The idea of having arts festivals and conferences during an Irish winter might seem a bit bizarre but where would we be without Out to Lunch in Belfast or Scoil Gheimhridh Ghaoth Dobhair in, er, Gaoth Dobhair, and there are many others of course.
Your Roots are Showing is the latest, just three years old, and it is more of a conference than a festival, being aimed at musicians and bands who want to move their careers forward. But there will also be music galore and much more, from workshops and industry talks to yoga.
Starting two days ago on Tuesday with a mega-concert and running until Sunday, Your Roots are Showing is the brainchild of Charlene Sloan and Brendan McCreanor and has grown in part from Lark and Owl, the travel, artist management and events company they set up five years ago.
“Brendan and I worked in music for many years on the business side while Brendan is also a fantastic uilleann piper,” Charlene explains.
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“I had always thought that Ireland really could benefit from a large-scale music conference focusing on the business elements of being a musician, so that people here could learn the nuts and bolts of putting their career together without having to travel outside of the country to do so,” she explained.
Despite its horrific nature, the Covid pandemic gave many people, artists in particular, the chance to evaluate their careers. It gave Charlene and Brendan the chance to work out what exactly Your Roots Are Showing could achieve, how to make it happen and what musicians and singers would benefit from it.
“From day one, our focus was on the musicians and singers,” says Charlene, who is also a certified life coach and mindfulness practitioner,
“We have nearly 100 artists who have been or will be performing on three stages over the four nights of the conference, and then we have a music trail as well on Sunday.
“The acts can choose whichever kind of masterclass they would benefit most from and at the end of the week, they can have a business plan put together.”
For example, she explains, artists can learn to do their own PR if they need to or they can meet a PR company agent who will take that over for them. depending on where they are in their career, or they can fine tune their songwriting skills.
Everybody just kind of mixes so you’ll have Ron Block who’s won 14 Grammy awards sitting and playing with a person that has never played on a stage ever. It’s beautiful to watch
— Charlene Sloan
“We have songwriting workshops with Liam Ó Maonlaí and others,” continues Charlene.
“We also have Dirk Powell, a Grammy-winning banjo player, who is also doing a banjo workshop, along with Enda Scahill and Ron Block.
“We have a fiddle workshop with Gerry O’Connor so there’s the practical kind of hands-on if you’re a musician, and you want to hone your skills with some masters who have really innovated their instruments.”
The other side of the Your Roots Are Showing is the unseen slog that people who make music for a living have to go through.
“How many know the ins and outs of getting a record deal and signing contracts?” asks Charlene.
“What do you do with social media? You have a TikTok account, but how the heck do you get people to look at it?
“We have Sina Theil – the German-born, Irish-based multi-instrumentalist, award-winning artist, singer-songwriter and social media Influencer – who is going to kind of bring people through the process of social media and how to gain followers.”
Your Roots are Showing is however, two things at the same time: a very industry-orientated conference but also a very social gathering as well. When the day’s learning is over, singers and songwriters and musicians, industry people, rookies and established artists, will be sitting in a corner exchanging stories and ideas and songs over a coffee – or something stronger more likely – until 5am, I have been warned!
“We really love the fact that we’re, I always say, cosy,” says Charlene.
“I know that it may not sound cosy because there’s all this business stuff happening, but it’s a really relaxed, happy environment, and people stay up until five in the morning, you know, playing music together and there’s no ‘them and us’.
“Everybody just kind of mixes so you’ll have Ron Block who’s won 14 Grammy awards sitting and playing with a person that has never played on a stage ever. It’s beautiful to watch.”
However, there is one huge problem with Your Roots are Showing – there are so many great talks happening at the same time.
So this morning, I had the choice between discussions on two aspects of folk and traditional music.
At 9m, it was ‘Using Music For Good In the Community’ with Joe Philpott and Thomas Gabriel (a grandson of country legend Johnny Cash) versus ‘Who Can Play Traditional Music? What Music Belongs in the Tradition and Issues of Cultural Appropriation’ with Liam Ó Maonlaí, Francesco Turrisi, Niamh Parsons, Rossa Ó Snodaigh and Gabriel Gonzalez. What a line-up.
Tomorrow afternoon sees the Your Roots are Showing keynote speech, being given this year by the great Rhiannon Giddens.
Rhiannon has already appeared at the opening concert of Your Roots are Showing on Tuesday, a show entitled Folk in Fusion which featured banjo aristocracy in the form of Peter Rowan, the bluegrass legend and Grammy winner, who received the conference’s first-ever lifetime achievement award for his groundbreaking contributions to music; Alison Brown, banjo virtuoso and co-founder of Compass Records; Ron Block and Enda Scahill: co-founder of We Banjo 3, showcasing the finest in Irish banjo tradition.
On a more traditional note, there was fiddler Gerry O’Connor and Liam Ó Maonlaí.
Rhiannon’s talk tomorrow will be wide-ranging but Charlene assures us that the singer/musician/researcher “is going to surprise us with incredible stories about her life and the music that she plays”: “I’m sure she’ll talk about the banjo and how influential the humble instrument is, not just on bluegrass music but on music in general and how it can be a surprising instrument in lots of different ways.”
The event finishes on Sunday with a music trail through Killarney town.
Tin Pan Alley had nothing on this.
