Thanks Where Thanks Are Due

I should start with Stuart Duncan, I suppose. He's at least indirectly responsible for my renewed interest in Celtic music. It was through Stuart's YouTube clips that I discovered the TransAtlantic Sessions, a series of cross-Atlantic, collaborative performances in the folk/traditional vein.

If you don't consider Duncan the preeminent fiddle player in the world, then you ought to, and in this bluegrass-flavored TA4 clip, he wryly notes, "I've listened to Celtic music since I was a little kid, and my two favorite instruments are bagpipes and pedal steel. Fiddle comes in a distant fourth, I think." Ooookay Stuart... I wonder what you'd sound like on pipes.

Like Stuart Duncan, I grew up listening to Celtic music. The Chieftains were one of my favorite bands as a child, and I was weened on Sir James Galway, whose flute and penny whistle playing influenced me to study the Boehm flute in school. Little surprise then that my ears perked up as I tracked the TransAtlantic Sessions on YouTube and heard the melodic strains of Julie Fowlis who excels as both a singer and a whistle player. In the BBC clip below, she sings in her native Scottish Gaelic along with Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, a renown Irish singer and whistle player who sings in her native Irish.




Julie Fowlis made me consider tin whistles in general, and she effectively led me to the next step of wondering about playing one. It wasn't all that long before I discovered that the fingering isn't too different from a concert flute, and to boot, you can get a very nice instrument for $20 to $50. So, just over two weeks ago on the last day of April, I ordered my first tin whistle—a Clarke Sweetone D that has been "tweaked" (adjusted) by Jerry Freeman, a fellow who is well known for making inexpensive whistles into world-class instruments.

I began to search the web for instructional material and soon found the final person on my thank-you list, Ryan Duns, a Jesuit priest who has established an online presence with his tin whistle tutorials on YouTube. In the clip below, he plays a reel that is appropriately titled "The Musical Priest." As subsequent posts here will show, my first real lessons and tunes owe much to the efforts of Father Duns.