Harp and Shamrock Tour

After having such a great time on the road with the Welsh band, I decided to book a tour of my own. Since I'm from the West Coast originally and enjoy visiting there, that was the logical place to start. Or it seemed logical at the time... All the music books tell you to tour within a 100-mile radius of where you live, and I had already broken that rule by about 2500 miles, but once it was decided, there it was, the Harp and Shamrock West Coast Tour.
Forty-five phone calls later, we are playing everywhere from nice listening venues such as Portland's Backstage Gate (Artichoke Music on August 6th), to the Thurston County Fair in Olympia Washington - on the Schwab Tire stage, for those of you who are into tires.

What has impressed me the most is how many people have offered to help with the tour. I guess when you've been in the music business a while, you're often dealing with club owners that have to worry about their bottom line and get approached by way more musicians than they could possibly hire. I forget sometimes that there are regular people out there that love music and want to be a part of something bigger....

On the road with Ffynnon

June 2005


This week is a road trip with a band from Wales called Ffynnon. It will be a 9-hour drive for two of us, getting there in time to load-in and hopefully run the music a little. So much for the glamourous entertainment business. I think a lot of those 9-hours will be listening to their music, since we haven't played most of the music with them before.

Last night I met with two fiddle players that also front their own bands, which actually is kind of unusual. We are planning a fiddle show in NYC in August, that will be a mixture of funky-jazz fiddle, world-jazz and celtic fiddle. It was nice to sit down with people who have their own groups going on, and I'm getting excited about the show.

A day in the life - celtic fiddle productions

I went to the Global Entertainment and Media Summit today in New York City. They had panels on various topics, one of which was blogging, so I decided to start a blog. The standard music business tips presented at many of these conferences is probably most relevant to people that are in certain musical genres-ones that follow the standard pattern.
I decided after listening to several sessions, that my life as an Irish fiddle player and working musician had a complete other set of challenges, and that by writing about them, I'd at least be able to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing.

I came home and began dealing with the challenges. The main one for this week is that I have three major upcoming shows booked in the same week, and due to the various musicians and dancers availability,plus a singer with bronchitis, I am having to put together separate bands for each gig. To start with, there is the scheduling nightmare of who can rehearse when,
and that is really just the beginning.
When I used to be in classical music, it wasn't hard to find people to fill-in, because there were a lot of musicians that could play the style and were fairly interchangeable. Not so with Irish music. There are just not 500 uilleann pipers in Manhattan (those are the Irish pipes, played like bellows). So you go with the best musicians you can find, that know the style. The challenge is that certain instruments have limitations (i.e. highland bagpipes can only play in Bb or Eb and don't have all the notes), so if you're going with different instruments for each group, you have to change everything. It's like starting over, which would be fine, but is a little stressful a few weeks before a big show.
The exciting part, though, is that I'll get to try all sorts of combinations. Putting together a really hot band requires a certain chemistry, and it takes time to find that group of people that just blend.
I know more now than when I first started. I used to think that playing with great musicians was the best thing. Now after a little experience under my belt, I have decided that playing with great musicians is still great, but it is so much sweeter when they are also people you enjoy as people and can have a great time on the road.
While I was dealing with all my business transactions - writing letters, answering e-mails, dealing with booking agents, etc. I put on some music and it reminded me why I'm going through all this. The music is, after all, worth some challenges.