Fusion of Samba & Ceili

When 30 curious invitees gathered on a wild, stormy day in Coole Park with their drums, mandolins and even a berimbau in tow the atmosphere was charged ...and that was before the power went out.The whole of the local samba group had turned up as did a troupe of students and their teachers and several renowned Irish traditionalmusicians. Tim Howarth, a composer who produces music for film andTV and works as a sound engineer for the BBC, had travelled from Brighton to record the session.The drummers were competing with the explosive sound of rain outside to showcase their San Paolo brand of samba, while the uilleann pipes were blending with gale force 10 winds. The sheer energy of the sound was blowing everyone away.Then there was an electricity cut.“Coole Park had opened up specially for us that day, we were all set up to record and we had no idea when it would come back. Weremembered we had an adaptor that could plug into the car cigarette lighter and thought we could run the laptops off that but we hadno petrol. So I went off to fill up while everyone starting praying. By the time I came back the power had returned, but that’s how desperate we were to capture the atmosphere,” recalled Aleisha Shimizu.With one half of the town now said to be Brazilian, Gort’s cultural mix has long been recognised but seldom tapped into.A community record label is set to change that by celebrating the Irish and Brazilian influences that have made the South Galway town a unique facet of modern Ireland.