Friday Oct. 21, 2022 7:30pm
Owen Kennedy is a seventeen-year-old fiddler from Maine whose love of traditional music and enthusiasm for performing has captivated audiences from San Diego to the Shetland Islands and all over New England. Owen’s musicality and commitment to traditional music have been recognized with several awards, including the Junior US National Scottish Fiddle Champion title and the Young Stars of Maine “Glenn Jenks Future in Music” prize. He was selected for Best of All Things Irish from the Maine Irish Heritage Center and received a Passim Iguana Music Fund Grant for work on his debut album, Oh When: Now which will be available later this year. Owen performs with the Pineland Fiddlers, the Maine Folque Co-op, and Vermont’s Young Tradition Touring Group and has shared the stage with Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy, Genticorum, Pete Sutherland & Oliver Scanlon, Seán Heely, Andrea Beaton & Troy MacGillivray, and Owen Marshall. As an emerging musician rooted in the Maine Maritime tradition and immersed in his growing passion for Scottish music, Owen’s powerful playing charms audiences whether capturing the melancholy of a Scottish air, mimicking the sound of pipes in a march, or driving a good ol’ New England contradance tune.
Owen will be supported by Ethan Stokes on guitar. Ethan Tischler is a Maine-based musician/educator with roots in the Champlain Valley of Vermont. He has been performing and teaching in Vermont and Maine for the last many years, at Bread & Butter Farm in South Burlington VT, the Belfast Adventure Education Program in Belfast Maine, the Sweetland School in Hope, Maine, and at Maine Fiddle Camp in West Gardiner, Maine. Alongside his own solo projects, he delights in playing with Elsie Gawler as Elsie & Ethan, and with the Gawler Sisters and Gawler Family as a whole. His debut album “Across the Waking Skies” enjoyed Top 10 play time on WERU, air time on VPR, and critical acclaim from Seven Days Vermont. As for the nature of his music, to quote the Seven Days review, “Simple in its legato optimism, the chant matter-of-factly confronts the mess of reality — and finds beauty in the heart’s resilience.”
Opening – Fern Tamagini-O’Donnell is a fiddler and Sean Nós style Irish dancer from Wareham, MA. She performs in Massachusetts, Vermont, and beyond, most recently at the Sutton Fiddle Fest in Quebec and the New World Festival in Vermont. Fern, with Hilary Menegaz Weitzner, won Vermont’s 2022 Young Tradition Festival Contest.
ADMISSION: By free-will offering, suggested cash donation adults $15-20; teens and seniors $10; children $5. 100% of patron donations go to the artist.
RESERVATIONS: http://notlobmusic.eventbrite.com
ARTIST’S WEBSITE: https://www.fiddlerokennedy.com/
COVID PRECAUTIONS: Full vaccinations, boosters, and masks requested. Please read additional Fivesparks’ COVID-19 protocols for events at https://www.fivesparks.org/
ABOUT NOTLOB PARLOUR CONCERTS: Since 2007, notloB has presented >200 not-for-profit folk, Celtic, old-time, bluegrass, and progressive string concerts in unique venues throughout the greater Boston area. notloB’s current home is space rented in the renovated 1890 Harvard, Massachusetts library – https://www.harvardpubliclibrary.org/about/history-library – repurposed as “Fivesparks.”
Phone – 978-226-8862
email – notlobreservations@gmail.com
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/notlobmusic