Everyone's music #2 - My personal journey with traditional music
By David Armstrong
The pic is of me playing the uilleann pipes, and was drawn for my 56th birthday by my wonderful daughter Eve when she was 14.
I was reared with music and love all sorts. My late dad - a Presbyterian minister - was a great singer and played piano well by ear. He forced us as kids (I’ve three siblings) to listen to the great tenors like McCormack, Pavarotti and Domingo. Opera never gripped me, but music did. I’ve ended up dabbling in lots of instruments over the years; e.g. I play bass guitar, and thirty years ago, my kid brother Paul Armstrong (a great drummer) and I were ‘gigging out’ 3-4 times a week - jazz, blues and rock n roll. In our tiny wee minds, we were the tightest rhythm section around! No one else thought so, mind!
Traditional music has also always been one of my great loves, but I only started trying to play it relatively recently. I made the mistake of falling in love a while ago with the uilleann pipes and I’m still trying to wrestle them to the ground. I remember fondly in my late teens, which isn’t yesterday, heading to the Ballyshannon Folk Festival every summer with a bunch of other wee Presbyterians; listening to Planxty on my Sony Walkman (if you’re young, Google it!); being knocked out by Davy Spillane’s trad fusion at the Ulster Hall; and travelling all over Scotland when I was a student there to hear the great Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan.
I was brought up in Ballyhackamore in East Belfast and I’ve lived here for many years. There’s great music vibes around this part of my beloved city, e.g. Van Morrison and Cyprus Avenue; Scott’s Jazz Club, one of the most progressive jazz venues these days in UK / Ireland; and lots of fantastic working musicians like my good friends Ken Haddock and Kyron Bourke, with whom I gigged (on bass) for many years. But there’s never really been much “traditional music” - in the commonly used sense of that term - around here. The reasons are nuanced and complicated and I’ll maybe tackle them in a later post! For now, let’s just say that so many locals and others have said to me how delighted that there’s a weekly trad music session like this in this part of Belfast. We’ve hardly missed a Thursday since we started in October ‘23, and it’s now become a pretty well ensconced part of the East Belfast vibe. I’m a wee bit proud to have played a small part in it.
The video is of us all blasting away one night in Hearth at Cooley’s Reel, including the wonderful, award-winning Brìghde Chaimbeul on Scottish smallpipes.
More to come. It’s all about the music! It’s everyone’s music!
Join us at The Hearth session each Thursday evening 8pm - 10pm for a tune or sit back and enjoy - it's everyone's music