Ottawa: Celtic music session - Daniel O’Connell’s Pub

The roadworks doesn’t make the Daniel O’Connell pub (at 1211 Wellington St Downtown Ottawa,Canada) easy to find, and when you do, it looks like an average punters pub. But don’t let appearances deceive - this is not your trendy boutique brewery, but the genuine article. And Thursday night saw me heading down at about 8.30pm to find a seat. And the place was almost empty - until 9.00pm when one by one people came in - mostly fiddlers with a couple of squeeze boxes, flutes, and a mandolin for good measure, and a couple of bodhran players. One of the latter had a couple of fine tuneable bodhrans with lovely tone - and he wasn’t a bad player himself.

I was introduced around to all the musicians as they arrived and was told that another Aussie had stopped by last week - from Sydney - did I know him? His name was Tom… I laughed and said “no, but I know his cousin who lives in Perth!”

They were another very friendly bunch - and very welcoming of visiting musicians. I was warned this was a louder session than Monday night’s one but again the pochette could be heard clearly. I missed not having a shoulder rest though - something to think about for the next one.

Despite the relaxed demeanour of the musicians - there was little relaxed about the music which was good and lively. By 10.00pm the pub was packed and people were clapping and replenishing our Guinness supplies. We sang a few songs, but it was mostly again the older traditional tunes - so I was well up with most of the repertoire. I sang “the Parting Glass” as a toast to the group and they seemed to appreciate it.

There was a particularly fine Cape Breton fiddler there, but there was a good range of players from relative beginners to some very professional sounding players.

It was a great night and we finished up around midnight. Again may thanks to the Ottawan folkies for making me feel welcome in their session.

Cheers
Jerry

 

Stradivarius - lost and found

Imagine how you’d feel! After 18 months of negotiations you get to borrow a 1723 Stradivarius violin - the “ex-Keisewetter” - worth $4m, only to accidentally leave it in a New York taxi. That’s what happened to Grammy-nominated violinist Philippe Quint on Monday 21 April.

The frantic Quint phoned the cab company and the police. Meanwhile the violin lay in its case in a bag in the back of the cab overnight on a Newark street. It stayed there while the cabbie - Mohamed Khalil - took a fare to Kearny and on to Queens for a vehicle inspection.

A call went out across the cab network and a fellow cabbie asked Khalil if he’d found anything left in the back of his cab. Minutes later Quint was reunited with the violin, whereupon the violinist dropped to his knees and wept with joy and relief. Khalil made light of his honesty - “You have to be honest. Even if it was worth $10 million, it doesn’t belong to me” he is quoted as saying.

You can read more about Quint here.

And if you are ever in Khalil’s cab - make sure you give him an extra tip

Cheers
Jerry

 

Upgrade to G5 imac

Well, if the blog has been a bit quiet lately, it’s not because life has been quiet! After five years with the graphite iMac the technology is starting to show its age - or rather sound its age. The disturbing whining sound coming from the hard drive made us think about the way we have continually pushed our home technology until it is well past its use-by date, by upgrading RAM and buying ever bigger hard drives. So the time had come.

We actually went shopping for a big hard drive so we could back up the formerly big one and still have room for growth. That was quickly solved when we found the price of 500GB drives were down to about half what the 250GB drive had cost us before. But we couldn’t easily work out whether itwas the external or the internal drive that was the problem. Hmmm time to look at other computers.

With our interests well into the graphics and music software, there was really no comparison to make - it had to be another mac, and then it came down to which model would be right for us.

The result was a bit of a dent in the plastic fantastic but we walked out with a couple of boxes - a 20-inch G5 iMac (big flat screen) with 1.5GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive and DVD burner built in. And an Epson stylus photo R210 printer - the latter because we can use it to print directly onto CD/RW - good for the Band’s demo CDs.

And it matches the electric fiddle! While the iLife GarageBand software looks good, I chose to upgrade to Mackie’s Tracktion2 for recording. The screen size is great for recording - everything is a good size. And the processor is quite a bit faster than the G3 iMac - and the whole lot a far cry from the machines we started on - the 512k mac and the mac plus. Those and the color Classic and the PowerMac all still work - each year we fire them all up. I reckon we need to start a tradition of Mac Day and fire up all the old macs on the anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh back in 1984!

Cheers
Jerry