Since Mike Rafferty has so many fans among current and aspiring flute players, I thought it would interest C&F fluters. Therefore I got permission to cross post this information from the Mudcat Forum.
Enjoy!
Subject: Mike Rafferty 80th birthday
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko - PM
Date: 26 Sep 06 - 01:10 PM
Mike Rafferty, who graces us with his East Galway style of flute playing and has been one of the leading forces in the Irish trad scene here in the U.S., will turn 80 years old on Wednesday September 27.
Mike came to the U.S. in 1949 and has appeared in concerts, festivals and ceili’s throughout the country. In 1976 he was one of the musicians chosen for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife. He went on to tour with Green Fields of America and he has taught the flute to many students over the years. His daughter Mary played the accordian with Cherish the Ladies for a number of years, and now she performs with her husband Donal Clancy (son of Liam Clancy) as well as her father.
Mike is an icon in these parts. The local chapter of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann has been named in his honor.
If you have a chance, drop Mike a birthday greeting through his daughter Mary - mraffie@aol.com and visit their website at www.raffertymusic.com.
This Friday I will devote most of the program to Mike and his music. The Session can be heard at noon ET on WFDU-FM at 89.1 in the NYC area or you can listen online at www.wfdu.fm .
As well as in my house. Thanks for the heads-up. He is certainly one of the fluters who inspires me the most – the fact that he really blossomed as a player later in life gives me some hope.
Thanks for posting this, Kate. Mike taught our flute class at Augusta this summer. What a great experience that was! And what a great teacher. In four and a half days, he gave us 31 tunes. He’s a great man and an awesome player, and a pretty good story teller too. I hope that I can go back next year and if so, hopefully he’ll be back, too.
I think that the most amazing thing was getting to watch and hear him at the sessions. He’d sit there, just playing, and then when one set ended, he’d look around for a couple of minutes, maybe say a word to someone, and off he’d go again. It was like the tunes were just coming out of his flute all by themselves… no effort in it at all. Kind of brings new meaning to the phrase, “I want to be like Mike.”
I tried tuning in, but must have got the timing wrong. Heard some good blues instead, just before my classes started.
It was a great thing this summer to have all that very concentrated time with Mike just working on tunes at Augusta. We were lucky, weren’t we, Dow? Dow was sitting just to Mike’s right in class, so he got all the closeup views of what he was doing with his fingers.
One of the things I envy about Mike Rafferty’s sense of the music is that it’s all aural. He knows a tune in a different way than I ever can, because he has a knowledge of it that involves neither a visual picture nor even a mental image of what intervals are in it, or what key it’s in. He often switched octaves on me, just when I thought I had the tune’s contours down. For me it was a major shift, for him probably just another variation. I love the pure “flutiness” of his music in that way.
Seeing that it was all commercial recordings, I retract my request for a recording. Even though I’m curious to hear what was said between the tracks.
I’m tickled pink to see that he played a Frank Maher track. He’s one of my heroes. And Mike Rafferty and Frank represent about half of my musical adventures this summer.
