Beth Patterson & Patrick O’Flaherty

Beth Patterson, a talented multi-instrumentalist, began playing the harmonica as a young boy in Connemara. Raised in Galway’s Gaeltacht on the Rugged West Coast of Ireland, Patrick is part of a select group of people whose native language is Gaelic. He grew up in Ardmore, Co. Galway, and spent much of his boyhood on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran islands off the coast of Galway. Today he is acknowledged as one of the truly fine practitioners of Irish mandolin and harmonica. He is also a highly respected player of the button accordion and banjo. Patrick is one of the few composers today writing original songs in Gaelic. His professional music career has spanned nearly three decades.

Beth Patterson began her career in her early teens as a classical oboist and a Cajun bass player (with the required teenage heavy metal stint on the side), but not truly belonging to any of these, set out to create her own niche when she was adopted by a stray bouzouki. After moving to New Orleans, she began to play the circuit, initially intending to do the folky thing, but accepted gigs of all types left and right because no one told her that they shouldn’t be played on the bouzouki. (Not to mention that it was a sin.) So she tried on genres as though playing dress-up, snatching up influences like a crazy cat lady with felines…she couldn’t bear to reject a thing. Beth later fled to Ireland, studying ethnomusicology at University College Cork, where she explored the music of Ireland, West Africa, India, Indonesia, and the Caribbean, and began to experiment with fusions of these world gems with her musical old flames.
www.poflaherty.com
www.bethpattersonmusic.com
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