Irish Fest offers traditional Irish music, dancing and food, but there are also innovative bands hailing from all around the world. This year's Celtic World Showcase features some of them.
The young, bilingual trio Ten Strings and a Goat Skin originated in Prince Edward Island in Canada's eastern provinces. The traditional music scene there sips from a rich musical soup that draws on Scots, Irish, English, and French influences. Ten Strings takes it even further.
Fiddler Rowan Gallant says of combining elements of traditional music and modern music: "it's breathing new life into these things." He says the band is aware of technological advancements that sometimes distract from tradition, but that it's possible to find a symbiosis of the two.
"You need the people who are preserving, but you also need the people who are progressing just as much. It's kind of a yin and yang kinda thing." adds Caleb Gallant, the band's percussionist.
The band plays Irish Fest all weekend, and played two songs in the Lake Effect studio: Auprès du Poêle, which means ‘around the woodstove’ and a set called Igen, which is Danish for 'again.'
