It’s knowing that’s someone else you can bounce something off and you know how they think and they’re going to give you the real answer and that is my confidence,” MacMaster says. “I have my support right here and I need that now. “And to have that commitment to a project or to a task is so important and so needed.” “Natalie brings a passion, like an unrelenting passion to everything she does,” Leahy says. They also agree on how much they love working together. “We tend to trust each other’s opinion and we come from different angles, but we kind of agree most of the time on things,” says Leahy. “And then there’s mom and dad’s favourite two tracks, and of course they’re traditional Cape Breton tunes played by their daughter,” the couple joked.īut does the married couple bump heads while working together? “I should mention Elmer Ferrer too, our co-producer, who’s from Cuba, he had an incredible influence on this sound as well,” adds MacMaster. Our oldest daughter is our keyboard player now and she’s right into Latin and so that has crept into our music,” Leahy says. The pair stretched the boundaries of Celtic-folk music on “Canvas” and experimented with global sounds. “We didn’t want to feel any restrictions,” says MacMaster. “We don’t have any preconceived ideas, any direction, we just have an open canvas … the music will decide what this is going to be,” says Leahy. They say their record - “Canvas” - started from scratch. It's a busy life for the couple, who lives on a working farm in Ontario, along with homeschooling their kids and extracurricular activities.īut the couple found time to create a new album together during the pandemic. “(The) babies aren’t very babyish anymore … our oldest is 17,” says MacMaster. They’ve now been married for 20 years and are raising their seven - also very musical - children together. “So I drove to Nova Scotia to meet the girl who played the music.” I’d heard Natalie’s music on a cassette tape my sister had,” Leahy told CTV Atlantic’s Katie Kelly. “It was love at first fiddle even before I met Natalie. The two fiddlers first played together on their first date, back in 1991. 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.Cape Breton musician Natalie MacMaster and her husband Donnell Leahy have released a new album that pushes the boundaries of Celtic music. 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. 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. Find concert tickets for Natalie MacMaster upcoming 2023 shows. 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. 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. Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.

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