What has happened in some places in Scotland is that the session scene was given a big boost in the 1980s and 1990s by adult-education groups who did a great job of packaging a repertoire for their students to learn. But they did a godawful job of keeping it open to incomers. So the session scene has been dominated by a cohort now near retirement age who've been playing the same stuff for 20 years. Younger performers of Scottish music mostly ignore this scene and do the struggling-professional thing. The result is there isn't really a good way to do Scottish music in public without being either professional or ossified. So I've tended to go for other genres in the last few years, where the performers are mostly a lot younger and continually taking on new stuff. It's sad because there's a vast amount of great neglected Scottish material I'd have liked to play, but there isn't any easy way to get it into sessions. LynnH's picture of the Irish scene seems pretty accurate, one reason why I don't go near it.
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