FUTURE  CONCERTS

Read about The Coatesville Traditional
Irish Music Concert Series

Page provided by: FRAYED KNOT ARTS

DONATE TO CTIMS!
Mike Rafferty
with Felix Dolan & Willie Kelly
Saturday, Oct. 13th, 2007     8:00 PM
$15/00
(Children under 12 admitted free)
Mike Rafferty is a revered master of the old lyrical and flowing flute style of the East Galway region of Ireland. Born in 1926 in the village of Larraga in County Galway, he learned his music from his father, Tom "Barrel" Rafferty, a farmer, flute player and uilleann piper. In 1949 Mike emigrated to the United States, where he has lived ever since. He has performed at concerts and festivals throughout the country over the past 25 years and has taught Irish flute at the Irish Arts Week in upstate New York, the Swannanoa Festival in North Carolina, the Augusta Heritage Center in West Virginia, and Boxwood, a school for traditional flute in Nova Scotia.

Felix Dolan, like Mike, an elder statesman of the tradition in America, is one of the most accomplished keyboard accompanists in Irish music. Born in the Bronx to Irish parents, he had taught himself the button accordion by the age of ten and eventually honed his legendary technique on the piano. In the late 1950's a young Felix was a member of the celebrated New York Ceili Band, playing alongside the legendary fiddlers Paddy Reynolds, Andy McGann and Larry Redican, in an ensemble regarded as the Big Apple's Irish musical elite.
Willie Kelly is a young Irish-American fiddler, born in the Bronx and raised in northern New Jersey.  Inspired to play Irish music after hearing his Irish-born father and grandfather playing the fiddle, he studied under the acclaimed West-Limerick fiddler and teacher Martin Mulvihill.  Willie has mastered a lovely older style of traditional Irish fiddle playing... a kind of fiddling too infrequently heard these days.
Photo by Paul F. Wells
Some of the cuts from Mike's 2004 "solo" record, "SPEED 78", which features Felix and Willie as well:  Just click on the link below to open an MP3.

"The Bower/ Jenny Picking Cockles": Mike on the Uilleann Pipes;

"The Collier's Reel/ St. Ruth's Bush" : Mike on solo Flute;

"Cormac O'Lunny's / The Braes of Busby": Willy Kelly showing his mastery of the fiddle;


Not a musical link, but a short discourse by "Himself" on "First Learning to Play".