Album Notes

Cobblestone, one of Portland's longest-running traditional Celtic bands, evokes images of rain-soaked Irish streets with horse-drawn carriages. At least that's what is on the cover of their CD "Unpaved Celtic", minus the horse-drawn carriage. The ban's unique and sometimes haunting sound derives from the combination of traditional and contemporary instruments blended together around the tunes and songs from the British Isles.
The band, founded somewhere around 1983, features hammered dulcimer played by Vicki Clark, and Northumbrian smallpipes, whistles and (in dire emergencies) the Highland pipes played by Gail Gibbard, driving rythms on guitar and banjos by Doug Hamar, and last but not least, multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hyman adds fiddle, mandolin and guitar to the mix. All in all, this particular selection of instrumentation is ideally suited for contemporary and traditional arrangements of Celtic music, each instrument enhancing the others.
"Celtic Christmas" is Cobbleston's third album and mixes a variety of Irish, Scottish, and Northumbrian tunes with traditional Christmas carols. The band has played for Christmas dances and parties for years, and this album is our answer to friends asking for a way to have us with them every year. Many Christmas albums that claim to be celtic are quite limited, so we included dance tunes that we usually play with those carols. No vocals in this one.