David, Denise & Willy

An Irish Band

A newly formed band, playing together since St. Patrick’s Day of this year, this trio brings a Celtic tone to the Rendezvous.

David Agee is a veteran of Irish music since 1980, after joining Talisman, the only Irish band in KC at that time. In 1982 he was a founding member of Scartaglen and has played Irish music off and on in other groups. In more recent years, Dave recorded a CD with his band, Blackthorne. David is multi-instrumentalist, playing fiddle, mandolin, tenor banjo, guitar, bones and bodran–and has been known to sing a song or two.

Willy Peterson began his music career playing classic rhythm guitar he learned from Dave Cook’s percussive adaptation of Peter Paul and Mary. While playing for church group sing-alongs, he heard Talisman and discovered the bodhran, played by celtic musicologist Dave Brown. Soon he found himself immersed in the world of Kansas City’s Celtic Rennaisance of the mid 80’s and after playing a brief period with Trinity, formed a trio with Frank Shopen and Randy Brown, The Boys of the Prairie, entertaining fans at the Red Lyon and elsewhere throughout the nineties. With the breakup of the band and his move to Kansas City in 2003, he found himself without a musical outlet and began hitting the rock and blues scene to explore a world of music he had neglected for much of his life. It wasn’t long before he began adapting his playing to the western styles of blues, rock and country and over the last year has been playing with local blues/rock jammers around town, learning the ropes and bridging the gap of traditional Celtic and the Western mainstream styles. He’s now back in the Celtic loop, enjoying the thrill of traditional tunes once again with Nine Mile Burn and looking forward to the development of new styles, venues and fans for the bodhran and traditional Celtic music.

Denise Reid-Shoaff fell in love with Irish music when in 1980 when she saw De Dannan at the Walnut Valley Music Festival in 1981 and has been a “celtoid” since. Her boyfriend gave her a broken mandolin that year, along with a broken heart, so her love rebounded to music. She met an elderly instrument maker who placed a new willow top on that mandolin and she played it constantly. Denise lived in California for 10 years, played with the folk club in San Francisco, and studied music with Irene, a “mandolin internationalist” who taught her tunes from all over the world. You’ll hear some of these unusual tunes in the repertoire of Nine Mile Burn. Denise began taking lessons from Roger Landes in 1991, coveting his Sobel Cittern/bouzouki until she bought it from him. In 1993 she and Gordon co-founded the Mando-Cherubians, the forerunner of Nine Mile Burn.