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

Swans Island

I am writing this update from the Bolt Bus between New York and Boston. I played a contradance last night in NYC and will be in Boston this weekend getting ready for the BCMFest Celtic Music Monday show that I'm organizing this coming Monday. But this post is actually about the 10 days I just spent on BEAUTIFUL Swans Island where my lovely girlfriend Kate is currently working.

Swans is a fairly remote island by most people's standards, requiring a 40 min ferry ride that leaves from the more well known Mount Desert Island (the island with Bar Harbor on it). Luckily Mount Desert Island is connected to the mainland by a causeway so there isn't a double ferry ride involved at least... Swans has about 300 year-round residents and another 300 summer residents. The year round population is predominantly fishing and lobstering families and Kate is working for their historical society doing things like conducting oral history interviews and organizing community events. This meant that as part of my trip I played for a community dance Kate had organized.

The dance was a great success and it was wonderful to see a folk dance taking place in a rural community where everyone knew each other beforehand instead of meeting at the event. It felt more true to the old folk dance traditions than most contradances and country dances we have these days. The band was myself on piano and the great Irish fiddler Alden Robinson (from Portland, ME based band The Press Gang) and the dance was called by my mother, Laura Pearlman. In addition, my dad jumped up at the end of the dance to play some fiddle with us and there was also a featured performance by a community band organized and led by Kate.

The rest of my trip was a chance to relax and explore the island before my touring schedule really takes off on Wednesday when I'm headed to New Mexico to start a 3 week tour with my dad with a bunch of really exciting new music we've just come up with for our duo. I got to take a number of beautiful walks around Swans and eating awesome food including Swans Island seafood--the last night on the island we gathered mussels ourselves from a rocky beach nearby!  I don't currently have most of the photos from this recent trip but here is a picture Kate took when I was on the island last October:

And on the food note, here are the mussels we gathered and steamed!

Covered in barnacles and such (the rock at the bottom we used to scrape em clean)

Cleaned and ready to steam

Ready to eat!!

Cheers for now,
--Neil

Pennsylvania

Welcome to my new blog! I'm very excited to launch the official Neil Pearlman tour blog. Over the next few months (and beyond) I will be going to a lot of different places and I will be regularly updating this blog with photos, thoughts, updates and more as I travel the world playing music!

This first post comes on the heels of a weekend playing for contradances in Harrisburg and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania with the new contradance band "Party of Three" which consists of my sister Lilly on the fiddle, Joe DiPaolo on many different drums and myself on piano of course. The dances were wonderful and I'm excited for the future of this band. We received generous hospitality from the dancers in both towns and the drives were full of beautiful PA hills and farmland. I look forward to playing there again in the future! Here are some photos:

 Joe and myself with the beautiful PA scenery ahead of us on the road.













Lilly studying while packed in the back with all the instruments and baggage!

And a couple shots of PA from the road--the sunset and farmland