LAVALLETTE — Jennifer Mylod & Mylodic Isle, a family band consisting of Jennifer and Philip Mylod Sr., son Philip Jr. and family friend Bob Schmidt, visited Lavallette’s Upper Shores Branch Library on Wednesday night, presenting a program of live Celtic music played on authentic Irish instruments.
Bandleader Jennifer Mylod, who sings and plays the fiddle among other instruments, explained her philosophy for performing and told The Ocean Star that her family is continuously engaged in music throughout the day.
“I try to make it interesting; nothing bugs me more than when you see a band, and you just can’t understand what they’re singing,” Mylod said. “There’s music in the house constantly. (My son) will start playing guitar in the kitchen, then I’ll start fiddling, Phil will pick up a whistle, or a drum.”
Philip Sr. credits Jennifer with getting him into performing music after he met her.
“Jennifer is the musical one in the family — she’s a singer-songwriter,” he said. “I never started playing music until I was 35. After I was married to her, I had to join.”
Family friend Bob Schmidt sings and plays the mandolin as well as the Irish bouzouki, both eight-stringed lute-like instruments.
“I’ve been playing in the band since Philip Jr. was only a few feet high,” Schmidt said of his connection to the family band.
“I started in the band four-and-a-half years ago,” said Philip Jr., 24. “We get to practice all the time; it’s great, you know? I can walk downstairs out of bed and start playing, so we have a lot of time to fine-tune…I grew up listening to Irish music, and then during COVID, I really started getting into the guitar.”
“Once I started that, my parents said, ‘You could make money from this, you can play with us,’ and I said, ‘Alright, I already know all the songs,’” he said. “So, I started playing with them and from there it just blew up; I started on the standard tuning for guitar, but I’ve since gone over to the old Irish tuning.”
Over the course of the program, Mylodic Isle performed both traditional and more modern Irish tunes, demonstrating plenty of traditional Irish instruments along the way, including the fiddle, pennywhistle, bodhrán (frame drum), Irish bouzouki, mandolin and the uilleann pipes, a type of Irish bagpipe played by squeezing air through a bellows into the pipes with one’s elbow.
“The uilleann pipes play two octaves, whereas the Highland pipes (traditional Scottish bagpipes) only play one,” he said.
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