òran mór

While I’m not lucky enough to be directly Irish, I do have some family links that connect me there one way or another – and I was lucky to have parents who played and listened to music as a main pastime.

After having plunked on my dad’s old guitar for a bunch of years, I got my first, a Kay acoustic-electric with funky little amp, when I was 13.  My friends were into Blues and 60’s R&B (not as a retro thing – it was the 60’s)  and I was immediately in a little band,  with piano, bass, drums and another guitar.  I got into learning  things like Jimmy Reed licks, or the guitar part for ‘Green Onions’  – and we had a blast playing at parties and school dances.

A little later, through other friends, I tuned into folk and fingerpicking, and brought all that with me through the rest of the 60’s, playing in various bands, from bluesy (Butterfield Blues Band, Mike Bloomfield) to Clapton-esque (of course).

In the 70’s my wife Chris and I were starting our family, and I focused more on my day job than playing out.  I went back to more acoustic roots and did some artsy things to keep a hand in the music – like helping write and perform the score for a Sufi play called ‘Toward the One’  that ran in Boston and (without me) in a few other cities.

Then some old friends who had a nice gig nearby asked me to join the band.  I could blend it with my day job (teaching, at that time), so I went for the steady cash and  the chance to get back to some serious playing.  That was great fun as it ran its natural course over a couple of years.  Then, without planning on it, I just got busy enough with my career and family that the guitar and any real involvement with music went on hold for a few years.

Musical good luck was again on my side, though, in about 1993, when Chris saw that a guitar player named Ed Gerhard was playing at the Colonial Inn.  We caught his great solo show, and I was captured by his fingerstyle  tone and  compositions.   I soon had a new acoustic guitar and started learning his material, using tablature and recordings at first.

Then another stroke of luck –  I was trying out an acoustic guitar at the Music Emporium in Lexington, MA – playing one of Ed’s pieces in a corner of the shop.  A friendly guy, introducing himself as ‘Chief’ (Chifuru Noda) named the tune, and told me that Ed was a friend of his. He helped me to set up lessons with Ed and that brought me back to the guitar in a whole new way.

‘Chief’ figured into our lives again, it turned out, as he invited Chris and I to several guitar events he’d organized around Exeter and Portsmouth.  As we traveled up to see people like Martin Simpson and Preston Reed, we met so many great people through the music that we said ‘why don’t we move up here?’  Long story short – we moved to Portsmouth in 1997 and have loved every minute.

Ed Gerhard, and then David Surette,  introduced me into the Irish, with fingerstyle arrangements of Turlough  O’Carolan and other tunes.  That brought me to the Portsmouth UU Coffeehouse,  MC’d by none other than the beautiful and illustrious David Behm.   My first night there I met fellow performer Bruce MacIntyre, and we planted what would become the seeds of “Hallowell and MacIntyre”  (or  “MacIntyre and Hallowell,” depending who you ask).  That brought me to the Press Room, Tom Hall … and on and on .. the floodgates for traditional music old and new were opened.

Pretty soon I took up the bouzouki, and used it for accompanying vocals and for playing  Irish tunes.  During a zouk workshop in the Catskills in 2001,  Jed Foley had Sandy Jones, a great fiddler, come play, so we could accompany close up.   Something in Sandy’s playing completely hooked me – I realized, in that moment, that I had to come back the next summer ready enough to take the beginner fiddle workshops.

I did that, and have so enjoyed being hooked on fiddle ever since.  It brought me into the melodies that I had loved, but had only experienced through accompaniment. I played at every session and workshop opportunity I could find.

Luck brought me close to Randal Bays, who taught me some real important things, and into workshops with just about all the great players you can think of, from Liz Carrol, Kevin Burke, and Tommy Peoples, to Maeve Donnelly,  Tola Custy,  Martin Hayes and many others.

Then, with a little more luck and some help from Gail McCarthy, whose brother then owned Molly Malone’s – I had the chance to start hosting a new weekly session there.

When I think about the way Fridays at  the Press Room, the session (then two nights a week, at the newly named McMenemy’s, and later every Monday at RiRa’s) and great musical friends who seem to gravitate to this seacoast area have helped me rekindle and continuously grow my love of all things musical I am very humbled and very thankful.