![]() ![]() We’re coming with the pure drive from the tradition that we grew up with. People don’t realize that piano is the main accompaniment for fiddle music in our tradition. “It’s pared down, so you hear everything, what we’re doing and the pianos. “It’s completely different than our own shows,” MacMaster says. They’re joined by two pianists, Mac Morin from MacMaster’s band, and Donnell’s sister Erin Leahy. ![]() Best known as part of the popular Ontario family folk group Leahy, he’s stepping out on his own for a tour with his wife for the first time. debut by Kiran Ahluwalia, the brilliant Indian-born, Toronto-based interpreter of Indo-Persian love songs known as ghazals.įor her Bay Area gigs, MacMaster is revealing a different side of her musical life, collaborating with her husband, Canadian fiddle star Donnell Leahy. She appears on two tracks on the eponymous 2005 U.S. Fiddle renegade Darol Anger produced MacMaster’s 2002 album “Blueprint” (Rounder) in Nashville, surrounding her with stylistically omnivorous string stars such as Béla Fleck, Sam Bush and Edgar Meyer. Like Ivers, she’s transcended her roots without severing them, collaborating with artists from across the musical spectrum. After collecting a shelf-full of East Coast Music Awards for her traditional albums, she started branching out, incorporating elements of jazz and Latin music. MacMaster first gained fame for her mastery of the Cape Breton sound, which hearkens back to the music of the Scottish Highlands and Outer Hebrides brought to Canada by immigrants fleeing land enclosures and famine in the 18th and 19th centuries. I was such a fan, I was in an Eileen phase for two years.” “I was 16 when I discovered Eileen, and she had this new sound I never heard before. “Before we started, the three or four women fiddlers I had heard of, half of them were dead and the others seemed very old. ![]() “There really weren’t other people besides my friends,” says MacMaster, 38, who performs Friday at Campbell’s Heritage Theatre as part of a series of Bay Area gigs. It was only years later that someone said this is very unusual.” “The fiddle was something I wanted to play as a kid. “The fact that there weren’t really other women out there when we started never entered into my psyche. “It was wonderful, because Joanie and I were childhood friends who went to grammar school together in the Bronx,” says Ivers, 45, who performs with Immigrant Soul on Wednesday at Villa Montalvo and next Thursday at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage. Ivers helped found the hugely popular group, which boosted her career and set the stage for Immigrant Soul. The County Limerick troubadour, banjo expert and ethnomusicologist had played an essential role in the Dublin folk revival scene in the late 1960s before relocating to the United States, where he was struck by the rising generation of female players.Īlways looking to stir the pot, Moloney created Cherish the Ladies in 1985, an all-female all-star band led by Joanie Madden, the first American to win the senior all-Ireland championship on the tin whistle. Irish-American fiddle star Eileen Ivers is one of the trailblazers, an incandescent player who’s created a turbocharged Afro-Celtic sound with her band Immigrant Soul.īut before she expanded the Irish tradition, she immersed herself in it, first making her mark with Mick Moloney’s Green Fields of America. But in less than a generation, a glorious revolution overturned the old conventions, and nowhere are the results more visible than in the far-flung fiddle community. For centuries, Celtic music traditions were passed down father to son, a male instrumental confederacy into which few women were welcomed. ![]()
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