Folk music is first. Virtually the only music I inflict on a live audience and the music I feel most comfortable with. I play mainly in sessions or folk clubs, in particular, the Irish House in Haifa every Saturday night.I like to take the occassional trip to Tel Aviv to the vibrant Molly Bloom session on Friday afternoons an when I'm home I always go to the Crichie on the 1st friday of every month for the Ugie Folk Club. There are some good sessions in Aberdeen which I try to get to and when I'm in England I always make a point of going to the brilliant session in Morpeth's Tap and Spile.
The saturday session in Haifa is not exactly what I think of when I see the word session. The assembled musicians (there's usually four or five of us) sit in front of the (often unruly) crowd, all mic'ed up and perform an unrehearsed concert. The fiddle player Dena, has a habit of throwing a tune at me with a nod of her head to indicate that it's my turn to take the next tune. The upshot of this is that I've had to remember a lot of the tunes that I've played over the years and my memory not being what it was, meant that we occassionally got the same tune about four times. I decided after one of these high adrenaline sessions that the only sensible thing is to copy out all the tunes that I can remember and create a cheat sheet of the first two bars of each part. I have included links to these tunes at the side of this page.
It would be nice to get some original tunes from all you folkies out there and put them up here, so if you want to see your tune on the web, send it to me.
This page was last updated on 17th Feb 2007
