Cantrip, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, Saturday, September 10, 2005

Early September in Maine, most of the tourists have gone home, the kids (and teachers) are back in school, the days are getting shorter and the air starts to cool. It's about the best time in the year for concerts. We found out through the electronic grapevine that Cantrip was playing a gig at Bowdoin College on a Saturday night, and made plans to go as opportunities to hear live Celtic music are somewhat scarce if you're interested in something outside of the Irish repertoire. Indeed one local promoter, we kid you not, won't do anything but Irish as obviously only Irish music is Celtic music!

Not so with the promoter for this concert! Ceilidh House, an all volunteer undertaking. was, according to their website, 'founded in 2003 as an educational and arts organization devoted to fostering an understanding of the Celtic heritage that is embedded in the culture of Maine. Forty-eight percent of Maine's population now claims Celtic and/or British ancestry. Many of the earliest settlers, c. 1700-1800 were Scots and Ulster-Scots (aka Scots-Irish) farmers and merchants and Cornish fishermen. They were followed starting in 1820 by the Irish. People continue to settle in Maine from these and other Celtic lands up to the present day.'

That said, Ceilidh House is perhaps best at doing live events and hands-on classes -- we see from the upcoming events brochure they handed out at the concert that they have a Scottish piping and dancing workshop, a Cape Breton concert, a Samhain Cross-Quarter concert, a Celtic Renaissance feast, a concert by a well-known Celtic Harper, Jo Morrison, and her husband, Wayne, who plays Welsh shuttle pipes and vocals, and a Scottish harp and smallpipe concert. A rather impressive set of events!

Holly Morrison, no relation to Jo Morrison in the past few centuries, is the Director of Ceilidh House. She told Cat that they will be doing both Welsh and Cornish related events in the future. Cool! Ceilidh House has the potential to be one of the premiere Celtic music and culture groups in Maine over the coming years.

The number of decent performance venues in southern Maine is pretty small if one is measuring both the comfortableness of the seating and.the acoustic quality of the space. Kresge Auditorium on the Bowdoin Campus is one of the best by both criteria. It's a lecture hall in the basement of the Visual Arts Center. With its wide, deep stage, gently banked audience seating and red-carpeted sound baffles, it seats around three hundred people. We'd been there once before, to see Vasen.  The sound there is simply perfect -- not a dead spot anywhere.

Cantrip was scheduled to start at 7:30. Although we didn't expect a big crowd, we like to arrive early so we can pick seats in our favorite section (right of center, about 5 rows back, on the aisle). When we walked into the hall at about 7:10, the band was doing a last-minute sound check. One of us (Donna) stayed to watch, while the other (Cat) went out in the hall to talk to the folks from Ceilidh House and to pickup a copy of the new (second) Cantrip CD, Boneshaker. When the boys came back on stage to start the show, we counted about 40 people in the audience. 

Although the first Cantrip CD, Silver, featured a five-member band, there were four members on the stage as they no longer have a percussionist. Jon Bews, seated on the far right side, played a dark green fiddle, sitting upright on the edge of the chair, his feet keeping time to the music. Dan Houghton sat next to him. He's the one who did most of the talking in the first set. He played the Scottish Border pipes, whistles and flute and also sang the lyrics to the very macabre Richard Thompson song 'Sam Jones.' Gavin Marwick sat next to Dan. Wearing a very white shirt and black pants and shoes, Gavin moved so much in his chair while he played his fiddle that we thought he was going to fly apart in several directions. Over to the far left was the guitar and mandolin player, Cameron Robson, whose composition 'Witch' was a lovely, haunting piece.

With the exception of the pieces by Thompson and Robson mentioned above, the band played mostly tunes from Nordic and Celtic traditions. In fact, we kept recognizing melodies that we already knew from Vasen, Garmarna, Iron Horse and the Old Blind Dogs. It's probably not coincidental that Marwick was a member of Iron Horse and has occasionally sat in with the Old Blind Dogs. The sound was clear, clean, and lively, although a couple of times we couldn't hear Cammy's mandolin or Dan's pipes over the fiddles. The band isn't touring with a sound engineer, so one of the members of Cellidh House ran the board. Cantrip also appears to be sans a percussionist right now. I didn't really notice that absence until I listened to some of the tunes on the CDs later at home.

All in all, it was one of the best concerts we've ever had the pleasure to experience. And we had one more pleasant experience as we left the concert. Gavin, who was outside rolling a smoke, chatted with us for a minutes about the now defunct Iron Horse group and other matters. As we walked away across the campus, he said 'Are you with Green Man?' (Both of us had Green Man t-shirts on.) We said 'yes, we are,' and he noted he reads us and likes the reviews we've done of his work!

[Donna Bird and Cat Eldridge]