Right about now Dave "Shocko" Shaughnessy, the main man behind our music booking here at the Kansas City Irish Fest, is boarding a plane bound for the green shores of Nova Scotia. He's off on Irish Fest business to attend the annual Celtic Colours Festival in Cape Breton where we hope he'll return with a whole suitcase full of great music for future Kansas City Irish Fests.
I attended this event myself a few years ago. If you ever get the chance, go. It's less a festival in the way you might think of the word than it is a series of concerts. Thirty-some venues are used, everything from state of the art concert halls to high school gymnasiums to pubs and some are many miles apart. If there's a center of the festival it's the Gaelic College where nightly shows and sessions rage until breakfast is served at 9:00 AM. This is where we hope Dave will end up because this is where the great conversation happens and the deals are swung.
If you'd like to peruse the Celtic Colours line up and give Dave some suggestions as to who to pay special attention to, please do. Publish them in the comments below and I'll make sure Dave's reading.
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3 comments:
I'll read them Danny. Right now, I am in New York waiting to board a plane to Halifax. I'll check in later. BTW, happy 99th birthday tomorrow.
We would love to make it to Celtic Colours someday, even though separate tickets for each concert gets a bit pricey. Great line-up, though, so it would be worth it. Ashley MacIsaac and Colin Grant are amazing fiddlers. Laoise Kelly from Ireland and Kim Robertson from Wisconsin are wonderful harpists. Kim’s stage banter is as entertaining as her music. I would love to see Le Vent du Nord at KCIF, they remind me of Vishten. It would be great to see Barra MacNeils again too. Though they may not be KCIF material, I think Dave would enjoy United Steel Workers of Montreal, a great swing/country/blues band.
By the way, my wife and I just got back from a trip to Ireland and Germany. We ran into a couple members of Grada playing in a local rockabilly band in Galway. We also met up with the band Cara in a small town by the Rhine River. Spent a lovely afternoon with Gudrun and Juergen and a couple friends, then enjoyed the German version of their show (the songs were still in English of course) that night with their regular piano player Sandra. They mentioned again how much they enjoyed KCIF and would love to come back next year. We would love that too.
Dean
Ashley MacIssac is a fiddle God.
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