Kitchen Ceili and Friends Concert

Kitchen Ceili and Friends:  Traditional and Original Music from Ireland, North America, the British Isles and India

Members of Kitchen Ceili perform a repertoire that includes lilting jigs, driving reels, and traditional and contemporary songs of lovers and laborers from the mountains of Donegal to the rivers of West Bengal. The songs and instrumental pieces in this concert were gathered over the course of some four decades of study, travel, composing, and collaborating in Ireland, England, India and at home in New England.  Our core group of Kitchen Ceili includes Stan Scott (vocals, guitar, mandolin and banjo), Dorothea Hast (vocals, tin whistle and recorders), Sam Scheer (vocals, guitar and banjo) and George Wilson (vocals and fiddle). 

Stan Scott teaches music at Wesleyan, Southern Connecticut State University and his own Rangila School of Music in Middletown.  He completed the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in 1997.  His recordings include Somewhere in the Middle of Your Life with Sam Scheer, The Weaver’s Song: Bhajans of North India, A Friend of the Wind with Sam Scheer and Trillium E with Anthony Braxton.  His publications include Music in Ireland with Dorothea Hast (Oxford University Press) and Exploring the World of Music with Dorothea Hast and James Cowdery (Kendall Hunt).

Dorothea Hast completed the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in 1994 and has an impressive collection of traditional whistle tunes gathered in many field trips to Ireland. She co-authored Music in Ireland and Exploring the World of Music and is currently a Visiting Scholar in Residence in the Music Department and Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College. 

Sam Scheer’s songwriting grows out of deep and extended immersion in American, Irish and English poetry, folk, country, and theater music; he has collaborated with Stan Scott in recording and performing projects since the mid 1970s at Bennington College. 

George Wilson, one of the most in-demand contra dance fiddlers in North America, is steeped in the folk music of his native upstate New York, as well as tunes from the Quebecois, Cape Breton, Scottish and Irish traditions.