O Ceilidh Come Calling

The 22nd Boston Celtic Music Festival takes over Camberville through 16-19 January, 2025.

Contra Dance, Scottish Ceilidh, harps, flutes, bagpipes, wheezeboxes, and plaintive songs about mother galore.

An orgy of sound and sentiment onstage at Club Passim, The Rockwell, The Burren, Crystal Ballroom and Somerville Theatre.

Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️

Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

〰️

Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️

Reko Matsuoka

at The Rockwell

The harpist focused on the Scottish tradition at the Rockwell, everyone’s favorite blackbox basement beneath Davis Square, on Saturday afternoon.

Reko Matsuoka played with a feathery technique, her hands poised for quick plucks across the face of the 47-stringed instrument. Notes floated through the air like unbursting bubbles. The effect was transcendent, resplendent, ethereal all on its own, never mind in contrast to the hootenanny that would unfold later across the street at the Urban Ceilidh.

A good set to bring a young child with sensitive ears, and there were a few families in attendance, making up a full house. Each song was prefaced with a short history lesson, detailing the provenance of the music, with some songs tracing all the way back to Scotland in the 17th century. Adults enjoy excursus more than children.

The Simon Lace Trio

at The Burren Backroom

We’re talking about the Burren Backroom, not the front of house. But it’s the Burren all the same.

The Simon Lace Trio, consisting of a guitar, banjo, and fiddle, and presumably Simon Lace, played to a packed house. No joke, packed to the gills. This is the kind of room with table seating, so the floorplan is full of a lot of furniture. Too bad if you showed up late, like myself, and were forced to fight for standing room only. Even SRO was in short supply.

I staked out a tiny spot next to the bathrooms (not usually a coveted zone) long enough to take a few snaps of the camera phone, then bailed.

You could have cleared out those tables and fit twice as many people in the room, but this was the type of event at the Boston Celtic Music Festival where people appreciate a comfortable seat.

I love festivals that operate out of smaller venues, clustered close enough so that you can wander from stage to stage, piecing together your listening schedule on the basis of your own will and whimsy. But sometimes you wander into a place that’s crowded as hell, and you just need to turn around.

Marty Frye, Sarah Collins, David McKinley Ward

at Crystal Ballroom

The three-piece, featuring Marty Frye, Sarah Collins, David McKinley Ward, played a few foot-stompers at Crystal Ballroom.

Plus, a plaintive solo piece featuring some version of a wheezebox that issued long arcing drone sounds. What do you call it? A Scottish variant of a shruti box? Not a shruti box, but something like it.

The musician prefaced the number with background about the social and political underpinnings of the song he would play about a poor Irishman in the New World, who misses his dear old mother, and who figures the one constant on both sides of the Atlantic is that landlords are bastards wherever you go.

Scottish Fish

at Crystal Ballroom

The Celtic folk quintet Scottish Fish closed out the bill at Crystal Ballroom on Saturday night.

The emcee mentioned in the introduction that this was at least the tenth Boston Celtic Music Festival that the group had played? They must have got an early start in music. The songs included plenty of originals, crafting the energy and spunk of traditional dance music into some surprising and unconventional forms, while still staying more or less on the dancehall beat.

Urban Ceilidh

Or is it just called the Urban Ceilidh this year? A night of traditional dance, and participation is what it was all about. The first half was Contra Dance, the second half was Scottish Ceilidh, plus an interlude by O’Riley’s Irish Dance troupe.

I’ll defer to my write up elsewhere to recount the Urban Ceilidh. Here’s one thing, though, that I didn’t say there that I wanted to. Namely, a remark about the emotional and psychological impact of the dance routines, which rip you from the comfy confines of the partner you arrived with and thrust you into the mix of the madding crowd.

Sounds violent, uncomfortable, etc. Maybe it is, in some sense, but there is also a shared sense of fun and commiseration, because everyone is in the same boat, and the boat doesn’t sink, and you all feel a sense of accomplishment for making it through to the end. Just plain fun.

From my Cambridge Day gig:

The 22nd Annual Boston Celtic Music Festival concluded on Sunday. Four days of music, drawing preeminently from the Irish and Scottish tradition, showcasing over thirty-five performances, at six stages across Cambridge and Somerville, plus a handful of workshops to teach you how to play these tunes yourself.

The festival is a sprawling orgy of sound, smiles, and good cheer, which resists neat summary. One hallmark feature, though, is the standing invitation to become part of the action. If you want to attend, sit back, and merely listen, you can do that. But the performances are engineered in various ways to draw you into the circle of participation, in mind, body, and spirit.

The event that loomed largest for me was the Urban Ceilidh, a traditional dancepalooza with Contra Dance and Scottish Ceilidh components, in which I resolved to take a more active role after mostly remaining a weirdo wallflower with a smartphone last year. I told myself that I was covering the event for Cambridge Day, and needed to keep a certain professional distance, right? Malarkey! I jumped right in the mix last Friday night. Sometimes you need to report events from the inside.

Here’s one thing that I never would have learned if I hadn’t danced myself: traditional dancing holds within itself ingenious methods for building community. Of course, I already understood in a general and empty sort of way that dancing brings people together. But experiencing it up close, I was amazed at how effective the routines were at mixing and remixing the people that walked through the door.

If you had arrived with a dance partner, get ready to play the field as the “callers” on stage directed the swirling crowd to and fro, into groups of three, four, and more. If you came alone, be prepared to get lost in the throbbing mass of humanity. By the end of the night the old had danced with young, the short with tall, the thin with plump, the shy with bold. And when the last note sounded, a room full of strangers felt a lot less strange.

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