Being just at the point where I know a few tunes well enough to sit in good quality sessions (though I have embarrassed myself a few times not knowing any better), and starting to come to terms with things part and parcel to sessions for experienced players (etiquette, volume, deciding whether to follow or ignore the bodhran player depending on the players quality), I am tentative about the actual sitting down and playing in since I spend alot of time sitting and listening. Also, I am old enough to know that most of the players I have seen are much better than me and have enough respect for their efforts not demonstrate my inexperience too profusely.
What was everyone else's first experience getting into a session? I am sure, with the exception of the prodigies amongst us, Everyone started somewhere/somehow.
I was awful. The folks I played with, fortunately, were very nice people. I could not play well at all. I mentioned that along with the whistle I also had a low whistle but it was crappy and out of tune. This generated some odd looks and someone asked who made it. Everyone remained quiet when I told them it was an Overton(!). They were all too nice to tell me that It was myself and my ability that was crappy! Hopefully I've improved a little since then....
Having been working on DADGAD for a few months, mostly with songs, after a workshop on Skye I found out that there was a session just around the corner from me - I never knew.
I knew a couple of the guys who played there and having mentioned to them before hand that I would come down just turned up and asked them if I could join them. I was very nervous.
Anyway so began a good long while of strained relations as I was probably massacring their beautiful music. A little bit of knowledge can be quite dangerous.
I had been playing other genres of music for decades, so I came to my first session with a bit of unintentional classical musician's snobbery. I'd heard of the Boston Slow Session website, picked off a few tune names, got the dots, and off I went. Needless to say, I've learned a lot since then.
My first real session was in Glasgow, the Ivory pub, just by kings park. When I wasn't scraping my fiddle I was bashing a bodhran, I was terrible and new almost none of the tunes. Everyone was very nice, and nobody got angry.
I was so intimidated by people who actually knew lots of tunes (I was more of a blooze jammer at the time) I was afraid to try it in my own country! The session players at Mulligan's in Amsterdam were very kind and charitable, when I trotted out Merrily Kissed the Quaker....
The first sessions I participated in were in the NUIG Trad Society, which I joined having no idea what Irish traditional music is about (you could say my closest association would be Clannad at that time), but had some spare time on my hands and wanted to learn the whistle; there were plenty of other players as horrible (or more horrible) as me, and I could pass for a decent player. From a perspective, it was not a good thing, as I learnt my lessons much later, when I already thought of myself as good, and thus it hurt much more.
People in the pub didn't mind our racket, and an occasional cliche American tourist would drop us a fiver.
I was very quiet - I learned to play the bodhran at sessions, so it was the first thing my friend taught me! I only got a bodhran of my own when I was sure I was able to play.
The session is still going, 30 years later, in the Seven Oaks Hotel in Carlow.
Having picked up the fiddle a few month before, i ventured to the local session. I sat in the back and played along on a few sets when I was asked by one of the really good players to play a set. Soon after I started my tunes a hush fell upon the pub. clearly, they recognized they were in the presence of a genius and when i finished my set the applause was deafening! Amazingly, one on the punters owned a record company and signed me up on the spot for a multi-million dollar recording contract. Naturally, fame and fortune followed. Just one more whiskey before I go...
I am heartened to hear that on can achieve fame and fortune through ITM. My long term goal was giving up the drudgery of High stakes investment banking for the more esoteric pursuits of music in pubs.
Herself was somewhat concerned that I should be able to support the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
lazyhound. you failed to mention whether 'dear' was the gorgeous girl of your sixteenth year....I have always said that God has a perverse sense of humor, and that the purest example was planning, design and ongoing obligations of the reproductive process.
Oops. Herself is calling. What did I do wrong this time.....
My first contribution to an Irish session (in Oxford, but very Irish) was to get up awash with Dutch courage and launch into the song Wor Nanny's A Mazor.
This is a vast and prolix Geordie (Tyneside) patter-song. I am not a Geordie. I might just as well have had a go at the Nissan Company Song in Japanese, or something. I do not know if I finished it or not. I do not want to know. But I had ambition and aimed high, surely that's the thing! Or perhaps not, in a session debut.
I departed in one piece, resolved to devote myself to the practice of deep obscurity for some time. It was a very long time ago...
I kid you not.....There was an advert in my local paper saying that there was going to be a session at a hotel in my home town. The session was to launch the formation of a local branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Eireann. Myself and three mates went along to the session. I was playing a drum kit that consisted of a bass drum made from a large square wooden tray (used by bread delivery men to carry the bread into shops) with a foot pedal attached and a snare drum that was originally a 'Quality Street Sweet Tin'. My mates were playing mouth organs. We played the only tunes we knew. Two marches, The Boys of Bluehill and a reel called 'The first of May. The year was 1951 and I remember that session like it happened yesterday.
I was sitting in a tent at one of the old Boston College Gaelic Roots festivals. The session leader was going around the circle, letting folks pick the next in what was a monster set of reels. I was sitting toward the back listening with a whistle in my lap. She kept pointing at me, and I kept trying to wave her off, but she insisted, and when the previous reel ended, so did the set, as I sat there silently. At that point I did not yet know any reels, which was what I was trying to tell her--I was a rank beginner, and everyone who was staring at me now knew it. One of life's more embarrassing moments.
After that it got better, obviously. I sat in the outer circle at the local pub for a few months, playing my guitar quietly with my thumb, working out the chords. By the time I deployed my pick, and played so people could hear me, I was not terrible, and my contributions were recieved pretty well.
I was a very shy 16yr old. I went to a session every week for nearly a year, just to listen. One day, one of the regulars decided it was high time I joined the group. He called me outside, sat me down and taught me the butterfly on the whistle there on the spot. I was then required to play with the group. I was so scared! But it was super fun. I then confessed that, yes, I did own a whistle and I would bring it in the future. He continued to give me tunes and pointers on the whistle every week after that. A few months later I turned up with my mom's violin. Then it came out that I was really a classically trained violist and had been secretly learning tunes on the my mom's fiddle at home. I soon had the loan of a fiddle, and I haven't looked back. Yay for happy endings! (or beginings!)
I never knew there were such things as sessions until I stumbled upon my first one while studying in Scotland. I had decided some time ago that I wanted to learn traditional Irish/Scottish flute, and had messed around unsuccessfully with sheet music for some time (and even asked a Scottish fiddle group if they took flutes) before a local mentioned to me that I should try the pub on Tuesday nights. I showed up at the pub and my eyes bugged out to see people there playing flutes, whistles, fiddle... I had never known this existed outside of Riverdance and the Chieftans. I listened the whole night and afterwards mustered my courage to go up and ask the musicians, "How - where - how did you - who taught -.... How do you learn this music?" They told me to bring my flute along to the pub the next week. So the next week I sat and listened, flute in my lap. By the week after that, I had learned Merrily Kiss the Quaker's Wife....
Epilogue: I found out later that I'd grown up within 30 minutes of two sessions, and gone to university in a town that had one, and had never known they existed! It's kind of like Dorothy learning that she could have gotten home all along just by clicking her heels...
My first session was in Dolans in Limerick. I was asked by one of the guys there to play a tune and I bottled out and said no! They asked me again and I launched into the Kesh Jig. I think thats the only tune I played that night. I remember sitting there with people looking at me and feeling horribly self conscious. At one stage a woman in the bar asked me was I allright, was I not enyoing myself, so I must have looked as embarassed as I felt. ouch. I did not prepare properly, just turned up, with not enough tunes....I know better now....and I did not know of this site back then.....
I can’t remember my first session where I played or sang as in my youth it was a feature of rural living, although I remember not being very good for what seemed like a long time and I owe a debt of sincere gratitude to all those who put up with me and helped me along the way especially my late father. I do remember my first gig though, like it was only yesterday……….
I'd be 18 or 19 and working aboard a trawler, going through my angst ridden teenage singer songwriter phase. I'd often ask the skipper to let me take a guitar or such aboard as in among the long periods of frantic work would be long periods of inactivity. "There's no time for any of that crap", the skipper would shout on the rare occasion where he actually spoke to me.
One day this guy came up to me in the harbour and said " I hear your playing with big Alex at the stag party", news to me. So when the skipper commanded me to bring the guitar next trip I was sick with worry. "I'm not bringing it", "oh yes you are the boats honor rests on it"............ So I was booked and it would cost me a job to refuse.
So there I was sat with "Big Alex" hands the size of shovels, in the midst of around a 100+ extremely sssseshed fishermen when I say to Alex; "are we in tune"? Alex seemed happy with being a few tones flat from me and just said, "day yi ken the irish rover son", by way of a direct order, not what I'd planned but when I rather weakly uttered the first line the whole assembled mass started up in grand voice. After that I never so much as heard a guitar for the rest of the night and by the end Big Alex seemed proud he only had a single string left attached to his well worn axe, “we showed thum son, eh”.
The next day the very hungover skipper said to me, "that was bloody brilliant I never knew you were that good" ahem, and so I entered my phase as acclaimed singer of sea shanties to the fleet. Although I never took an instrument for the rest of my rather short career as hardy fisherman.
I cant remember my first session, but I do remember my first ' session/Gig.' We were an acoustic 3 piece somewhere in London at some sort of social club, the gig was going really well, place was packed, mostly young and up for it crowd, when the lights and electricity went!, Did that phase us at all? no way ! we just carried on and the place went wild. I will never forget that buzz, we were on form, the crowd loved it and we rocked that place.
Or the time I slunk into an Irish pub in Gibraltar with a guitar and 60p to my name for a long cup of tea. I left with a hat full of change, half p*ssed after a great night blashting out the old Ballads. Ahh memories...
Ha Free Reed, you must've enjoyed John&Pip Murphy then in Wexford. Heard them on RnaG last Sunday morn. - great stuff on the mouth organs.
Me, I was playing about a year and thought I'd go along - found out I was s**it, sat on my hands and listened most of the time. But the lads were helpful, I did make an effort to learn the tunes that commonly cropped up, improved technique somewhat etc. Most important thing is to try to improve, learn the repetoire and turn up reasonably regularly.
In October 1995, someone posted an announcement on the bulletin board at a local music store about an "Irish Jam Session" which was to be held that evening at a local seafood restaurant.
I went and sat there quietly all evening just listening and watching.
When the session ended, I told the musicians which instruments I played and asked if I might bring one or both instruments to the next Session.
They asked me to bring my electronic keyboard and play it as a piano.
Yes, I was somewhat confused at first because this was a new style and genre of music to me.
Before I saw the announcement about the "Irish Jam Session", I had no idea that some musicians liked to get together on a semi-regular basis to play Irish music.
Thanks to my varied and eclectic training and background, it was easy for me to adapt to playing what was a new style and genre of music to me and fit in at the local sessions.
Fourteen years later, I am still welcome to sit in and play piano at the local sessions.
Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I thought that title would hook some folks
Being just at the point where I know a few tunes well enough to sit in good quality sessions (though I have embarrassed myself a few times not knowing any better), and starting to come to terms with things part and parcel to sessions for experienced players (etiquette, volume, deciding whether to follow or ignore the bodhran player depending on the players quality), I am tentative about the actual sitting down and playing in since I spend alot of time sitting and listening. Also, I am old enough to know that most of the players I have seen are much better than me and have enough respect for their efforts not demonstrate my inexperience too profusely.
What was everyone else's first experience getting into a session? I am sure, with the exception of the prodigies amongst us, Everyone started somewhere/somehow.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was awful. The folks I played with, fortunately, were very nice people. I could not play well at all. I mentioned that along with the whistle I also had a low whistle but it was crappy and out of tune. This generated some odd looks and someone asked who made it. Everyone remained quiet when I told them it was an Overton(!). They were all too nice to tell me that It was myself and my ability that was crappy! Hopefully I've improved a little since then....
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by shanty
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Meh, at first I was terrible. Everybody was at one point.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by reenactor
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Having been working on DADGAD for a few months, mostly with songs, after a workshop on Skye I found out that there was a session just around the corner from me - I never knew.
I knew a couple of the guys who played there and having mentioned to them before hand that I would come down just turned up and asked them if I could join them. I was very nervous.
Anyway so began a good long while of strained relations as I was probably massacring their beautiful music. A little bit of knowledge can be quite dangerous.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by No Cause For Alarm
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I had been playing other genres of music for decades, so I came to my first session with a bit of unintentional classical musician's snobbery. I'd heard of the Boston Slow Session website, picked off a few tune names, got the dots, and off I went. Needless to say, I've learned a lot since then.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
My first real session was in Glasgow, the Ivory pub, just by kings park. When I wasn't scraping my fiddle I was bashing a bodhran, I was terrible and new almost none of the tunes. Everyone was very nice, and nobody got angry.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by WobblingFiddle
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was so intimidated by people who actually knew lots of tunes (I was more of a blooze jammer at the time) I was afraid to try it in my own country! The session players at Mulligan's in Amsterdam were very kind and charitable, when I trotted out Merrily Kissed the Quaker....
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by tuckered out
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
WobblingFiddle - nice to hear you enjoyed your session in the Ivory. It is a great session and I love going along to it when I get the chance.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by No Cause For Alarm
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
It was an amazing session, great fun, I'm sixteen and my mates and I were allowed in, once they saw the fiddles on our backs. Great folk aswell.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by WobblingFiddle
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
The first sessions I participated in were in the NUIG Trad Society, which I joined having no idea what Irish traditional music is about (you could say my closest association would be Clannad at that time), but had some spare time on my hands and wanted to learn the whistle; there were plenty of other players as horrible (or more horrible) as me, and I could pass for a decent player. From a perspective, it was not a good thing, as I learnt my lessons much later, when I already thought of myself as good, and thus it hurt much more.
People in the pub didn't mind our racket, and an occasional cliche American tourist would drop us a fiver.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by EastPole
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was very quiet - I learned to play the bodhran at sessions, so it was the first thing my friend taught me! I only got a bodhran of my own when I was sure I was able to play.
The session is still going, 30 years later, in the Seven Oaks Hotel in Carlow.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by RockyRoader
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Having picked up the fiddle a few month before, i ventured to the local session. I sat in the back and played along on a few sets when I was asked by one of the really good players to play a set. Soon after I started my tunes a hush fell upon the pub. clearly, they recognized they were in the presence of a genius and when i finished my set the applause was deafening! Amazingly, one on the punters owned a record company and signed me up on the spot for a multi-million dollar recording contract. Naturally, fame and fortune followed. Just one more whiskey before I go...
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by leoj
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was 16 at the time and met this gorgeous girl during the summer holidays and
sorry dear, I'm coming off the computer right now
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by lazyhound
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
hah! ITM + online ITM forum = ~22
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by airport
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
leoj
I am heartened to hear that on can achieve fame and fortune through ITM. My long term goal was giving up the drudgery of High stakes investment banking for the more esoteric pursuits of music in pubs.
Herself was somewhat concerned that I should be able to support the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
lazyhound. you failed to mention whether 'dear' was the gorgeous girl of your sixteenth year....I have always said that God has a perverse sense of humor, and that the purest example was planning, design and ongoing obligations of the reproductive process.
Oops. Herself is calling. What did I do wrong this time.....
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
My first contribution to an Irish session (in Oxford, but very Irish) was to get up awash with Dutch courage and launch into the song Wor Nanny's A Mazor.
This is a vast and prolix Geordie (Tyneside) patter-song. I am not a Geordie. I might just as well have had a go at the Nissan Company Song in Japanese, or something. I do not know if I finished it or not. I do not want to know. But I had ambition and aimed high, surely that's the thing! Or perhaps not, in a session debut.
I departed in one piece, resolved to devote myself to the practice of deep obscurity for some time. It was a very long time ago...
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Awful! I showed up with sheet music..... need I say more! Lesson learned.
# Posted on April 20th 2009 by CarolWhitaker
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I kid you not.....There was an advert in my local paper saying that there was going to be a session at a hotel in my home town. The session was to launch the formation of a local branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Eireann. Myself and three mates went along to the session. I was playing a drum kit that consisted of a bass drum made from a large square wooden tray (used by bread delivery men to carry the bread into shops) with a foot pedal attached and a snare drum that was originally a 'Quality Street Sweet Tin'. My mates were playing mouth organs. We played the only tunes we knew. Two marches, The Boys of Bluehill and a reel called 'The first of May. The year was 1951 and I remember that session like it happened yesterday.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Free Reed
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was sitting in a tent at one of the old Boston College Gaelic Roots festivals. The session leader was going around the circle, letting folks pick the next in what was a monster set of reels. I was sitting toward the back listening with a whistle in my lap. She kept pointing at me, and I kept trying to wave her off, but she insisted, and when the previous reel ended, so did the set, as I sat there silently. At that point I did not yet know any reels, which was what I was trying to tell her--I was a rank beginner, and everyone who was staring at me now knew it. One of life's more embarrassing moments.
After that it got better, obviously. I sat in the outer circle at the local pub for a few months, playing my guitar quietly with my thumb, working out the chords. By the time I deployed my pick, and played so people could hear me, I was not terrible, and my contributions were recieved pretty well.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by AlBrown
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Didn't play a note and tried to be invisible.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Hup
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Al Brown,
That's a really nice article on your bio page about ITM. That took time and thought, and I'm glad I saw it. I hope others do so, too.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was a very shy 16yr old. I went to a session every week for nearly a year, just to listen. One day, one of the regulars decided it was high time I joined the group. He called me outside, sat me down and taught me the butterfly on the whistle there on the spot. I was then required to play with the group. I was so scared! But it was super fun. I then confessed that, yes, I did own a whistle and I would bring it in the future. He continued to give me tunes and pointers on the whistle every week after that. A few months later I turned up with my mom's violin. Then it came out that I was really a classically trained violist and had been secretly learning tunes on the my mom's fiddle at home. I soon had the loan of a fiddle, and I haven't looked back. Yay for happy endings! (or beginings!)
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by fiddleK
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I never knew there were such things as sessions until I stumbled upon my first one while studying in Scotland. I had decided some time ago that I wanted to learn traditional Irish/Scottish flute, and had messed around unsuccessfully with sheet music for some time (and even asked a Scottish fiddle group if they took flutes) before a local mentioned to me that I should try the pub on Tuesday nights. I showed up at the pub and my eyes bugged out to see people there playing flutes, whistles, fiddle... I had never known this existed outside of Riverdance and the Chieftans. I listened the whole night and afterwards mustered my courage to go up and ask the musicians, "How - where - how did you - who taught -.... How do you learn this music?" They told me to bring my flute along to the pub the next week. So the next week I sat and listened, flute in my lap. By the week after that, I had learned Merrily Kiss the Quaker's Wife....
Epilogue: I found out later that I'd grown up within 30 minutes of two sessions, and gone to university in a town that had one, and had never known they existed! It's kind of like Dorothy learning that she could have gotten home all along just by clicking her heels...
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by fuzzygreen
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I was playing in the house with some friends and they said :Let's go down to the pub
Safety in numbers. Then someone there came over to talk, and wanted to try certain tunes, then they told me about another session
But I had no idea it was so widespread until the internet came along.
I had no idea it was so serious either.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Bren
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
My first session was in Dolans in Limerick. I was asked by one of the guys there to play a tune and I bottled out and said no! They asked me again and I launched into the Kesh Jig. I think thats the only tune I played that night. I remember sitting there with people looking at me and feeling horribly self conscious. At one stage a woman in the bar asked me was I allright, was I not enyoing myself, so I must have looked as embarassed as I felt. ouch. I did not prepare properly, just turned up, with not enough tunes....I know better now....and I did not know of this site back then.....
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by BanjoBongo
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I can’t remember my first session where I played or sang as in my youth it was a feature of rural living, although I remember not being very good for what seemed like a long time and I owe a debt of sincere gratitude to all those who put up with me and helped me along the way especially my late father. I do remember my first gig though, like it was only yesterday……….
I'd be 18 or 19 and working aboard a trawler, going through my angst ridden teenage singer songwriter phase. I'd often ask the skipper to let me take a guitar or such aboard as in among the long periods of frantic work would be long periods of inactivity. "There's no time for any of that crap", the skipper would shout on the rare occasion where he actually spoke to me.
One day this guy came up to me in the harbour and said " I hear your playing with big Alex at the stag party", news to me. So when the skipper commanded me to bring the guitar next trip I was sick with worry. "I'm not bringing it", "oh yes you are the boats honor rests on it"............ So I was booked and it would cost me a job to refuse.
So there I was sat with "Big Alex" hands the size of shovels, in the midst of around a 100+ extremely sssseshed fishermen when I say to Alex; "are we in tune"? Alex seemed happy with being a few tones flat from me and just said, "day yi ken the irish rover son", by way of a direct order, not what I'd planned but when I rather weakly uttered the first line the whole assembled mass started up in grand voice. After that I never so much as heard a guitar for the rest of the night and by the end Big Alex seemed proud he only had a single string left attached to his well worn axe, “we showed thum son, eh”.
The next day the very hungover skipper said to me, "that was bloody brilliant I never knew you were that good" ahem, and so I entered my phase as acclaimed singer of sea shanties to the fleet. Although I never took an instrument for the rest of my rather short career as hardy fisherman.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Solidmahog
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I cant remember my first session, but I do remember my first ' session/Gig.' We were an acoustic 3 piece somewhere in London at some sort of social club, the gig was going really well, place was packed, mostly young and up for it crowd, when the lights and electricity went!, Did that phase us at all? no way ! we just carried on and the place went wild. I will never forget that buzz, we were on form, the crowd loved it and we rocked that place.
Or the time I slunk into an Irish pub in Gibraltar with a guitar and 60p to my name for a long cup of tea. I left with a hat full of change, half p*ssed after a great night blashting out the old Ballads. Ahh memories...
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by the wicked hacker
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
Ha Free Reed, you must've enjoyed John&Pip Murphy then in Wexford. Heard them on RnaG last Sunday morn. - great stuff on the mouth organs.
Me, I was playing about a year and thought I'd go along - found out I was s**it, sat on my hands and listened most of the time. But the lads were helpful, I did make an effort to learn the tunes that commonly cropped up, improved technique somewhat etc. Most important thing is to try to improve, learn the repetoire and turn up reasonably regularly.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by the wounded hussar
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
I took more notes than played them.
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Lint - upon - Tweed
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
She kept saying "what ARE you doing?" and "Ouch! your elbow's on my hair again!" - er - wait.. what did you mean by first time?
# Posted on April 21st 2009 by Jusa Nutter Eejit
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
JNE
I think my point was made. You must have been playing fiddle to close to the lady harp player...
# Posted on April 22nd 2009 by zippydw
Re: Everyone's experience in their 'first time'
In October 1995, someone posted an announcement on the bulletin board at a local music store about an "Irish Jam Session" which was to be held that evening at a local seafood restaurant.
I went and sat there quietly all evening just listening and watching.
When the session ended, I told the musicians which instruments I played and asked if I might bring one or both instruments to the next Session.
They asked me to bring my electronic keyboard and play it as a piano.
Yes, I was somewhat confused at first because this was a new style and genre of music to me.
Before I saw the announcement about the "Irish Jam Session", I had no idea that some musicians liked to get together on a semi-regular basis to play Irish music.
Thanks to my varied and eclectic training and background, it was easy for me to adapt to playing what was a new style and genre of music to me and fit in at the local sessions.
Fourteen years later, I am still welcome to sit in and play piano at the local sessions.
# Posted on April 24th 2009 by fauxcelt