ST. PETER’S: No strangers to this community thanks to their roles as instructors for the annual Music Camp on the Canal, two Celtic music collaborators helped camp organizers ramp up the enthusiasm for the event’s sixth annual edition this coming June.
Fiddler Colin Grant and guitarist/composer Scott Macmillan, who recently collaborated on the duet album Good2Go, hosted the first-ever KitchenRackets Masters Concert on Friday evening at the St. Peter’s Lions’ Hall and then settled in for an informal jam session at the same venue. Co-sponsored by KitchenRackets and the St. Peter’s Economic Development Organization (SPEDO), the event was partly designed to preview this year’s Music Camp on the Canal, which runs from June 2-4 in St. Peter’s.
Camp director Greg Silver, who spoke to The Reporter in-between the main concert and the jam session, confirmed that Macmillan, Grant and fellow instructor Kelli Trottier will be part of a new feature at this year’s camp – specifically, the expansion of the weekend’s master classes for advance students from two days to three.
“For the first five years, we concentrated on beginner-to-intermediate [instruction],” Silver recalled.
“But we’ve had such incredible instructors that are able to work at a higher level, so we’ve had some demand… We’ve kind of proven ourselves over five years to show that we actually can run a good music camp, so more serious players want to get in.”
While additional announcements regarding Music Camp instructors and content will occur on a regular basis over the next four months, Silver added that “we’re not changing much” from the successful formula of the first five years. This includes such elements as the Saturday night All-Star Concert, communal meals with the camp’s faculty and students, and Band Labs that see groups of students working together throughout the weekend to create their own original compositions.
“Some of these bands have decades of age differences in the players, and everybody loves it,” Silver beamed.
“The instructors love it that we are mixing kids from eight years old to 16 or 17 with the ‘kids’ that are, like, 19 to 80.”
With this age diversity in mind, Silver is pleased to see as many as two dozen different businesses and organizations contributing to the Music Camp’s bursary program, which allowed 24 students to attend the camp without paying admission in 2016. Such activities drive home the importance of fundraisers like Friday’s Masters Concert, which originally had a ticket-sale target of 150 but wound up putting 156 enthusiastic audience members in the Lions’ Hall chairs.
“We like to keep live music happening year-round,” Silver said of the concert’s February show date.
“A big part of our mandate is to keep live music alive. So any reason we can come up with to have a concert or a jam session, we’ll do it, because that’s what we do here.”
For more information on Music Camp on the Canal 2017 and other KitchenRackets activities, visit the Web site: www.kitchenrackets.org. The organization also has its own Facebook and Twitter pages.
