This is great stuff Sean.
My own trip around New Zealand started with Terry Carroll. I lovely man and a fine piper too. Terry is playing a half set made by Dan Dowd made in 1977 and when I met him he still had all the original reeds that Dan made!
We had a great tune with Charlie Montgomery, a very fine fiddle player from Tyrone, I believe. Did you meet him Sean?
Lorcan and his kiwi wife Mary (?) moved back to Dublin since 1996,
Yes they did. They landed in Dublin with nowhere to stay right away so they moved into 15 Henrietta St for a month or so. Lorcan swears the place is haunted….
I stayed with Bob Bickerton( from Birmingham,Sasana) in Nelson, his wife Evey McAuliffe (who is from Dublin,Eire),
I had a great night of music in their house too.
Bob’s wife is also an aunt of Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh who a great flute player and the current singer with Danu!
I did a gig in Dublin with Muireann and Tony Byrne, the guitarist with at first light nowadays, and the NZ connection came up.
We commented in the rapidly decreasing size of the globe, to which Tony replied, ‘that’s such a coincidence, that’s another person that I’ve never met before….” Ba bum tish.
Anyway, another coincidence.
Ian McKenzie was the reed doctor at the Tionol in NZ 1999, the year I was teaching there and be brought along a pal from Sidney, Jamie Carlin.
Jamie had inherited a beautiful Leo Rowsome set from the family of Billy Crowe.
Billy was a piper who had ordered the set from Leo in the late 1940's, i think, and also an uncle of Tipperary piper Joe Barry.
Joe had always wondered what happened his uncles pipes and was delighted when I filled him in the following year at a Tionol in Fermoy. So Joe finished the story for me.
Billy had lived in Australia for years and played a flat set, he was fed up not being able to play along with others so he asked Leo to make him a set and would he consider a trade in as part of the price of the full set.
Leo said fine, I’ll ask about and see who wants a flat set in Dublin. And who made it, our man Egan.
It all worked out.
Dan Dowd bought the Egan set from Leo and Joe informed me that the Egan set was one that John Coughlan played which he bought from the man who ordered it from Egan himself in NY in 1852.
Who else, but PADDY GALVIN.
Big world, isn’t it.
Tommy