Galicia (and Scotland)

Well once again I am weeks late in posting... Maybe I should just resign myself to only getting one post up a month... Or maybe I'll get into the habit eventually and become more reliable! In any case, I am writing this update from one of my favorite cities in the world: Edinburgh, Scotland. I have quite a soft spot for this town, with its wonderful music scene, amazing atmosphere, fascinating architecture and brilliant scenery, not to mention the great friends I made a few years ago when studying at the University of Edinburgh for a semester. I am close to the end of a 2 week return to Scotland that I have added on the end of an amazing trip to Galicia, Spain, organized by the inimitable Alfonso Franco.

I met Alfonso and a number of other amazing Galician musicians when when they taught at the Sierra Fiddle Camp in June 2011, a fiddle camp run by Alasdair Fraser in the Sierra Foothills of northern California and where I've taught piano for the last couple years. Alfonso is an influential fiddler in the Galician traditional music scene who is working to bring the fiddling tradition into greater recognition and popularity there. Galicia is the northwest corner of Spain, just north of Portugal, and they have a strong celtic element to their traditional music and cultural heritage. The music is a fascinating mix of these celtic influences with other influences more commonly expected of Spanish music--Arab, Latin American, etc. The landscape is similarly a beautiful mix of lush green rolling hills and forests with rocky coastlines very reminiscent of Scotland.

Alfonso had organized a day full of workshops with a concert and party which I was to give along with the incredible Scottish fiddler Bruce MacGregor (founder of the seminal group Blazin Fiddles). Later in the week, after Bruce left, I was to give some piano classes and record some guest tracks on Alfonso's upcoming CD of Galician fiddling. Bruce, his girlfriend Yvonne and I arrived on a rainy Friday night in Santiago de Compostela after a harrowing and exhausting travel day that began in Glasgow, Scotland. Among other trials and tribulations I had gone to the wrong airport in Glasgow at first and the Barcelona security had forced Bruce to throw out a bottle of whisky he had bought for Alfonso. Needless to say we were glad to have arrived in spite of the rain. After a brief tour of downtown Santiago, Alfonso took us to a restaurant for some traditional Galician fare and threw us right in the deep end with one of their national dishes: boiled octopus! It was actually delicious and I ended up having it at least twice more over the course of the week and a half that I stayed there.

Boiled Octopus and Potato with salt and paprika

After a sampling of Galician fare we went to a club/bar where a traditional music band was performing and a bunch of people were dancing traditional dances, then we drove the 40 minutes south to the small rural town of Xustans where Alfonso's house is and got some much needed rest. 

The next day was Saturday, the day of workshops and concert. A bunch of great Galician musicians came out and we had a great time working with them. Bruce, Yvonne and I had to get used to the Galician lifestyle in which they eat at least 4 meals a day and are very laid back--something that fits my metabolism and outlook on life very well! After the workshops and our first dinner Bruce and I played our concert (which was incredibly fun) and then the Galician jam session started (during which we ate our 2nd dinner)! Lots of amazing Galician music, dancing and singing, with the occasional Scottish or Irish tune thrown in. The music went well into the wee hours.  

That night was the first night I had both the chance to sleep in and the chance to have a real bed so I slept quite late on Sunday. But once I was up (and, of course, fed) there was a treat in store for us: we had happened to visit Galicia on the weekend of a traditional music and dance festival in Vigo (the other major city in the region). Needless to say, we spent the evening walking around Vigo and taking in the sights, sounds and culture. There were stands selling all manner of food--including loaves of bread that were twice as tall as a regular loaf, circular and a foot in diameter and must have weighed 10 lbs. There were pipers and dancers all over the place--we even saw a group of pipers and drummers playing in the middle of a pub!

Piping in the middle of a pub

That night we went to an outdoor pub full of music. Lots of tambourine players were there--it's one of the most important instruments in the Galician tradition. At one point there were so many of them that you couldn't hear the pipes! After that we found a quiet pub and played some tunes of our own before heading back up to Xustans. 

After the weekend was over, Bruce and Yvonne headed home to Scotland. I spent the first part of the week hanging out with Alfonso, when he wasn't teaching. One night Alfonso organized a party in a restaurant/pub in Vigo which was full of amazing traditional musicians. Another night we went back up to Santiago to sit in with the resident band in a bar there. I also visited the school of traditional music that Alfonso and his colleagues teach at. It is an amazing government funded institute for the study of traditional song, music and dance. They even have a traditional music orchestra full of fiddles, pipes, harps,  hurdy-gurdies, singers and more: 

 The next weekend we worked in Alfonso's studio, laying down my piano tracks for their CD. The musicians are Alfonso Franco and Alfonso Merino on fiddles and Xose Liz on bouzouki and guitar. 

Alfonso Franco and Xose Liz in the studio

Aside from the teaching and recording I had a lot of time to experience Galicia and really enjoyed it. Alfonso took me to the coast and on a long walk through the hills and forest by his house. I also was able to explore Vigo a bit with a number of my Galician friends as well as the historic Pontevedra. The day before I flew to Scotland I stayed with Alfonso's mother in Santiago and she showed me around the town and around the world famous cathedral. With all these amazing sights I have too many pictures to put up here but I will try to give a sampling. After the trip was done I came to Scotland and have been bouncing around Edinburgh and nearby regions trying to catch up with many of my friends from the last time I was here. I have a few more days here and then I'm back home to see the family and relax!

Alfonso's dog, Roque

Vigo across the water

Pontevedra

Pontevedra

Pontevedra

Cathedral of Santiago

Cathedral of Santiago

Pacific Northwest

Hello again, Loyal Blogsters!

Once again I must apologize for delayed posting. I am half a week from the end of the second of two back to back tours in the Pacific Northwest and was hoping to update after each of them but unfortunately my camera ended up on a plane to New York after the first one and I had to wait to get it back before posting. So here is another extended post to bring you all up to date on my touring life!

Javier, me and Doug visiting the gorge in Auburn

Back in mid-March, after a week of unwinding at home in Maine, I set off for Sacramento to meet Doug and Javier, two of the three other members of what was then the Neil Pearlman Band and is soon to become Alba's Edge.  After renting our small SUV, we headed up to Auburn, CA, where we stayed with Doug's brother Sam.
















The next day (Thursday) we headed out on an epic 12 hour trek up to Portland, OR, where the first show of our tour was scheduled for Friday night. Our Ford Escape treated us well throughout the tour, with a nice sound system for on the road entertainment and a roomy back seat:

Good for practicing,

Sleeping,

and Partying!

Once up in Portland, we met up with our fourth band mate, my sister Lilly.

Hangin out before the house concert in Portland

Our show in Portland was a wonderful house concert hosted by Abbie Weisenbloom and her family. The show was a great success, with lots of great people coming out and even an after-hour fiddle jam with a Scottish ceilidh dance or two!

The next day, after a little Portland sight seeing, we headed up to Tacoma, WA where we had a St Patrick's day show at a big music cafe called the Mandolin Cafe. We had some good publicity and played to a full room, then drove another hour and a half up to Bainbridge Island, outside Seattle, where we would be playing the next day.

Bainbridge Island was a sort of miniature music festival that Sunday, as Brittany Haas and Lauren Rioux were playing an afternoon show on the same island that day, so we went to their show and they came to ours and all in all it was a great music and friend-filled day on a beautiful island closing off with our concert, which took place in an amazing house with an incredible piano (enough superlatives for ya?). 

Outside of the Bainbridge Island house concert

Lilly had to fly back to New York for school the next day so we had to finish the tour without her, unfortunately. We spent the next few days traveling back south toward California in order to get to Santa Rosa, CA, for our Wednesday evening house concert. It was another wonderful experience in a beautiful place on a great piano. We had a small but very interested audience, who asked us all sorts of questions so it ended up being half concert half discussion of our music, which was a very interesting and enjoyable experience.

The view from the back yard of our Santa Rosa house concert

The final concert of our tour was a double bill in Grass Valley, CA, with the band A Thousand Years at Sea, who I also play with. We played to a packed room at the Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters, which is a decent size music venue in spite of what you'd expect from the name. The next day Doug and Javier flew back to New York, having completed a very successful second tour of the Northwest.

The front of the room at Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters

Since the end of that tour I have been performing and recording with A Thousand Years at Sea. We are working on our second full length album currently and with most of the mixing and all the recording done, I feel very good about it. (If you want to support the album and preorder a copy go here:  http://www.indiegogo.com/athousandyearsatsea )

In the studio

I write this from San Anselmo, CA, as we get set to head up north on a string of shows that will finish off this week before I fly to Scotland this coming Monday! Exciting times are ahead, so stay tuned for more updates!

Best wishes,

--Neil

The Gulf Coast

This post is incredibly belated and probably should have been at least two posts, one of which would have come in a week ago at least. Sorry about that, dear readers, being on the road sometimes doesn't leave much time for blogging and uploading photos... So here is long-ish account of the Florida, Alabama and Louisiana tour that directly followed our Southwest tour.

Dad and I flew from Durango, CO to Jacksonville, FL to begin the second half of our 3 touring weeks. On arrival in Jacksonville we were given a very affordable upgrade from our basic, tiny rental car to a fancy, high class one, which turned out to be a life saver. It had lots of storage space, was very comfortable and drove really well, all of which were great boons considering that we drove over 2,000 miles in it! 

Dad with the Nissan Maxima we rented.

The next day we drove across the top of a Florida to Tallahassee, where we had a fiddle workshop and house concert scheduled. The workshop and concert were both great successes and a lot of fun. We met a number of great new people and really enjoyed the slice of the music community that we got to experience while there. Our amazing hosts, who put us up not far from the house concert and workshop, were incredibly generous with their hospitality and made us feel right at home--all in all a great experience.

Fiddle Workshop in Tallahassee

After Tallahassee we drove back to Jacksonville for the North Florida Highland Games, where dad was judging the fiddle competition and we were performing periodically throughout the day. In the process we crossed the famous Swanee River (or Suwanee, as it was spelled on the sign) for the second out of four total times. The sign has the music to the song written on it but unfortunately I missed the chance to take a picture of it every time we crossed it... The Highland Games was a great time, with a lot of fiddle competitors and big, appreciative audiences for all of our performances. We were put up in a hotel and also performed at the fancy dinner the night before the festival

After the games it was back across Florida to Sopchoppy, a small town down by the Gulf Coast, about 45mins south of Tallahassee. We played a small concert at a lovely music center and coffee/food place called Posh Java, then stayed with a great guy and banjo player named Frank who lives in a cabin in the middle of some woods that used to be used for turpentine gathering. He cleared the road to his cabin himself and had all sorts of stories about direct experiences with all kinds of wildlife, benign to vicious. Luckily we didn't run into any bears while out there, but it was a wonderful experience all the same! 

Frank and his cabin

The road/driveway--pretty tight for our car at some points!

After Sopchoppy, we had a few days off so we drove down to Orlando and went to one of the Universal amusement parks including the brand new and incredibly believable Harry Potter section of the park. We played an afternoon concert at a retirement center down there and then headed back north, ready for the cooler temperatures of North Florida and the Gulf Coast again. After spending another evening in Sopchoppy, during which dad led a fiddle workshop and I taught a Cape Breton stepdance lesson, we moved on driving along the coast to Mobile, Alabama. The drive was a pretty foggy one and even though we were driving right along the beach at some points we could barely see the ocean at all. It cleared up halfway through, but the bridge across the swampland and part of the bay into Mobile itself was covered in fog again. Apparently it's a dangerously foggy bridge and is the site of the largest multi-car pileup in US history. I got a picture of the sun and the car silhouettes on the other side of the bridge as we emerged from the fog:

In Mobile we played a packed concert sponsored by the Scottish Society of Mobile in the space the Mobile Symphony uses to rehearse. It was a great success and the work of the Scottish Society and fiddler Tom Morley really paid off. 

Downtown Mobile

The next day, after taking a few hours to explore Mobile, we set out for New Orleans. The drive wasn't as long as some that we had done but as we approached New Orleans we hit a line of incredibly intense storm clouds. I'm pretty certain they were part of the system that became the huge tornado outbreak the next day, but for us it was just a deluge of rain that made it almost impossible to see. We pushed through it and as we came out the other side we were almost at New Orleans. Skies over the bridge were wild as the dark storm clouds gave way abruptly to clear skies over New Orleans:

We had two days in New Orleans. The first night we had off and explored the French Quarter. I'd never been to New Orleans before so getting to explore Bourbon St, Frenchman St, and the rest on a Friday night was a dream come true. Mardi Gras was over about a week earlier so I guess those in the know would say it was quiet, but we would never have guessed! The night was full of highlights and we even saw some Hollywood celebrities hanging out in the last place we went to, enjoying the jazz and party atmosphere just like everyone else. The next day was another workshop, this time for the Strathspey and Reel society of New Orleans, followed by a performance at the Irish House, a new restaurant specializing in top quality Irish Pub food--if that seems like an oxymoron you'll just have to go and see for yourself! Our hosts in New Orleans were once again incredibly generous and full of hospitality--I can't wait to go back.

A brass band in Frenchman St.

The last leg of our tour took us back to Alabama on our way back to Jacksonville to return the rental car and fly home. We went to Fairhope, a gorgeous town directly on the gulf, across Mobile Bay from Mobile itself. It was a clear, if windy day and we could see all the way across the bay to the Mobile skyline, many miles away. The bay is incredibly shallow with an average depth of 10ft, so the wind really churned the water up. There was one last workshop in the afternoon in Fairhope, followed by an Irish session in the local pub to wind down from the tour. We were incredibly lucky as one of the workshop participants let us stay in his luxurious guest house directly on the bay while we were there:

The next day we drove back to Jacksonville, spent the night with some people from the Highland Games and flew out the next morning for the snowy shores home in Maine. As I write this I am relaxing on the couch with the dog. I have about a week to relax and then you'll see more posts as I head out again, this time for the Pacific Northwest!

Until then, 

--Neil

Colorado

Hello again!

Dad and I arrived in Florida a couple days ago having enjoyed a wonderful couple of days in Colorado. We did a few workshops and a performance in Durango and visited Mesa Verde to see the old Pueblo ruins and views of the Rocky Mountains.

Our amazing host Maria from Durango picked us up in New Mexico and drove us up to Colorado. At the Colorado Border we could see the brown, sage brush covered hills of New Mexico give way to the craggy snow covered mountains of Colorado:

Arriving in Durango we just had an hour or two before I led a step dance workshop and then dad and I each led music workshops. There's a great group of people in the Colorado/New Mexico border area who are interested in Scottish/Cape Breton culture and the workshops were a lot of fun!

The next morning we went out to Mesa Verde, a national park and site of pre-Pueblo Native American settlements, some of which have survived until today due to being nestled in cliff faces and hollows in the rock. The mesa itself was incredibly high up and took a long, climbing, winding drive to get there. We stopped for pictures of the incredible vistas this drive offered a few times. Here's a picture of dad taking a picture:

 At the top we got a tour from a ranger of the one area that was open in the winter season, a group of buildings called "Spruce House." The picture below is from the ridge above it before we descended into the hollow to get a closer look:

On returning that afternoon to Durango we explored the downtown area and played a concert for a great audience of interested people. All in all a great couple days! Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for the next entry: Florida!  

--Neil

P.S. I will be posting complete photo albums on facebook so find me on there if you want to see more pictures!

New Mexico

Hello dear blog-readers,
Apologies for my tardiness in updating this, I will try to be more regular after this. Dad and I just finished the better part of a week in New Mexico and it was a very busy few days with a whole bunch of gigs and GORGEOUS views, so this will be a bit of a long post. I bought my own digital camera on the first day out here and got a bit trigger-happy with it so I'm going to upload the whole photo album when I can for all your viewing pleasure and I'll post the link to that on here. For now, though, you'll get a few of the best or most representative photos from the trip. [UPDATE: I have put half the New Mexico photos up on facebook now, tried to make it public but not sure it worked. If you're my friend though you should be able to see them]

We started our tour by flying into Albuquerque, spending the night in Cerrillos with my aunt and uncle and then heading straight up to northern New Mexico to meet my former classmate Hannah, who had helped us set up an afternoon show at a beautiful adobe church with an amazing Steinway piano in Taos and a house concert that night at her place in Dixon, a historic adobe home that is owned by a Columbia University professor.

Church in Taos, NM

House Concert in Dixon, NM

The next morning, before we headed back down to Cerrillos, Hannah showed us around the Rio Grande gorge, where she's doing anthropological work on the petroglyphs and such, and also took us to the bridge that spans the gorge something like 600 feet in the air... Terrifying...

Dad and me in the Gorge

View of the Gorge from the center of the bridge.... Pictures can't really do the sheer height of it justice....

Back in the Santa Fe area we did a marathon of gigs, performing at an old Wild-West style saloon in Lamy, a great BBQ place in Santa Fe itself and an old roadhouse called the Mineshaft Tavern in Madrid, all over the course of a day and a half--10 hours of playing in a little over 24 hours! We stayed in bunk beds in a little one-room shack outside my aunt and uncle's place, heated partially by a wood stove and partially by a space heater. Finally we rounded out the weekend with a much needed day of rest and a bluegrass pickin' party! 

The view just outside our little shack

Pickin in the kitchen!

There were far too many great pictures from this part of the tour for me to put even a fraction of them up here so keep an eye out and I'll post a link to a full picture album hopefully in the next couple days [NOTE: see above update]. Until then, here's to good times and great music! Next stop, Durango, Colorado!

Cheers,

--Neil