Update: Had another great time up at the Checkmate this month! Updated image.

I play Irish and Celtic music for fun. For about a year now I've been getting together pretty regularly with a friend to practice at least once a week. Occasionally we'll cruise out to another friends' place for a session (Seisiún) with some more folks, and once in a while we'll take a field trip to see a band play. It's always a learning experience - as a teacher once told me when I was taking my education classes, "after this class, you'll never take a boring class again. Even if you're not interested in the subject matter, you'll be analyzing the teacher's technique." For almost a year I've been making half-hearted plans to run up to see...

Buddy Merriam & Back Roads at the Checkmate in Setauket where they play the first Tuesday of every month (for the last seven years!). Those plans just seemed to never work out, but finally things came together and we set out to see Buddy at the Checkmate. The Checkmate is a great venue - when I was going to Stony Brook, which is right around the corner, that was one of the spots I'd hit on occassion. It's basically a big old house that always has a fire going in the fireplace (in the winter anyway), but the front rooms have been converted into a stage. The bathrooms are clean, and the crowd is a good mixture of college kids and professionals. You can't really get a bad crowd when you're a bluegrass band though in my opinion.

The show was awesome! Buddy entertained on the mandolin with two sets of (mostly new) rockin' bluegrass. Buddy is a consummate performer, keeping everyone entertained with stories and banter throughout the entire show, and whipping out the mandolin riffs in between. But it wasn't all Buddy! There was great standup bass work and some really sweet harmonies provided by the great Ernie Sykes, Jr. and Jerry Oland who also lent us his jammin' banjo lines. On guitar, the "Sound Beach Songbird" Kathy DeVine added some sweet female voice harmonies as well as carrying some tunes all by lonesome. Tim and I had a nice conversation with Ernie Sykes outside at the break, and we enjoyed a few Hefeweizens from the bar. We even got seats near the end and managed to stay for the whole show!