The Kells performing at the 2005 Dublin Irish Festival. That's Brian McCoy, who taught the festival whistle workshops on the right. I only got to see about half of their performance since it was getting close to the end of the day and my three-year-old daughter was ready to leave. The Kells play energetic, traditional music; you can hear it here.
This is the first of a series of posts about the 2005 Dublin Irish Festival. They were expecting 85,000 people, and judging by the crowds and great weather I think there were at least that many.
You can look forward to lots of photos and comments on shows by Cherish the Ladies, Eileen Ivers, and the Tannahill Weavers (plus an interview on the subject of whistling in Scottish music), but it will take me a while to write all of that. So I'll start out with the first thing I saw when I entered the festival, which was my whistle teacher giving an introductory level ("introductory" in the "which end do I blow into" sense of the word) seminar on playing the whistle to a standing room only crowd of over 100 people. Brian did a great job keeping the crowd engaged and laughing.
