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Notes from the Field

Sometimes my enthusiasm for this little eight string marvel just boils over and I have to tell someone. I figure this is a safer way to do it, than to yet again bore my friends.

  1. Infinite moments, finite minutes

    So this week the jam was at my house. Our normal venue, where we have our jam on stage, and where we don’t charge them a dime, our normal venue every now and then thinks they can do better. So every other month or so they book a rock band to play on our jam night and tell us to git.

    Anyway, on those evenings the jam meets at my house. Tonight we had four fiddles, three mandolins, two guitars, and a flute. Oh and the piano. We played lots of tunes that featured arpeggios in the B part, ...
    Tags: jam, joy
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  2. Tuesday Nights

    All in all a typical Tuesday night jam. The company - three fiddles, two guitars, two mandolins, one banjo, and a guitar/clarinet/penny whistle player. At times the jam has had a few more fiddles, and a few more guitars. Once or twice we have had three mandolins, or more than one banjo. This night I played the Martin bowlback, a 1911 style 3 that plays really well with others.

    We played an assortment of Irish tunes, mostly popular though a few rather obscure, a bunch of old timey ...
    Tags: regular jam
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  3. Muscal Heroes

    I play mandolin, and have played for many years. I am not great, never will be. Mind you, I am a fair hand at it, but the package of abilities I received at birth did not include prodigy. (It did include skills in other areas, in which I make my living, and for which I have a different kind of passion.)

    But I do have a love for the mandolin. I enjoy playing mandolin more than I enjoy listening to any particular genre of music. And I play just about every day for myself, and once or ...

    Updated Aug-24-2010 at 9:45pm by JeffD

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  4. Some thoughts on great tunes

    I am presently addicted to old timey music. I still have my love for Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton traditional music, and French Canadian fiddle tunes, and I still love the New England old time tradition, as well as Klezmer and Eastern European music, and Western Swing, Tango, and... and...

    But right now I am addicted to the music of Appalachia. And in particular, Southern Appalachia.

    What I like best about old timey music is its worship of the tune. This is not ...
    Tags: great tune
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  5. Welcoming Jam

    This is a repost of a thread starter that was fairly blog like. The update is that I will be revisiting the location this fall, and I will know ahead of time about the jam and show up again, this time for three weeks running. I sent emails, and seem to be remembered, so this should be fun. So... about a year ago...


    So here I am in a strange city, for one week, for work. Of course I brought my mandolin, at least to play in the hotel room in the evening.


    ...
    Tags: jam, old time
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  6. Contra Dance music

    I have always seen this music as a subset of Old Time, what a number of folks would call Northern Old Time, as it has so much New England and French Canadian, and Irish/Scottish influence as Appalacian. If it is its own category of music, well thats great, I would not argue.

    It is a body of tunes. I recently checked out a contra-dance web site in an entirely different part of the country from where I live, a place I have never been, and I found their set list was entirely familiar ...
    Tags: contra dance
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