What's Going On

The Hotel Mar Alto in Cascais has closed for renovation, and on September 17th, 2015 The Esplanade Five played its terrace for the last time, eight summers after the first. "Last Night on the Terrace", the song we wrote that afternoon, is now out as a single. You can play a piano sketch of it on the band page.

Wednesdays at Casa da Lua in Alfama carry on all winter, from half past nine. The room holds forty people and the piano holds about sixty keys that work, so come early and forgive the rest.

In May 2015 we took the band on a small tour of Portugal and Spain: Porto, Coimbra, Evora and two nights in Seville, where the audience clapped along in a rhythm we had never heard before and have been trying to learn ever since. Thank you to every promoter who found us a piano and every landlady who found us a bed.

Since October 2014 I have been teaching a Saturday piano workshop for teenagers at a community music school in Lisbon. Twelve students, three of them already writing songs better than mine at their age. Their end-of-year concert is in June.

In December 2014 the Bedford Harbour Children's Choir sang the songs of Twelve Small Voices again, with a new generation of twelve small voices, and invited me home to Halifax to play the piano. Half of the first choir came to listen, now taller than me.

Dear Amelia. The new album came out on March 22nd, 2013, with a release concert in a converted tram depot in Lisbon. Thank you to the neighbours from Alfama who came in their slippers.

Halifax. In August 2013 I played the harbour stage at a folk festival in Nova Scotia with Callum MacPhee on fiddle, twenty years after we first played together at school.

Radio. Rosa Mendonca invited the band to play live on her late-night jazz programme in November 2013. We played six songs and talked about the Amelia letters for half an hour. New pictures are in the photo gallery.