musical mischeif

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So since I can't go to Celtic week in Swannanoa this year I took it upon myself to create my own celtic week and as luck would have it, one of the most popular music camp/schools in the same vein as our dear old Swannanoa Gathering is happening in Tubbercurry, Sligo all this week.

I speak of none other than the South Sligo Summer School (or the Thouth Thligo Thummer Thcool, if you speak Daffy Duck). Tubbercurry is a charming little town that is ecstatic that all the musicians have flocked to its pubs and restaruants for a week. This music camp has a cult following. There is a team of South Carolinians who make the trek every year, a Cape Breton-"er"?, a few Japanese, plenty of English, Scottish, and Northern Irish. I took a fiddle class yesterday with Manus Maguire who is a great man and great player. After class was over I had lunch in town and bumped into fiddler Gerry Harrington who I ended up having a long conversation with. Gerry and Manus are master fiddlers and are pretty legendary around Ireland. The game around here seems to be who will I play music with next? I sat down to have lunch at a pub yesterday and got invited to a session a few feet away w/ some English flute enthusiasts and a Scottish trio. After that I never left and proceeded to have tunes w/ an English flute-playing fellow who was recovering from the 7-day binge of music-making that is Willie Clancy Week in Miltown-Malbay, Co. Clare. For those of yous unfamiliar, this is yet another music camp where people sacrifice 7 days of work and sleep to take Irish music classes and play Irish music relentlessly until they pass out from exhaustion. After he left, some friends came by and we played tunes until dark. A local insisted we play this polka which was his favorite. We did and he grabbed this starry-eyed French tourist who he began dancing with. She musta been confused to death but her friend's camera was firing away (accompanied by an obscene grin, so I guess they were having fun).

Ireland is colorful. Yea it rains a lot, but the countryside is beautiful and all of the houses here seem to have a fresh coat of paint on them. Each window sill is also always bursting with flowers. (coping mechanism to deal w/ the weather perhaps?) I have my theories. I have been hitch-hiking into town which has been surprisingly easy. Getting back is the tricky part. Every day around lunch time is a quest for salad. you'd think it wouldn't be so hard to get a green vegetable on the "emerald" isle but potatoes and turnips continue to be the vegetables of choice. You grow to love'em. I hope everyone is well...

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