Musical fun of various sorts

I keep on accumulating a backlog of things I forget to write about in the excitement of posting silly quizzes and YouTube clips of shows lost in the static of time--but tonight, briefly, I'll talk about some of what I've managed to do when I haven't been stuck behind the computer screen or a book.

Friday night we went to Maeve Donnelly's concert at Ireland House, where Tony MacManus joined her on guitar. Lovely, lovely stuff. I think she was a bit nervous, and the house was full to bursting that by the time J & I arrived 15 minutes before the show (and after a sublime dinner at Veselka) the only seats available were in the back of the room, where I used to sit in Irish class (yes, I'm a back-of-the-room sitter when there's a choice).

Anyway, Maeve and Tony played some gorgeous music together, although they didn't play "Sailing Into Walpole's Marsh"--but Maeve did start with "The Humours of Drinagh," and was doing a zillion things with it she didn't do on the old LP. Way cool. As Don Meade pointed out in his emcee spiel, the album--one of my all-time favorites--is now available on iTunes, as is the whole old Green Linnet catalog. Now, if only Comhaltas would get all those old records and tapes up there...you'd think that with their smoochy relationship to IMRO that mightn't be impossible, but I'm not holding my breath.

The social craic was great at the concert, too, as it was at the Ceol session on Sunday, when I joined Don and Jason Cade for some lovely, kitchen-style tunes. The pub wasn't crowded--I think their Easter dinner rush had happened much earlier--but the people who were there were very appreciative. Anyway, we played a bunch of old favorites, including a little hero-worship set of Connie O'Connell's pet tunes. I hope we'll have another go at the tunes next week, which means I have to get my ass to work on my taxes--as if I didn't already have plenty to do!

And finally, today I worked out--at long last--how to make my Mac play streaming audio from Clare FM and WNRN (Charlottesville). Windows Media Player has some sort of Mac-ly snit about reading .asx files, but I found a patch for Quicktime that gave it the ability to read them. I managed to catch the last hour of Claire Keville's show on Clare FM, where she was playing a bunch of tracks from that great cd set "The Hills of Clare"--I tuned in as she put on Ollie Conway singing "The Banks of Sullane." So now ye know how I'll be distracting myself on Tuesday afternoons between 2 & 4pm...Sophie, will we play our old name-the-player game over text?

I didn't listen to much of WNRN, but it'll be nice to catch Anne Williams' show in the mornings sometimes, and the goth show that comes on on Sunday night, to which I used to listen on my drive home from the session in C-ville.

The Article I'm Not Reading: "Linguistic Syncretism and Lnguage Ideoloies: Transforming Sociolinguistic Hierarchy on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)" by Miki Makihara.