tranzac, postcards

My irises are blooming!

Last Tranzac session for the summer took place last night; I didn't realized this because I had missed the last session (my tendinitis was acting up).

Seems like ages since my first Irish music session at the Tranzac, but it's actually been a little over six months. I remember how scared I was back then!

Back then, I only knew a handful of tunes and had very little experience with sessions. Half a year later, I'm at the stage where I can play on at least a few of the tunes each session from memory (with varying degrees of competence), recognize others well enough to play along with sheet music, and can recognize many more by the sound of the tune though not yet well enough to look them up or play along.



Last night, I brought along copies of the sheet music to St. Mary's Polka, also known as Gurteen Cross and Paige's Polka (the tune Dave Clement taught me). I used the sheet music from TheSession.org since that was closer to the version that some people at the Tranzac seemed to know. Denis went through each part of the tune slowly with the group, we played through the entire tune several times.

I still feel incredibly lucky to have picked the Tranzac as my first Irish session experience. The group is friendly and welcoming to newcomers, and I've found the learning sessions led by Denis Lyons and Bob Gardiner to be very instructive. Denis was at the session last night, and I made him a little thank you cartoon. :-)

After Jeff and I move to North York, it will take me a bit longer to get to the sessions but it would take more than mere distance to keep me from attending. :-)

Thanks so much for the postcards, Parki, Becca, Gary and Ju! It was a nice surprise finding them in my P.O. earlier this week. You can see their postcards in my Flickr Postcard collection.

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