The Dublin Irish Festival Brings Ukers from 9 States Together for a Memorable Collaboration

BY JIM D’VILLE |  PHOTOS BY ROBB McCORMICK | FROM THE WINTER 2025 ISSUE OF UKULELE

The 32 ukulele players had traveled from nine states to gather at a Dublin, Ohio, hotel for a three-song rehearsal. They had never before performed together as a group, but in a little over 24 hours, on August 1, they would be sharing a stage at the Dublin Irish Festival with the internationally touring Irish band Gadan.

Describing the members of Gadan sounds like the beginning of a joke—an Irishman, an American, and three Italians walk into a barre chord. They play high-
energy string music that blends Irish traditional and bluegrass styles with an Italian flair, using banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass, fiddle, and vocals. But not a single ukulele.

Gadan banjoist Enda Scahill is no stranger to unusual collaborations. “I had a band called We Banjo 3, which toured worldwide for ten years. We would often invite unique ensembles to play with us,” he says. “Once we had a 50-piece choir, another time a horn section, bagpipers, and once a full orchestra onstage in front of 20,000 at the Milwaukee Irish Festival. It’s a great community builder when you get local people involved, (and) I thought a couple of our new songs would really suit ukuleles.”

So he reached out to Jon Levy, head of Columbus’ Buckeye Ukulele Society, who, in turn, tapped Amber Rozel of Steel City Ukuleles in Pittsburgh to be the music director for the project. Rozel, a multi-instrumentalist music educator, arranged the harmony vocal parts and tabbed out the picking arrangements. “We had about 15 hours of rehearsal, primarily online,” she says. “It helped that I sent out a multi-track video with links to isolated vocal and picking parts for people to practice with.”

The practice paid off. “I was blown away by how much heart this group put into their performances. Memorization helped their energy, personality, and heart shine through every time we performed,” says Rozel. “It was genuinely uplifting to watch everyone performing at the absolute best of their ability and enjoying every moment.”

Levy adds his take on the weekend: “This was truly a fantastic experience. Amber prepared us so well, encouraging us to listen to our bandmates and be ready
to adjust in real time, which helped me to connect with them and the audience and feel the sheer joy of the moment. Each performance was better than the previous as we got more comfortable.”

Susanne Kibler-Hacker of Blanchester, Ohio, was one of the uke players onstage at the festival. “There isn’t an adjective in the dictionary expansive enough to describe this experience,” she says. “The musical energy from a stage full of musicians and 1,500 audience members singing along and clapping in time was beyond all superlatives. In my ideal world, everybody makes music. This is as close as I have ever come to living that ideal.”

Staying in the same hotel and sharing meals over the three days was a crucial element for bringing this disparate group of people together. And it didn’t hurt that Levy and Rozel provided matching green Gadan T-shirts for each player to wear during the performance.

“The crowd is there to be entertained,” says Scahill. “They want to see a spectacle. And they want to feel a connection with the band. So when we said we had a local ukulele society joining us and all these smiling, happy people joined us onstage, the audience knew it was something unique and they were never going to see it again.”