I was luck enough to be a feature artist on the great local music show Live at Spectrum last week, playing a few original tunes and having a chat. It was a lot of fun! Catch up & watch the whole episode here:
Live at Spectrum, now in its second season, is a seriously brilliant community-driven project that gives voice to local musicians, artists & music lovers. I take my hat off to the crew who make it possible every month!
Subscribe to their youtube channel to catch each new episode, and catch up on past ones too.
Thanks also to good mate Beau Atkinson for joining me for a few tunes, and taking a punt on one we’d barely rehearsed!
I’ve been lucky enough to have a few stints on the wireless on recent years (particularly recent months), but it was extra special to meet long-time (slightly older) ABC journalistic crush Fran Kelly, and feature on ABC Radio National in both Earthworker Cooperative AND musician capacities the other day.
#LiveInMorwell.
So, in case you missed good mate Beau and I on ABC RN last week, here it is.
If you’re interested, you can listen/download to the interview about Earthworker Cooperative (before the song) HERE . It’s great to hear from young Morwell champs Ella and Josh in the interview too – young voices are all too rare, but so important at this vital time of change in the Latrobe Valley… and let’s face it, the world.
And if you just want the tunes, good old Lynton captured it here…
I’ve long had a deep, hard-to-describe love of traditional Celtic music, and love to romanticise my Irish roots. (‘Musil’ is a Czech name from my Dad’s side of the family, on my Mother’s side is a big Irish mob – hence the sunburn & *in certain light* ginger-tinged beard.)
Despite this love, I’ve only started actually learning a few jigs and reels over the past couple of years.
“Why not learn a bunch of Celtic tunes on the dobro??” I thought. So I did.
And I’m still enjoying noodling out more and more of them, and finding out how lap-slide can (and sometimes can’t) slide right into playing tunes and rhythm in the Celtic sessions I try to frequent close to home.
So here is a set of my current favourites, arranged slightly differently, played roughly… Given I’m playing slide, I thought I’d blues-up and minor-key a slow version of the first tune, ‘Behind the Haystack‘, which is followed by a Gloaming-inspired version of ‘Rolling Wave‘ and closed with a (very rough) arrangement of the ‘West Clare Jig‘.
I hope you enjoy them! (and feel free to let you know what you think).
Might see you at a session sometime soon….
I’ll post some more at some point soon – like the facebook page to stay in the loop, or get in touch to join the email list.
UPDATE 2021: Here’s another Celtic-Blues mashup – a fuzz stomp frolick of The Ashplant Reel on dobro, with a loop pedal. It feels a little blasphemous for the trad listener, but it was fun…
As you can see, after some website issues, we’re back online!
Please have a look around the new website – any feedback/suggestions/requests welcome.
There’ll be some new content (tunes and videos), as well as news on gigs and budding collaborations, up soon!
Dan Musil 