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Let's do a hotwash!
I recently attended Baltimore Trad Fest [0]. So good. Truly the best of fests. While a great time was expected, the amount of mental exhaustion I suffered was not. Which, looking back is rather foolish, since after a long session I do get quite tired. And this was that expanded to like … 9 AM - 12:30 AM. I got the time right and you read that right 😅 Let’s talk about irish music in Baltimore the weekend of April 10, 2026.
I’ll start off by saying the event was great. Specifically the classes and concerts were awesome. The sessions were fine. Which is the opposite of what was anticipated. More on that in a few. But the event was generally well organized. The website was good. Cost was almost dirt cheap for the insane value. It was like $200 to see insane musicians for 6+ hours, play music all day and night (my favorite activity), and have master classes. Damn son!
The people were kind. And I loved the main concert and late-night session venue, which was the Creative Alliance [1], an old movie theater turned into concert venue and bars. Nice. The classes and such were at a high school, which was perfect. I’m sort of a stranger to Baltimore, in that whenever I visit, I drive right to my location and then leave. But I walked around a bunch for this event and felt like the events were in a generally safe area. This may be different for you as I’m a dude who is “built like a shit brick house”, or so I’ve been told.
I knew these were gonna be good when the festival organizers sent an email asking for us to tell them if we weren't gonna make the concerts because it was going to be packed. And I was right. There were some legends, both local and otherwise on stage and it sure sounded like it. It was great hearing Laura Byrne play her own tune that is played around this area called Lucky Day[2]. It's on thesession.org [3]!
Josh Dukes and crew above played my favorite O'Carolan tune: Madam Maxwell [4]. But the energy was insane. I have a crappy video of it on my phone that I might post. Then they TURNED IT INTO A JIG. It was so good. The crowd went wild. Most of the performances were just like that. Insane energy and an excited crowd. It was also cool seeing dancers onstage. I haven't played with dancers since I last went to the Celtic Club which was like 2 years ago. I have crappy phone recordings of around 5 tunes. Send me an email if you'd like copies. I'll likely just throw them on Patreon for now. It did feel like a lot of the performances were put together last minute. And I kind of loved that. It wasn't in a slipshod way, it was more... closer to like what a real session is like where it's just people coming together making music. I loved it!
The sessions were just … full of wolves! It’s like, if you play an FPS game on Friday from 8 PM - midnight, the skill level of the people playing significantly increases. At that time and place and you’re likely to get destroyed the whole evening. The wolves were out here too! Basically just people who have been steeped in this music their entire lives, or at least a lot longer than me (I only have about 5-6 years total depending on how you count it). There’s nothing wrong about it per se, it’s just that you’d think with around 170 tunes under my belt I could sit at the table and play a lot of the evening. I only knew around 10 - 15 tunes sitting there for an hour.
An actual issue was that the session areas were very crowded. 50+ people easily in the room. I think they will probably need to do a ticket system in the future, and they are not going to want to do that. The fest is just getting big. Everyone is festing too hard. My guess is that the organizers likely want to have an opportunity for everyone to get together as a nice group after the concerts but I’m just not sure if it’s practical. What do I know. Oh! A funny thing was the instrumentation was like …85% fiddles. Normally there’s lots of fiddles at a session, but 85% was A LOT. It felt like a Scottish session. And I listened for a while; it was only reels. lol. Also, many folks didn’t have seats, and people just vibing with old friends were kind of at the entrances stopping ingress and egress. Hopefully they find a solution for next year. I think having an alternate intermediate session in a different location after the concerts would be swell.
I attended one of the intermediate sessions which was called by some of the younger folks who I believe were in high school, but people of all ages and skills were in attendance. That was great fun. More my speed, which was solid. It felt much more like a normal session (for me). I love how the skill level in trad isn’t dictated by how good you are at your instrument with tone and technique, but rather by how much music you have inside your head available for instant recall. Super cool and one of the reasons I am drawn to this type of music.
Let’s talk about classes.
They had classes on a variety of session instruments, but alas no mandolin (and no concertina either, one of my concertina playing friends told me). MAD weekend [5] last year was like that. No mandolin. I know soooo many mandolin players in the area who would’ve loved something special for mandolin. Anyway, so I was stuck with the tenor banjo players!
The options were either beginner or intermediate / advanced, so I rolled the dice and did intermediate / advanced. First up was John Carty [6]. I mostly knew him as a fiddle player to be honest but it was a fantastic master class. These little events in a school room were similar to master classes in the classical world so I’ll call ‘em that. And as you might expect, that man can play the banjo, lol. What really surprised me is that he seemed to approach it like how Marla Fibish [7] approaches the mandolin, with pedals, drones, double stops, chords, triplets of tons of flavors, what have you. Apparently as a lad he did play the mandolin, but I doubt that had any real impact on his play style from what we heard. John told us about his background (he grew up with only 3 banjo players in his general area!), how he just started recording tunes one day, and … he eventually quit carpentry to do Irish music professionally.
John taught us a few tunes. Chalk Sunday [8] and something else… They were nice enough. Somehow he and I got onto playing Around the Fairy Fort [9], and he said he learned that tune from Vincent Broderick [10] himself, who composed the tune. He showed me a few variations Vincent did, and kinda corrected a note in a way I played it (which was basically the version off the session haha). It definitely made a harmonic difference, although it felt odd to sit here and play with John while the whole class of ~8 watched.
Pauline Conneely [12] was next and she was hilarious. She talked about growing up in a musical household, but she only got her first instrument around age 20. When she picked up the instrument, she said she knew the music so well she could play. That stuck with me. She taught us 2 tunes, but we couldn’t figure out the name to one of them. She even went around asking all the other instructors and nobody knew. But it is a great, pentatonic feeling reel. It was fascinating to see her play because she was kind of improvising on the tunes and had to really concentrate to convey the skeleton of the tune to us. It really made me think that she thinks of a tune not as a skeleton to be ornamented as I do but more of a sonic puzzle with infinite solutions waiting to be solved, often in real time! I thought that was a great take to consider and think about.
It was fascinating to watch Pauline work. She asked for us to play some tunes we were struggling with for her. It was cool to see others trying. I played a reel that I often mess up (Bunker Hill) and got some good feedback. Both Pauline and John balked at my Round mandolin [19] essentially asking “what in the hell is that?” I think Pauline may have used those exact words.
For me, the big takeaways from the classes were:
John also had a fun quote that I forgot the context for. But it was “Box players get away with murder don’t they?”
Most of these were already on my "watchlist" of sorts, but after this weekend I really want to pick them up. The first is:
Also shout out to Baltimore Salute [18]. I had sorta learned it but heard it here constantly so now I've relearned it.
It was cool doing “pick up groups” outside and in the hallways. I’m a huge fan of that. More generally, it was just great to see a lot of my Baltimore friends from the Kent that I don’t get to see that often cause I’m not making that trek a lot right now. My friend J was there, and I had learned a set of reels from her from a series of videos. It was fantastic to get to play those with her in person!
A few random things… many people told me to switch to banjo. Over and over. I get it, I get it, I could play tenor banjo tomorrow and be heard more easily. There is definitely a part of me that would like to, and now I’ve seen it’s not the devil after watching John play it. I do struggle to be heard. I do struggle to impart the groove I want on a tune, because once I play it people just overwhelm me with sheer sonic force. But the tone of the mandolin is so much more pleasant. And … I want to be a mandolin player at sessions ya know? So if I’m telling someone how to play mandolin at session on YouTube, it’s because I play mandolin at a session every week. I don’t play tenor banjo or fiddle at sessions like I see other big mandolin creators do. I don’t know. Not having my fingers hurt is tempting sometimes though, not gonna lie.
The classes were a great exercise for forcing me to do a little real world ear training under pressure and on the fly. I often do ear training simply by learning a tune via a looping app. I should probably stop that at some point. I also met another low whistle player in the area. Bro had a Goldie. It was cool to hold it and see how heavy it was. It felt almost as heavy as my Viper.
I’ve got some audio from the farewell session on Sunday. I normally use my phone for session audio but lately the kids have gotten my phone gross with ketchup and slime and whatever. So I got this old Rode mic I was going to use for YouTube but ended up not using. I think the audio I did collect towards the very end when I remembered was really, really good! Lesson learned. Anyway, JTAG out.
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