Saturday, August 25, 7 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park 84.Īrt accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Andrew MacNaughton. MacMaster’s current tour is technically in support of In My Hands, but she tends to cover a lot of ground in her performances though the show will doubtless emphasize her recent crossover-friendly material, there should also be a fair amount of traditional music, and even a bit of step dancing. On the goosebump-inducing title tune, based on the traditional Irish reel “The Drunken Landlady,” she coos breathily over a double-tracked recording of her own narration, while her fiddle weaves a bright filigree above a panoramic programmed soundscape. “Blue Bonnets Over the Border” features throbbing electric bass and swirling strings–and a pounding drum program that, ironically enough, suggests a bodhran. It intersperses pristine folk recitals with dense, contemporary-sounding pieces that juxtapose her ageless fiddle with rock percussion, electric guitar, or undulating layers of synthesizer.
The brilliant young fiddler from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia not only plays with the prodigious verve synonymous with the Cape Breton fiddle style, she performs some remarkably intricate step dances as she plays, a kind of one-person Riverdance which can expand into a full-on kickathon when.
Her discography (on Rounder in the States) includes traditional material like 1997’s Fit as a Fiddle and My Roots Are Showing–recorded in ’98 but unreleased here until last year–but she’s also pushed the envelope with albums like In My Hands, recorded in ’99 and still her most recent work. Natalie MacMaster has to be seen as well as heard. Natalie MacMaster, niece of legendary Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster, took up her instrument at age nine, and by her teens she was a leading practitioner of the style. Natalie will be performing in Scotland at the Aberdeen Music Hall on October 5, 2013. Performances are traditionally given solo or in a small group, with the fiddler’s own feet providing percussion.
The Cape Breton style evolved at community functions like parties and weddings, and the island’s fiddlers still prefer a driving, danceable, strongly rhythmic approach–stuttering grace notes, punchy double-stops, and piercing, unorthodox tunings–over the showstopping high-velocity displays currently popular among Celtic folk revivalists. The fiddle music of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island gets its character from the Scottish immigrants who settled the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries–in fact, many traditions that have all but disappeared in Scotland are still vital there.
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