Snow Elsewhere

The members of Contratopia are no strangers to snow. Here in Decorah we have had a good foot or so of snow on the ground since early in December of this winter. We have not, however, had a significant snowfall for many weeks. We are also well equipped with snow shovels, plows, icemelt and the other necessities of winter life. It is a little unnerving to realize that we intend to be gathering in Takoma Park, MD in exactly one month when I see what is going on in the mid-Atlantic region today.

We are scheduled to play the Friday Night Dance at Glen Echo Park in four weeks but tonight's contra there has been canceled. The fate of this weekend's Sunday Waltz Time and evening contra dance is undecided. We are booked to play those dances in a month as well. Hopefully this will all be a fond memory by then and large crowds of happy dancers will flock to the park on the first weekend in March.

When we head east this time we will be bringing a new "product" with us. We now have digital download cards from CD Baby available for sale. For a modest price you will be able to purchase a wallet size card that will be printed with a code that will allow you to go to the CD Baby site and download an mp3 version of our first CD, Hands Four. It will be interesting to see how many people are interested in this way of buying our music.

Winter snows always lead to thoughts of summer. Summer, for many, is the wedding season. Contratopia rarely gets to play at a wedding as a group because of our hectic schedules and geographical challenges but all the members are active as wedding musicians from time to time. Pat and Margie O'Loughlin also serve the needs of brides and grooms with their Sandhill Photography business. They have recently launched the Sandhill Photography blog and I highly recommend subscribing to their posts.

Erik Sessions and I always play a handful of weddings every summer in Winneshiek County and we have now taken the sensible step of creating an Erik & John website (with the expert help of Karen Goodin) to hopefully simplify the process of finding us and figuring out what we can do. Give us a holler if you are planning on getting married in the Decorah area and are looking for some lovely and lively acoustic music for either the ceremony or the dinner/reception. We are also pleased to be associated with the new Welcome in Decorah website that is promoting Decorah as a great place to hold your wedding.

Apart from winter storms and summer weddings we also want to remind everyone that in two weeks, Friday, Feb. 19, Contratopia will meet in Northfield, MN to play at another wonderful Winter Stomp! contra dance, held downtown at the city armory.



We hope to see you there!

New Year, New Dates

As we bring 2009 to an end I am pleased to announce that several dates have been added to our calendar. Contratopia will be providing the music for dances at Tapestry Folkdance Center on January 9, 2010 (guided by the calling of our friend, David Kirchner), March 27 (mystery caller) and April 24 (with Robin Nelson). We will also be playing for the annual Northfield Winter Stomp! dance on Feb. 19 (again with Robin).

These new dances will combine with our March 4-7 return to Philadelphia, Glen Echo and Shepherdstown, WV to make for a fairly busy spring in Contratopia terms. I just checked our history page and April, 2008 was our last visit to our friends in the mid-Atlantic region. This may be our longest absence since the band was formed, so we're really looking forward to seeing familiar faces and halls.

If you are still unsure about what to do on New Year's Eve (48 hours from now) it's not too late to travel to the Twin Cities where Pat O'Loughlin and Friends will be playing for the dancers at the Tapestry party. Pat has a lot of talented friends so there's no telling what you might hear that night. Say hi from me if you make it to the dance.

Mid-term Review

Well, we've had a flurry of activity and now our season is going into the holiday break. We had another great time in Northfield on Oct. 23 (looking forward to returning there on Feb. 19, 2010) and a tremendous time last night at Tapestry. Beau Farmer called a great selection of dances and encouraged us to play whatever we wanted. It turns out that we had some good music in us last night and I believe we played a couple of tune sets as well as we've ever played them.

The night before last, Patrice, Pat and I were joined by wonder-fiddler Mary DuShane for a dance at a St. Paul grade school. Pat handled the calling chores (for a large crowd of excited youngsters and their sometimes reluctant parents) and Mary, Patrice and I had fun playing a variety of standard fiddle tunes. Following the gig Pat and I went out on the town briefly, first dining on some delicacies at a Lake St. White Castle and then crossing the street to hear some tunes at an Irish session in Merlin's Rest. Saturday morning we (Pat and I again) spent a couple of hours at a great old-time jam at a coffeehouse in St. Paul and then visited Hoffman Guitars. All in all a good weekend of music for me in the Twin Cities.

We are hoping to nail down some dance dates at Tapestry during the second half of our season (Jan.-April) and we have our east coast weekend dates all confirmed now. Also, Erik and I will be playing some with the Western Home String Band at our local Decorah contra dance next Sat., Nov. 21. Stop by if you're in town.

It All Comes Round Again

An eventful summer leads into another Contratopia season. We've spent a decade together as a band and we can honestly say (well, at least I can) that we are better friends than ever and we still get excited at the prospect of playing some music together.

Just a week ago we were all in the same dance hall celebrating the wedding of our beloved Patrice to the most excellent Alton Accola. Pat, Erik and I had the pleasure of playing a few tunes (with the stellar support of Sherry Ladig on keyboard) while Patrice and Al cut a rug with the wedding guests. Patrice nearly jumped in for a bit but she had a few other things on her mind.

In another month Patrice, Erik and I will be supplying the tunes for the dancers at the Midwest celebration of the wedding of our own Ted Hodapp and the legendary (because some of us had never met her until last week) Lynn Baumeister.

Pat O. will sadly be otherwise engaged that evening so the actual Contratopia machine won't get cranked up until Oct. 23rd in Northfield, MN for the annual Harvest Stomp! dance. After we kick out some jams (what's that next word?) in Northfield we will be ready for our seasonal debut in Minneapolis at the Tapestry Folkdance Center on Nov. 14.

Hopefully something fun will come up for us to do in January and February 2010 before we head back to the DC area in early March. We'll be playing in Glenside, PA on March 4 and Glen Echo on the 5th and 7th. On Saturday March 6th we'll return to Shepherdstown, WV for the third or fourth time. Finally there are rumors of a possible return to lovely Highlandville, IA in May for another Derby Day dance at the schoolhouse.

When's that new CD going to be ready you ask? Well I wouldn't start holding my breath if I were you but the topic does come up from time to time. We're all still in reasonably good physical condition and we've got two or three CDs worth of material waiting (if you count the dozens of waltzes that we've played over the last 6 or 7 years) but it's pretty hard to find the time to record stuff. Maybe someday?

In any event keep an eye out for us and come and say hello if you get the chance. You can usually find out where we'll be by checking our "dances" page on the Contratopia website. Hope to see you soon.

Loose Ends

"Oh my friends it's springtime again, buds are swelling on every limb"

- from Dillon Bustin's "Gardening"

Well, another Contratopia season has come to a satisfying conclusion. The farmers among us are farming and contra dance music takes a bit of a back seat for a while. We did close the season with a bang by playing a cool wedding dance at the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul which included an expanded band for the last couple of sets.

In April, shortly after the previous post, we had the great pleasure of being joined by our friend Ken Steffenson on fiddle (on very short notice) to play both a mostly-waltz afternoon session and the evening contra dance at Tapestry after Erik called in sick with "the plague". Ken did a great job and we really had fun playing with him.

Linda Breitag finished out the season with us by playing the always-fun Earth Day contra at Carleton College and the above-mentioned wedding. We really enjoyed getting to play with Linda more often this past season, and we look forward to more gigs with her in the future.

Even though it's only June it's not too soon to begin looking ahead to next season. In September and October we have two Major Wedding Events in the Contratopia family. More on these to come. Next March, thanks to Ted Hodapp's highly organized booking efforts, we will be making another visit to our favorite DC area dance spots: Glen Echo, Glenside and Shepherdstown. Beyond that we have some openings.

So, if you are looking for a really good contra dance band next winter or spring give us a holler and we might be able to work something out.

Why Ted Flies

Why indeed? If you'd really like to know, you can stop by Tapestry on Saturday night and ask him yourself.

It was just a little over a year ago that we last had the pleasure of touring with Ted Hodapp. You can check some of the blog posts from last April to get a sense of what we were up to then. Our last dance together would have been at the Glen Echo Sunday night contra but I suspect we ended the evening by watching a couple of episodes of Shaun the Sheep at Ted's place afterwards.

In any event we're all looking forward to meeting up with Ted again on Saturday and we can promise that a good time will be had by all. We are also playing a mostly waltz dance from 3-5 in the afternoon that should be a lovely way to spend part of an almost-spring afternoon.

This will be our last outing of the season with Erik on fiddle but we will also be playing the following Friday at Carleton College in Northfield with Linda Breitag as part of their Earth Day celebration.


Finally, all of you mandolin players are invited to stop by during any of these dances and take a look at my new Pomeroy flattop mandolin. Don Paine has created a beautiful instrument at an extremely reasonable price and I'm very happy to be one of the first owners of this new model. Here's a link to short recording of me playing the new instrument: (http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=40787&d=1238859035)

Hope to see you soon.

New Additions

Contratopia has added a couple of additional dances to its current season thanks to our good friend, fiddler Linda Breitag. Linda allowed a "Pat O'Loughlin and friends" gig at Tapestry last Saturday (March 21) to become a Contratopia dance by subbing for Erik Sessions (who was busy with more important matters, see below). She is also going to join us at Carleton College on April 24 as part of their Earth Day celebration and at a private function in May. We are always delighted to have Linda join us and last week's dance was an especially good one. You can ask caller Beau Farmer to confirm that if you want. He'll tell you all about it.

Another addition to the larger Contratopia world has been the publication of my new tunebook "31 Waltzes" (http://www.contratopia.com/mtopia/31waltzes.htm). I'm pleased with how the collection turned out and, if you enjoy playing waltzes, I think there are lots of tunes you might find interesting. You can check out the website if you are curious and order using Paypal, or you can email me.

The most important addition to the Contratopia family, however, is Nina Stella Sessions, Erik and Sara's new baby girl! Born earlier this month, Nina joins her sisters Meg and Mairi as future fiddlers of Contratopia Land and organic farmers in training.

Just about a year ago at this time the band was out East having a great time. Just tonight, from my hotel room here in New Harmony, Indiana, I stumbled across a Flickrstream of photos from the dance we played on April 5, 2008 in Shepherdstown, WV. Here's the link:
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/akaelainesk/sets/72157611792636112/)
Many thanks to akaelainesk for sharing these excellent photos!

Thanks to the wonder of Ted Hodapp we have just recently arranged to return to Shepherdstown during the first weekend of April next year, 2010. We always love playing in that hall and the cool people who dance there. Something to look forward to....

Finally, don't forget that we'll be reuniting with Ted on April 18th at Tapestry for what promises to be a really fun time. Hope to see you there!