A couple of Saturday nights ago I was hosting a small Irish traditional music session, a regular occurrence for me on a Saturday night. The conditions were favorable - low humidity and no bugs - for playing out of doors so we repaired to the porch for an evening of jollyment. After an hour or so of a friendly back and forth session of tune-sharing on fiddles and guitars, two gentlemen stepped up to the porch - Teng, a 1993 escapee from Laos, now living in New York city; and Carl, from Boston. Before long it was discovered - as is often the case with visitors to the porch - that one of the gentlemen, Teng, played guitar. Indeed, Teng played and sang beautifully and regaled us, first of all, appropriately, with The Fields of Athenry. Teng offered a couple more pop-folk songs to the mix while also sharing the fact that he was having a tough time due to his twenty-year-old nephew having been shot dead in Milwaukee the previous night; at least one of Teng's songs was offered up in memory of his nephew. So, during the course of the night the music shifted from Irish to folk to the classic Catholic hymn Here I Am, Lord in three-part harmony. I even managed to get my Gloria into the mix. A lovely evening.
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