Obscure tunes as such aren't the problem. In fact, if they are good tunes, and the person playing them knows them, and plays them long enough for other people to pick them up, that's what makes for a good night.

There's a balance in everything. But a session which doesn't include people of different levels of skill playing together is lacking something, in my view. And that requires a extra bit of skill in the best players. There are plenty of technically skilled players who have yet to acquire it.

And also sometimes to recognise that a different way of playing isn't necessarily a worse one. I remember in a bar in a little festival a few miles from here, and there was this old fella from Ireland who hadn't played for years, and he picked up a fiddle and gave us a few tunes, and he played them much slower, and ten times better than the man whose fiddle it was, who never appreciated that to be the case.