About the exhibit

“TRAD” is an ongoing project by photographer Christopher Bickford featuring studio portraits of traditional Celtic folk musicians. Part of a larger body of work including native Irish, Scottish and international musicians, the current show will focus on the local Irish music scene, which in the last 30 years has grown from an underground coalition into a thriving community, thanks in no small part to the Blue Ridge Irish Music School, which was founded by Tes Slominski and Sara Read in 2000, and has been directed by Lori Madden for most of its lifetime. Celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year, the school offers workshops and classes in various instruments, singing, and dancing; runs a regular session at Dürty Nelly’s pub and a monthly ceili dance at Potter’s Craft Cider; and hosts some of the finest touring Irish and Scottish musical artists and bands on the scene today for concerts in various venues around Charlottesville. Many of the subjects of this portrait series grew up as BRIMS students and now lead sessions, teach classes, play gigs around the area, and generally make the Charlottesville Irish music scene the robust musical phenomenon that it has become. 

While the music scene is strong, it can be difficult to depict visually, since many events occur in dim or otherwise poor lighting and “sessions”, for all their musical vitality, are not much to look at, as the musicians are not performing for an audience, but for themselves and for each other, sitting in a rough circle, staring down at their instruments. The idea of this portrait series is to bring the individual musicians into the light, as it were, to show them as unique and essential members of an organic group that exists within a much wider tradition and is based around the idea of communion, conversation, carousing, and self-generated entertainment, or as they say in Irish, "the craic”.  

About the artist

Christopher Bickford is a freelance photographer and writer, currently located in Central Virginia. He has shot for the New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, Time Magazine, Captain Morgan Rum, Vision Magazine, The Grand Ole Opry, Milepost Magazine, Carnival Music Company, and various international publications. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar.

Chris is the author of the book Legends of the Sandbar (Burn Books), a visual and written ode to the surf culture of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which has garnered high praise and been featured in The Surfer's Journal, the New York Times Lens Blog, Surfline.com, and on innumerable sports, lifestyle, and photography blogs. Surfline dubbed it “a visually mesmerizing poetic triumph”, Outside Magazine called it “The most striking surf project we’ve seen in years” and the NYTimes called it a “book of fantastical images that make you feel as if you are in the tumult of the raging ocean.”

In his professional life Chris has worked on a wide variety of assignments and projects. He has been on barges out in the Gulf of Mexico photographing the confusion of cleanup efforts after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He has twice been to Haiti to document the efforts of the World Food Program, and to wander the tent cities, capturing the life of a nation living amid rubble and ruins after the devastating earthquake of 2010. He has documented post-disaster cleanup operations on the East Coast by trucks with cranes that look like giant robots. He has scuba-dived the murky waters off of Panama with marine archaeologists in search of the lost ships of Captain Morgan. He has flown over Kauai in a helicopter, over Kona in a motorized glider, over the Florida Panhandle in a Cessna.  He  descended 150 feet down the Bloody Bay Wall in the Cayman islands to get a view of divers far above against the ridge line.  He has attached his camera to wing struts, sailboat hulls, automobile hoods. He has spent countless hours swimming inside the churning waters of the Outer Banks, photographing the local surf heroes and studying the shapes that waterborne energy makes as it dies its violent death against the obstruction of landfall.  He has documented Carnival celebrations around the world: from the fantastical masquerade balls and ancient legend-rich spectacles of Venice, to the sexy samba street parties of Rio, to the socially complex and endlessly fascinating Mardi Gras culture of New Orleans, to the surreal — and at times violent — Courir de Mardi Gras of rural Louisiana.  He has photographed famous and almost-famous musicians — live, in the studio, and in a multitude of locations.  He worked as a cameraman for a video project on Medal of Honor recipients for the Grand Ole Opry. He worked as the Director of Photography on a long-form video for International Youth Hostels promoting respect for cultural diversity. He DP’d an independent film that had to be scuttled due to lack of funds.  He has shot and directed music videos. And he has photographed over 200 weddings.

Bickford's photographic specialties include portraiture (both environmental and in-studio), news and documentary work, travel photography, in- and under- water photography, and just about anything you ask him to do. He also shoots and edits video, some of which can be seen on this website. He is currently working predominantly in the music industry. His most recent book, Scenes From a Venetian Carnival, is near completion and seeking publishers. 

Bickford's stock photography portfolio is currently represented by the National Geographic Creative Image Collection. For commissions, promotional work, freelance video work, commercial photography, editorial work, or any other inquiries you can contact him directly. 

Website: www.chrisbickford.com

Instagram: @chrisbickford

Facebook: Chris Bickford, Kitty Hawk, NC (chris-bickford-34)

TRAD.

It’s a cold, rainy Tuesday night in January. Most people in their right minds are at home, curled up next to the space heater and bingeing on Netflix, saving their energy for the rest of the work week. But at Dürty Nelly’s pub, a sticky-floor hole-in-the-wall bar with a roaring fire, located in an obscure corner of a university town, people keep crowding in, shaking off their raincoats, unpacking instruments, and gathering around in a messy circular formation that keeps growing and growing as more musicians arrive. They are here for the “craic", as they say, which is an Irish term that means something like “fun”, but which more specifically refers to good music, good conversation, good drink, good laughs, and good friends. 

They call such a gathering a “session”, which in Irish is spelled “seisiun”. And the music they are playing is mostly Irish, with a little bit of Scottish and Cape Breton thrown into the mix. And this session is one of thousands that happen on a regular basis all around the world, from Toronto to Brisbane to Galway to Lisbon to Kuala Lumpur. It is arguably the most thriving folk music phenomenon in the world. It goes by many names, but in Ireland it is generally referred to, by both those who love it and those who hate it, as “trad”.  

When a piece of music is so old that no one knows who composed it, it is considered “traditional”, and on sheet music the attribution for such a tune will often be abbreviated to “trad.” 

Most of the tunes played by Irish and Scottish folk musicians are of unknown origin, and thus the term “trad” has come to define a certain kind of sound, a certain culture of musicians. 

They play instruments like the fiddle, the flute, the concertina, the tenor banjo, the accordion, the tin whistle, the bouzouki, the bodhran, and various kinds of bagpipes. They gather in pubs, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, sometimes every night of the week, and play tunes. 

“Tunes” in trad-speak refers to instrumental pieces of music (as opposed to songs), mostly jigs, which are bouncy dances in 6/8 time; and reels, which are driving dances in 4/4 time. If the group gets bored with jigs and reels (which rarely happens), or there are some students in the mix, they may start playing other kinds of tunes, like hornpipes, polkas, strathspeys, waltzes, barn dances, marches, or slow airs. Each of these types of tunes has a different feel: airs are wistful and haunting, hornpipes are jaunty and jolly, polkas are great for jumping up and down to, and waltzes, well, you know what a waltz is. 

Like 12-bar blues or verse-chorus pop songs, trad tunes all have a simple and common structure. The tune begins with a theme, which is either 8 bars or 16 bars long, which repeats once, sometimes with a variation at the end. This is called the “A part”. Then the tune changes, often rising in pitch and intensity, or changing from major to minor, but generally playing off the theme of the A part. This is called, naturally, the “B part”. Once the B part is played twice, the tune returns to the A part, and keeps going round until someone starts in with a new tune. Most tunes only have 2 parts, but some can have as many as five or more. 

In any given evening, 50 or 60 tunes or more may get played. At the next session, there will be 50 or 60 more tunes played, most of them completely different. A good trad musician will know a few hundred tunes; a great trad musician will know over a thousand. No one knows how many tunes there are in the world. Old ones keep getting discovered and new ones keep getting composed. 

Generally, tunes will be played in a set, where three or four tunes are strung together to form a medley. At a session, someone may start with a tune, then once that tune goes around two or three times, someone else will start in with a new tune, often signaling the rest of the players with a “hup!” a bar or two beforehand. At the end of a set, patrons will cheer, musicians will refuel with drink, and laughter will abound. 

Conversation between sets often revolves around the music, with the inevitable “What was the name of that last one?” being thrown out there, along with references to recordings where someone learned the tune, other tunes that get played alongside a certain tune, and sometimes a “Jeez, I haven’t played that tune in years”…

Some people know the names to all the tunes they play. Some people know all the tunes, but none of the names. They will communicate with their instrument: “D’you know the one that starts like this?” 

The names of tunes are all quite interesting. They can refer to animals (The Kid on the Mountain, the Lark in the Morning), people (The Rakish Paddy,The Wise Maid), the landscape (The Cliffs of Moher, The Mist-Covered Mountain) drink (The Jug of Punch, The Humours of Whiskey), the player who popularized the tune (Father Kelly’s, Chief O’Neill’s Favorite) — really the name of a tune can be anything, but most tune names have a lilt, a musicality, and a mystique that is hard to define. There are combinations of words that just sound like the name of a tune. 

Sometime around 9 PM at Durty Nelly’s, a young woman stands up to sing a song. Within seconds, the raucous bar jammed with 50 or so people laughing and drinking falls pin-drop silent. The woman sings a capella or “sean-nos” (which means “old style” in Irish). Tonight the song she sings is in Irish Gaelic. The tune is achingly melancholic. She sings slowly and with great feeling, embellishing certain notes with vocal ornamentation. Since it’s in a foreign language no one knows what the song is about, but there’s a good chance someone dies at the end of it. The singer finishes and the room remains hushed for a brief moment, then erupts into applause and hoots and hollers. 

Then it’s back to the tunes.

Trad music is dance music, so there’s no surprise that the occasional patron will take to whatever floor space is available and dance a spontaneous jig when the music is really crackling. More serious dancers may show up with small wooden platforms and hard-soled dancing shoes and pound out fierce rhythms with their feet to spur the players on. 

As the evening wears on, the session starts to thin out, as the old folks and the students pack up their instruments and head out into the cold. Gradually the remaining players reposition themselves to get closer to one another, and the music gets more focused, more nuanced, tighter. This is the best part of the night. They will play as long as they are allowed, which is generally up to the bartender. If she’s got an early morning, she may enforce the 10:30 curfew. If not, things may go a little longer. 

In Scotland and Ireland, sessions regularly go into the wee hours; a good session may even last until dawn. To get around mandated closing times, the publican may lock the doors and “close” the bar, but those locked inside will continue to generate craic until they run out of steam. If the session is rocking but the bar has to close for real, the musicians may move to someone’s house nearby, and crank things up all over again. 

Trad, however, is more than just sessions. For many, it’s a way of life. There are festivals, concerts, summer gatherings in the mountains that go all night long, artists who record and tour and make a living playing traditional music, and many, many folk music lovers who just want to listen, whether it’s to recorded music in the car or at home, to a session at the local pub, or to a concert in an old church or a huge amphitheater. There are also ceilidhs (pronounced KAY-lees), where people gather to perform the set-dances that the music was originally created for, with live music provided by a ceilidh band. In Ireland especially, ceilidhs are major social events, and many a romance through the centuries has begun with the locking of arms and the spinning of bodies on a warm summer evening. And to give credit where credit is due, there are many contemporary trad musicians who compose their own tunes, so that the tradition continues to grow and breathe new life. These tunes get shared from musician to musician or by way of recordings until they, too, become part of the trad canon.