Thursday, March 13, 2008

St. Patrick's Day Weekend in New York

I'll be checking out three shows this weekend, and I hope to be able to post summaries of them at some point.

Tonight, I'm headed down to the Highline Ballroom to see Lunasa and Karan Casey. To the best of my recollection, I've never seen Lunasa, so I am excited to check out this leading Irish band. Karan Casey I have seen a few times before, and my reviews would be somewhat uneven. She usually has some fine musicians playing with her though.

Tomorrow night, I will visit the Nokia Theatre in Times Square for the first time to hear the Saw Doctors. The first time I saw these guys a few years ago at the Fairfield County Irish Festival, they just knocked my socks off. And I had never seen so many thirtysomethings with toddlers on their shoulders shouting out the lyrics to rock songs. While crashing at my friend Ben's place in D.C. for a few weeks, their song "Bless Me Father" became our anthem; that summer, we also saw them in a co-bill with Great Big Sea at Wolf Trap. Ben is coming up from D.C., and we are very much looking forward to this show.

And then on Monday night, Ben will still be in town when we head over to B.B. King's to check out the ultimate New York Irish band, Black 47. I first saw them 10 years ago at an Irish festival that Guinness sponsored on the Lower East Side; we also spent New Year's Eve with them back in December 2004 (during which concert my girlfriend stood in the rear corner of the room with her fingers in her ears). They have been popping up a lot on my iPod--"Big Fellah" is a terrific song to start running to--and so I am most excited about this show.

It's one non-stop funky ceili here in New York.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Tell the Saw Doctors I say hi. I can't wait to read your post about them.

M. in Connecticut