// JOHN RYAN

Folklorist and multifaceted musician John Ryan is at the forefront of the strongest generation of Irish traditional artists in the Genesee Valley in more than half a century, since the post-war immigration boom brought musicians and dancers from every corner of Ireland to labor, build families, and pass on their art here in the Rochester area. For more than twenty of his thirty-five years, he has taken up the instruments and tunes of this Golden Generation — button accordion, concertina, whistle, and bodhrán — and brought them into the 21st Century, providing his community with more opportunities to hear and play this music than ever before. As a instigator and leader of jam sessions in the region, as a performer and presenter on all manner of stages, and most recently as the founder of the Hochstein School of Music’s first ever Irish music curriculum, his ambition is to convince all of WNY of both the approachability and the sublimity of this deceptively simple discipline. John Ryan lives in the North Winton Village with his fiancée, (journalist Rebecca Rafferty) and their children, Aoife and Diarmuid. In addition to his career in music, his studies in the History Department at SUNY Brockport have earned him multiple recognitions, among them a Friends of Drake Library award for his work on Al Smith, New York’s greatest governor and the first Irish Catholic candidate for president.

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