Willie Week Revisited.

[David Levine]

I hadn’t been to Miltown Malbay during Willie Clancy week for about 20 years. Last time there I took classes with Tommy Peoples and Seamus Thompson and the classes were grand. It cost me 5 Irish Punts for the week. The classes, I hear, are still very good-- or, like all classes, are what you make of them. So my comments have nothing to do with the school aspect, and in all fairness Willie Week is presented as a summer school.

This year I didn’t take classes. I went hoping for some good sessions with great players. There were plenty of great players and there were sessions everywhere you went. But the pubs were hopelessly crowded. While great players were in abundance, too often the sessions had fifteen or more people playing.

Unless you were very lucky and/or knew someone who knew where a small session was going, you would be doomed to trudge the streets, along with a thousand other people in this small town, looking for some comfort and some good music. This was true of Cathal McConnell and Andrew MacNamara as well as those who are not intimately connected to the small world of Irish traditional music.

I did play in a few lovely sessions. I wandered into Friel’s early and had some tunes with Harry Bradley, Ben Lennon, Leslie Bingham, and Belfast Jerry. That broke up after about a half-hour. Harry had to get back to Dublin and the session was losing intimacy as more players appeared.

On another occasion Paul O’Shaughnessy invited us to a session in a small pub that had sold its license. The proprietor wanted one more (private) Willie-Week session. Since she couldn’t sell beer she was giving it away! That was a rare, lovely time: Hammy, Paul O’, Patrick Olwell, Henry Benagh, Dermy Diamond, Connie O’Connell. Some of their kids playing fiddles. We had to leave after a couple of hours but Hammy told me the session lasted well into the night.

The point is, Willie Clancy week is more like a Club Med or Doolin on a Saturday night. Crowded. Noisy pubs. Too many players in the sessions. East Durham is far more appealing, IMHO. The session are smaller and the pubs are not filled with stupid noisy drunks from the world over.

It is fun to get a chance to play with some great people during Willie Week, and for many it is a grand reunion and a chance to meet and play with old friends, but you have to be very lucky or know somebody if your goal is to come to Ireland to do Irish music. I think you’d be better off travelling to some of the surrounding towns. There will be more comfort, more intimacy, and the music will probably be just as good.

Am I being a curmudgeon?

[Cayden]

I think if you come for the classes and the concerts, the concentration of good players is still hard to beat. And that is still what the Willie week is about : it's a summerschool. And as such it functions well, student numbers were up again this year, 100 pipers, over 400 fiddles etc. The focus have changed though since we were first learning 25 years or so ago when a lot of students were in their late teens early twenties. The focus has changed to the children of parents from our generation, busloads of young Irish kids are in the classes. My son and a good few of his friends and neighbours did the classes and thought it was a great week.

On the other hand: I went into town around seven last night (and I haven't been in town an awful lot compared to any of the previous 24 Willie weeks I was at),thinking we could look around before it would get ugly, maybe listen to Tony Smyth, Denis McMahon and Marcas O Morchu do their annual street music, but found the atmosphere menacing. So we did our shopping and went home. I haven't been looking at Willie week as an opportunity to wander around and walk into good music for a long time now. You do get nice music n the afternoons if you look well. On saturday afternoon I sat in with the fiddlers John and James Kelly, Peter Mackey, John Joe Tuttle, Vincent Griffin etc with Sean Potts, Ian Roome, Siobhan ni Chonorain and a few others locked in Fahey's for a while. That was nice. But that aside it's that aside it's by arrangement mostly: you get a few people to meet in a place where you know it will be quiet, away from the town, you play before the word gets out (which doesn't take long in the days of mobile phones and textmessaging, last week I saw someone sending a video message of a session to a friend so he could see if it was worth crossing the street for).
As you say, it's nice to see some familiar faces (although I realised nearly all the old players we used to hang out with are now dead and gone) but for playing out, I I'll do that outside this week, or outside any festival for that matter. By the way: it was quieter in the street and pubs than it has been for a long while. Some years ago most pubs would just shut for being filled to capacity. Some other years a few pubs had rockbands doing gigs just being contrary. This was the first year one of the pubs (Michael A's) had uniformed bouncers during the night, not a great omen for the future.

As for being curmudgeon, I don't know. Like the rest of us living here, look at it as an opportunity to see some nice players who won't be around here often. I had to change my outlook on it at some point. Whether you enjoy it or not depends on what you expect to get out of it. This year I sat with Gerry Harington and Peter Horan a few miles away from my front door and got a great buzz out of it. I enjoy these little nuggets I get out of the week. I went to a ew of the concerts saw some people play i didn't see before, had a few nice tunes and a bit of chat. It's over now and it's back to the usual routine of playing decent tunes in peace if and when the mood takes you.

[Eldarion]

Thanks for the report David, I always find it fun to read about it even if I weren't there. Also watching out for the one Thomas Johnson usually does on Irtrad-L..

I think sessions are definitely nicer and more intimate outside of the week, less people crowding around and you can actually hear individual musicians. But all that happens only in the night time and if you don't know people to go to for music in the day, you'd have to find stuff to occupy your time with.

I remember heading to Tubbercurry not sure what to do in the daytime, being in the B&B practicing and watching old movies - which was kinda silly having travelled all the way there. Granted Seamus Tansey was at Killoran's all day and night but he's not really my favourite flute player. (now I know that I should have went to the Coleman Heritage Center to look up some old styled Sligo musos) Miltown is also very relaxed outside of the week, you could probably walk around, stroll to Spanish Point and stuff. Its nice enough when on a long relaxing holiday but not so good if one is travelling from afar on limited time for the music, which only occurs in the night - unless you know people.

On the other hand Willie Week is nice for condensed ITM for visitors, you can listen and play 24/7 plus there's always so much happening all round, the talks and recitals. Its true that despite all the good musicians hanging around real good sessions are hard to find though.

[djm]

but found the atmosphere menacing.

Could you elaborate, please?

djm

[Cayden]

Exactly like I said, menacing, large groups of noisy people who have nothing to do with music or what the week is about, drunk or very drunk hanging around waiting for something to happen. The night when the town becomes a zoo. Walk around any irish town late on a night when people go out and you'll know what I mean. Oblivion, agression and menace in the air, shouting, people falling over, glasses flying through the air. The ugly side of Irish society.

[toughknot]

Which is why when as a teenager living in Ennis Co. Clare during the late seventies the neighbours told us not to go in town during the music festivals "as it was nothing but drunks in the streets" I took their advice and didn't go so I don't know myself first hand.

[Cayden]

It's not the music festival, it's the people from outside coming in 'for the craic' during the weekend (especially the last weekend) that are the problem. Over the past few years the town was quite pleasant during the early hours of the last saturdaynight. This time it was already getting ugly around seven, maybe a lot of people that were here for the music just left early because of the bad weather that lasted most of the week, saturday was the first good day but I can imagine those out all week were pretty fed up.

[Steampacket]

The two highpoints of Willie Week for us this year were the brilliant Saturday session out at the "Crosses" with Kitty Hayes, Peter Laban, Jackie Small & Margaret McMahon. Thanks Sanna. 3-4 hours of wonderful music. A rare privilege indeed to hear such music, and a joy to hear Kitty playing live. Then later in the week, on the Wednesday evening to play in the same session as the master piper Billy McCormick. We'd wandered into O'Loughlin's in search of somewhere to sit and play and the place was full of musicians from the North playing away. For us it was a great wild session especially with singer Micky Flynn spicing things up. My parter was a bit frightened by him at first ,and didn't know what to make of him, but Billy and the others seemed relaxed, so it was just to go with the flow. Such passionate singing and shouting I've never come across before. The tunes were just flowing out of Billy, one after the other. No end to them. His Taylor set, made for Eddie Joyce in 1869, with a Cillian O'Briain chanter, was just humming. There were many good pipers at Willie Week but Peter Laban and Billy McCormick, along with Mick Coyne & Mickey Dunne were my favourites. Unlike some of the "clan" sessions, the northern musicians really made us feel welcome to sit in on their session. Prehaps because they were "blow-ins" too.

As David mentioned it wasn't easy finding a space to sit and play. You had to be out early, or get in at the right moment when a session started to wind down, just before a new one started. I've never been fond of Michael A's, but with no where else to go we started a couple of sessions in there on pipes & fiddle and people joined in. The last Friday afternoon we had some tunes there with the only German musicians we were to come across the whole week.

We also got the impression that as far as the sessions went there were not many musicians from other countries honking away this year.

[Cayden]

Saturday session out at the "Crosses" with Kitty Hayes, Peter Laban, Jackie Small & Margaret McMahon.

That was a nice afternoon, the best of the week for me anyway. It has been scorching hot here since you guys left. Was good to see you.