News from the road

An incredible weekend at Newport!

I am writing from my hotel room in Boston as I am reflecting on the incredible weekend that I just spent at Newport folk festival in Rhode Island.

One of the most amazing things that happen at this festival, is that there is a huge amount of fantastic musicians concentrated in a very small space, so collaborations flourish and everyone ends up sitting in with other people’s bands.

We were so incredibly lucky to be joined by two very special guests on our set: Taj Majal and Joan Baez. These two musicians are living legends and they certainly don’t need my introduction!

Here’s a video of the piece we played with Taj…and towards the end you will see Joan Baez come out for a little dance with Rhiannon!

For the last piece we had both Joan and Taj join Rhiannon and the band in a memorable version of “I shall not be moved”, a particular version that Rhiannon learned from her mentor Joe Thompson.

In the end we had the whole crowd singing a cappella, it was a very powerful moment.

Here is a video I took from my seat at the organ

The next day we had the honor of accompanying Taj Mahal in his own set. He came to Newport without his band so he asked us to sit in and it was a little crazy! We had a couple of hours of rehearsal to learn his music and then we jumped straight onto the stage and it was such a joyous and uplifting set.

Here a little video of the last piece we played with him:

That same night we drove to a studio and recorded a couple of songs with Taj for a future recording project (my mouth is shut)

From a food perspective Newport is actually quite good. To be honest we didn’t have a huge amount of time for eating but I managed to have a quite nice lobster roll, some good oysters (which were free in the artist bar!!) and some half decent barbecue

Now the tour is continuing and I will keep you posted if anything extra exciting happens!

A presto