CRA WEBSITE SPOTLIGHT

Mike Simpson is a busy, busy man. In addition to maintaining a tune archive and lending a hand as the Georgia calendar contact for CRA, he now coordinates the most comprehensive website for Irish session fans on the World Wide Web. We recently asked Mike about his interest in Irish traditional music and about this new website, The Sessioneer. The Sessioneer has only been out for a couple of months and already it's drawing thousands of hits from Irish traditional fans from around the globe.

Mike was first introduced to the dance music of Ireland ten years ago while studying architecture at Georgia Tech. A roommate of his played Green Linnet Celtic compilations from time to time: "I thought it sounded otherworldly, like something from a medieval soundtrack. I didn't have a clue that this was a living, flourishing tradition."

One day a student from Newfoundland dropped by while Mike was listening to one of these CDs and, as fate would have it, this fellow was a tin whistler. He loaned Mike one of his tin whistles and proceeded to teach him some of the basic techniques. It was not long before Mike was bitten by what sessioneers have come to call the "ceol bug"- an infection that leads to a lifelong obsession with Irish dance music:

I obtained a couple more whistles, and some books and tapes, and began learning. I drove lots of people crazy all over the Tech campus practicing wherever I could....to the point where it was interfering with my studies.

From tin whistle, Mike branched out into bodhran and eventually fiddle and flute. Nowadays he's a mainstay at Fado's Irish Pub where he leads one of the local seisiuns.

In 1996, Mike was introduced to web page making by a member of his band, The New Road. In addition to authoring a web site for the band, he set up an on-line tin whistle tutorial. Response was formidable:

I wasn't prepared for the amount of feedback I was getting....apparently there were a lot of people who (like me) didn't have ready access to a teacher. I was getting lots of emails from people all over the world, and eventually the site was getting so much traffic that my ISP was shutting it down towards the end of every month because I was exceeding my bandwidth allocation.

Around this time, Mike began work as an Internet consultant. This allowed him opportunities to create more innovative web designs. As a result, The Sessioneer was born. One of the unique features of Sessioneer is that the site is designed to maximize the ability of browsing Irish music fans to contribute directly to its formation. As Simpson puts it:

I was aiming for a much more participatory site... I wanted it to be a place where musicians from all over could contribute their talents (sort of like the difference between a concert and a session if you think about it).

At Sessioneer, Mike has created a cyberspace where browsers can:

• Post tunes in various formats.
• Post information about music sessions in their area.
• Post reviews of instruments, artists & recordings, and retailers.
• Contribute comments to the tin whistle tutorial.
• Browse and search listings of contact information for other users of the site.
• Chat live with other visitors to the site.
• Browse and search for specific tunes (the site even allows you to do a "sounds-like" search by entering a piece of a tune in ABC format).
• Assign personalized fonts and colors.

Since the website is still in the early stages, we asked Mike about how Sessioneer might evolve in the future. Some of the features he would like to add include:

• A threaded discussion board application.
• An online "bulletin board" where people can post classified ads, links to their sites, etc., categorized in a Yahoo-style tree.
• The ability to sort views in ascending or descending order.
• A redesigned home page with more information and cool stuff on it.
• The ability for users to be notified via email when someone posts a tune / review / session.
• More sophisticated chat functions.
• I want to allow a moderated chat where we can have online "master classes" and be able to control the volume of questions that the teacher gets.
• A full collaborative discussion / whiteboard application, a la NetMeeting.
• Support for "themes", collections of fonts/colors choose based on the operating system of the browser.
• Better performance, by moving to a different database platform.
• An online function for converting ABC tunes to gif and/or midi format.
• Ideally, a complete online ABC editing application which can save tunes in ABC, GIF, and MIDI formats.
• A "biography" section profiling famous players, perhaps with interviews, etc.

In his webmastering experience, Mike has had the opportunity to take in session scenes from all over the globe. No matter which Four Corners of the word, the calling of the sessioneer remains the same, a sublime passion that defies any simple definition:

Each player plays for deeply personal reasons, yet two musicians from opposite ends of the earth can sit down in a session and, without saying a word, play a tune together. To me a really good session brings people together in ways that can't be expressed in words; doing the web site is one way I pursue that goal and further it. I feel very lucky to be able to help beginning session players discover the kind of experience that draws me into the pub every Monday night.

CRA wishes Mike the best of luck with Sessioneer. We heartily encourage fans and players of the tradition to check out the site and it many offerings.