If there’s a better way to spend an hour and a bit of your day than listening to this week's episode with Ewen Baker, I’ve not heard of it.

Ewen’s a fiddle player, arranger, multi instrumentalist and teacher, and he takes us on a journey to find the music-induced tingly feeling, via The Oils, J. S. Bach and Kerry Slides; St Anne’s Reel and The Bushwhackers; collaboration and individualism; coming to terms with our own imperfections but still getting stuff done. And we don’t even get around to talking about working with songwriters, at which Ewen’s an acknowledged master. Still, it gives us an excuse to do a second episode down the line.

In this episode Ewen plays the following tunes:

Merrily Kissed the Quaker’s Wife
Brian Boru's March
St Anne’s Reel
Sheehan's Reel
The Australian Waters
Mama's Reel

Ewen’s collaborated with a huge range of musicians over the course of his career, but it was only a couple of years ago that he released his first CD, ‘The Inch Before The Saw.’ As in, the only thing in life you really need to be worrying about is…’the inch before the saw.’ You can find the CD here, and as we say in the episode, it’s a cracker:

https://ewenbaker.com.au/store

'It's a session in your speakers.' Ewen’s collaboration with Paddy Fitzgerald, Jack Brennan and Geoff McArthur is called Lisnacrieve, and you can find the gofundme page here:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/paddy-fitzgerald-cd

As always, the episode is free to download or stream from everywhere you get podcasts:

Our website: https://blarneypilgrims.fireside.fm/49
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3fM61MG
Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/3cPTkis
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2T1il26

We'd also like to say a huge thank you to today's episode sponsor, Ceol.fm. This is a bloody brilliant service. So do yourself a favour and head over there and check it out. www.ceol.fm

Ewen, thanks for a cracking chat.
And with that, we’re away.

Darren & Dom

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We know it's a tough time so we hope you can hang in there with us. If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge at any level over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

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Truth be told this is the second ever episode we recorded. Back when Darren had a strictly non-speaking role. For a long time we thought it wasn't right, then upon revisiting, we realised what a cracker it is.

Ado plays the following tunes during the episode:

The Golden Keyboard
The Oak Tree
The Porthole of The Kelp
...a reel we never got the name of, and...
The London Jig

Enjoy!
Darren & Dom

...

If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge $2 over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

Of course, you don't have to become a patron to listen, but we guarantee you'll enjoy each episode more because you'll be safe in the knowledge that you're a deadset legend.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

...

Dom's Notes

Once upon a time I spent a few nights kipping in an orange VW van that was parked just down the hill from Stirling Castle in Scotland. I was between jobs, and between (very shitty) houses, and the van was a refuge offered to me by my friends Frank and Linda. In the days when I wasn't sleeping in it, I'd look out for that van every time I was wondering across the top of the town, because if it was around it meant they were around, and if they were around it meant mugs of tea and music and a bit of crack. I loved that van. I kipped in it after gigs up the west of Scotland - ('Do ye dae any Rangers songs?' 'Naw, we're not that kind of blues band') - or Frank would drive us out to Cambusbarron or somewhere to pass a rainy afternoon talking about books and politics and quoits and a guy called 'Skin Bone' from Fallin who was the local champion. But more than the van, I loved being with Frank, Linda and their kids, Gregor, Neil, Peter and Emily.

I used to work in a wine and whiskey shop in Stirling, just down the hill from Frank and Linda's house, which is how I first got to know them. I worked there for a good few years, and one of the perks was that I could play whatever music I wanted all day long on the shop stereo system. (Another perk was naptime in the cellar on delivery day). When there weren't many customers (Tuesday mornings) I'd drink mugs of instant coffee and construct complicated doodles on the wrapping paper stacked on the counter, daydreaming, wondering where in the world I'd be in some far off year like 2019, wondering if I'd look back fondly to working in a wine and whiskey shop in Stirling, Scotland, doodling and daydreaming.

Frank was a regular visitor, shopping bags bursting on his way back up the hill from the shops, always with an eager ear out for what I was listening to - Dr Wu by Steely Dan, Songs of the Auvergne sung by Gill Gomez, The Bothy Band Live (Afterhours, that epic of epic albums) or Yank Rachell, on casette or CD.

We'd talk about trains, railway signal box design (Frank was a former signalman), beer (Efes Pilsener, Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale, Redback), Walter Becker's hair and the engineer who supposedly accidentally wiped the original masters of the famously painstakingly assembled Countdown To Ecstasy, an album I knew from my brother Gerard's collection. We'd talk about whiskey and wine and mandolins and blues music and sausage rolls and Ye Jacobites By Name (Lend an ear, Lend an ear). And we ended up playing together on and off for years, in folk bands which always felt a bit ill fitting for Frank and blues-rock-ish bands which always felt a bit ill fitting for me. He is, I should say, because he wouldn't say it himself, a fabulous musician. He has the chops, but more than that, he has such heart, such a feel for music. He's the unassuming center of any band he plays in, basically.

So the McCullough's house was my home away from home, their kids like my own nephews and nieces. How do you quantify a friendship like that? Why would you even try? It's enough to say it's here, even now after...how many years? It'll always be with me, permanently wrapped around my heart.

So, when Ado Barker and Kate Burke and Beth McCracken and virtually everyone else we've spoken to mention that it feels strange to sit and play a tune in isolation, detached from its usual social setting, I know exactly what they mean. So much of what me and Ado talked about, even before we started recording, was about how music connects us to others, and to deeper parts of ourselves that we are only able to articulate through it. It was music that first connected me to Frank and Linda (well, music and my staff discount on cases of Portuguese lager). And it was music connected me with so, so many other friends besides.

As Ado was talking about going deep into the music I was remembering playing with Frank in a bar called The Tollbooth where we had a regular gig, him singing Back of My Mind (John Hiatt) or Steady Rollin' Man, bottleneck ratting on his Yamaha acoustic, me playing a mandolin borrowed from a friend ten years previous and never returned, a mandolin missing two of its tuning pegs. On those nights, and many others, especially working on some of Frank's own songs - brilliant, beautiful, melodic, and mostly unrecorded - I was often lost in what we were playing (in a good way, like). I mean, we'd be gone (in a good way, like).

In the way that Ado describes.

Thanks Ado.

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Here is the translation Kate mentions, a version of Donal Og that's startling and strange in the ways that only really great translations can be. (He said, knowing very little about translations, really). (Though I'll correct myself and say that it's probably true that really bad translations can be startling and strange too...)

Donal Og
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
a ship of gold under a silver mast;
twelve towns with a market in all of them,
and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,
that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
when I see the world and do not see my boy,
he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday
and myself on my knees reading the Passion;
and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother has said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

(Shades of St Patrick's prayer in that last verse...)

So what do I ACTUALLY know about translation? Mostly what I remember from many long, wonderful (as in full of wonder), beery conversations with my pal, Ian Lavery. Poet, academic, punctuation pedant and a very, very funny man. Anyway, when he was doing his PhD on Northern Irish poetry I would regularly perform my friendly duty by insisting he come drinking with me when he should have been working. So it was Ian who witnessed me - two bottles of white wine to the wind and heading for a few pints - walking into the road and smashing the windscreen of an oncoming car with my head. All the classic accident shit went down - a local lad leaned over me shouting 'How many fingers can you see pal, how many FINGERS?' My shoe came off (just the one.) And I apparently garbled half remembered lines from Seamus Heaney's 'Station Island' all the way to the hospital. And yes, I do realize that makes me sound like a complete wanker.

Anyway, so, when Kate mentioned Donal Og I thought of Ian because he knows his translations. And because he's from Carrickfergus, and first turned me on to Louis MacNeice, also from Carrickfergus. Who worked at the BBC in London for many years and was friends with (seriously) Andy Irvine (check out this interview with Andy if you don't believe me):

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/rte-second-captains/second-captains-andy-irvine/

So thinking of friendship, and distance, and love, as Kate was singing Donal Og, and then and then...the song was over, and we talked some more about other things. And then Kate mentioned her children, and bringing them the see where she studied geology in Melbourne, and THAT'S when I sort of made my tangled, inarticulate attempt to say that...what...everything is everything. Music, songs, friendship, love, food, cars, biscuits, concertinas. All of it. Or, as the great Scottish songwriter Michael Marra might have said...The World is Phul o' A Number o' Things...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jz6LJXUqhI

Which isn't a million miles away from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMNXogXnvE

If you're of a melancholy turn of mind, you need songs like these. I wrote to Kate the day after we finished recording to say thanks, and what a lovely way to spend an evening. And it's true.

Thanks Kate (and Ciaran O'Grady) for the chance to listen.

...

The New Graces (Kate Burke, Melanie Horsnell and Robyn Martin) have recently tracked and mastered their debut album at Sydney’s Rancom Street Studios, working with producer Garth Porter (Sherbet, Lee Kernaghan) and legendary engineer Ted Howard (Gurrumul, Paul Kelly & The Stormwater Boys). The album is due for release in early 2020. (Website coming soon)

To buy Kate's music go here:

lukeplumbandkateburke.com

kateandruth.com

troubleinthekitchen.com

...

To learn more about QuasiTrad go here:

https://quasitrad.com

...

And finally, as aways.

If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge $2 over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

Of course, you don't have to become a patron to listen, but we guarantee you'll enjoy each episode more because you'll be safe in the knowledge that you're a deadset legend.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

Till next time.
Darren & Dom

www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims
www.blarneypilgrims.com
facebook.com/BlarneyPilgrimsPodcast
@blarneyPilgrimsPodcast

The tunes played in this episode are:

The Mountain Road (Trad)
The Rose in the Heather (Trad)
Paddy's Trip to Scotland (Trad)
Mullingar Races (Trad)

For more info on the Canberra Irish Club go here: https://www.irishclub.com.au/
For more info on Comhaltas Canberra go here: https://www.facebook.com/Comhaltas-Canberra-580450142467295/

...

Dom's notes:

I really love this conversation. We very easily found our way into the stuff that gets me going - the ephemeral nature of the experience of playing music, the naming and honoring of players we used to listen to, and - of all things - The Brass Fiddle.

I have no certain memory of how I came across that CD of Donegal fiddle music that we talk about. But on first listening to it, I remember I was blown away by its elemental nature. It's not just that the recordings are plain and true. It's that the playing itself is completely unfussy and unafraid. In fact, what it is, now that I think about it, is authentic. It IS what it is.

Doodley Doodley Dank is the Con Cassidy track David hums, I think. I thought I was cool having that rarity of a CD that I got from who knows where, but as if to prove our point about how you can get everything everywhere now, you can listen to The Brass Fiddle on Spotify. So I'm slightly less cool now. Anyway, check it out.

Since we started the Blarney Pilgrims, one of the revelations me and Darren have had is that the fiddle is an intensely physical instrument. The music is born of friction, which goes some way to explain the appeal of the instrument maybe, and the seemingly endless variety that's audibly apparent between different players. Even if they share the same background, draw on the same regional style of playing, no two people sound the same. And I wonder is it my imagination, or is the fiddle unique in how it allows players to express themselves with such individuality, because as Chris Fitzgerald says, playing it is a wrestling match. And then I wonder if other bowed instruments have the same quality. And I'm thinking about Jordi Savall, the amazing Catalan musician who plays the viola da gamba. If you've never heard that guy's music, you're missing out. His 1988 album Les Voix Humaines will blow your mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylpOO-7cyt0

I was introduced to this by two great friends, Jon and Mary Pritchard, when they lived in London, I lived in Scotland and we would spend every weekend we could manage hanging around drinking, eating and just having a completely beautiful time. As I did with Darren at the Banjo Jamboree in Guildford, Victoria.

David, thanks for taking time out from the festival to talk to us.

...

If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge $2 over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

Of course, you don't have to become a patron to listen, but we guarantee you'll enjoy each episode more because you'll be safe in the knowledge that you're a deadset legend.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

Till next time.
Darren & Dom

www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims
www.blarneypilgrims.com
facebook.com/BlarneyPilgrimsPodcast
@blarneyPilgrimsPodcast