Effervescent and engaging, Boston-based fiddler Hanneke Cassel’s fiddle music fuses influences from the Isle of Skye and Cape Breton with Americana grooves and musical innovations. She has performed and traveled across North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Hanneke’s music is a blend of the contemporary and traditional, described by the Boston Globe as “exuberant and rhythmic, somehow wild and innocent, delivered with captivating melodic clarity and an irresistible playfulness.”
The Hanneke Cassel Band features Keith Murphy on guitar/vocals and alternating string players Jenna Moynihan on 5-string fiddle/vocals and Tristan Clarridge on cello. Newfoundland-born guitarist Keith Murphy began absorbing his native musical languages – folksongs, ballads and dance music – from an early age. A proficient multi-instrumentalist, he has long applied considerable energy to the rhythmic side of music, becoming a valued band member and highly sought-after sideman on guitar, mandolin and foot percussion. Jenna Moynihan is regarded as one of the best in the new generation of fiddle players. Versatile and inventive, her fiddling style draws strongly from the Scottish tradition, but is in no way bound by it. An assistant professor at Berklee College of Music, Jenna performs as part of a duo with cutting edge harpist Mairi Chaimbeul and is the regular fiddler for the Seamus Egan Project.
Together, the Hanneke Cassel Band creates a cutting-edge acoustic sound that retains the integrity and spirit of the Scottish tradition.
Natalie is one of the most sought after cellists playing traditional music today. She and Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser have toured as a duo for over 15 years, wowing audiences at festivals and concerts worldwide with their unique sound. Their first album together, Fire & Grace, was awarded Best Album of the Year in the Scots Trad Music Awards 2004.
Natalie has also toured with Mark O’Connor as a member of his Appalachia Waltz Trio. She and O’Connor premiered his double concerto for violin and cello, ¨For The Heroes¨, with the Grand Rapids, East Texas, and San Diego Symphonies. As a studio musician, Natalie has been a guest artist on over 50 albums, including those of Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster, Irish greats Altan, Solas, and Liz Carroll, and Americana icon Dirk Powell.
A graduate of the Juilliard School, where she studied with cellist Fred Sherry, Natalie discovered the cello at age nine. In addition to having extensive classical music training, she is accomplished in a broad array of fiddle genres. Her music journey found purpose when she fell in love with Celtic music at the Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School at age 11. Inspired and encouraged by director Fraser, she began to investigate the cello’s potential for rhythmic accompaniment to fiddle tunes, and to this day, the two continue to resurrect and reinvent the cello’s historic role in Scottish music.
Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” dancer and musician Nic Gareiss has been hailed by the New York Times for his “dexterous melding of Irish and Appalachian dance” and called “the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald.
Gareiss draws from his deep love of sound and gesture from across the North Atlantic: from a capella percussive dance pieces, simultaneous song and flatfoot numbers following the legacy of fellow Midwestern singer and dancer John Hartford, and virtuosic improvisations interpreting traditional Irish and Scottish tunes, Gareiss offers warmth, finesse, and do-it-yourself folk inventiveness through the medium of dance as music.
Nic received the Michigan Heritage Award, his state’s highest distinction bestowed on traditional artists and a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination for traditional singer of the year. He has performed in sixteen countries with artists including The Chieftains, Bruce Molsky, Liz Carroll, The Gloaming, Alasdair Fraser & Natalie Haas, Bill Frisell, and Phil Wiggins at venues such as London’s Barbican Centre, the Munich Philharmonic, the Kennedy Center, and Steve Reich’s 75th birthday at the Cork Opera House. Always jubilant, often puckishly queer, Nic Gareiss is swiftly becoming recognized as a singular artistic presence in traditional dance and music.
Maeve Gilchrist has taken the Celtic harp to new levels of performance.
Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Maeve‘s innovative approach to her instrument stretches its harmonic limits and improvisational possibilities. She is as at home as a soloist with an internationally renowned orchestra as she is playing with a traditional Irish folk group or using electronic augmentation in a more contemporary, improvisatory setting.
Maeve was the first lever harpist to join the faculty of the iconic Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she taught for five years before switching to a visiting roots department artist this spring. Also an in-demand composer and arranger; this year, Maeve premiered her first concerto for lever harp and symphony orchestra and is currently working on a number of commissions including a string quartet for Irish harp and string quartet to be premiered in Scotlandin the spring of 2018.
Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki is a New Hampshire-based fiddler who specializes in Celtic music but often joins other performers and bands in genres ranging from folk to rock. He was awarded the title of “Master Artist” by the NH State Council On The Arts, and named “Best Fiddler 2016” by NH Magazine. He has toured nationally with various projects, written soundtracks for audiobooks and television, and appeared as a guest on over 60 albums. He currently performs about 200 shows each year, mostly with his own band, the Jordan TW Trio.
Traditional ballads have been a source of inspiration for Lindsay Straw since her childhood in Montana, but she truly grew into the art when she became immersed in Boston’s Irish and folk music scenes.
There she began to tie together the threads of the traditions she was most passionate about: English, Scottish, Irish and American songcraft. While in college, she founded a young Celtic trad band, The Ivy Leaf, which she draws from to fill out the music on her new second album, The Fairest Flower of Womankind. In addition to her own sensitive, agile accompaniment on guitar and bouzouki, Straw is joined by members of The Ivy Leaf, Daniel Accardi (fiddle), Armand Aromin (fiddle), and Benedict Gagliardi (concertina, harmonica), plus renowned Maine guitarist Owen Marshall (The Press Gang). Throughout, Straw’s tender vocals and careful arrangements draw out the inner depths of these old songs, telling tales of women from beyond the ages. A ballad needs commitment to be told, a belief in the importance of its story.
Bright Young Folk said of her 2015 debut solo album, “My Mind From Love Being Free has finally announced Lindsay Straw onto the folk scene in magnificent style”. A generous grant from Club Passim’s Iguana Music Fund and a successful Kickstarter campaign allowed her to record and release her second album, The Fairest Flower of Womankind, in April 2017.
Acadian powerhouse trio Vishtèn has been recognized worldwide as an ambassador of francophone culture. The Canadian band has dazzled audiences with its fiery blend of traditional French songs and original instrumentals that fuse Celtic and Acadian genres with a modern rock sensibilities and indie-folk influences.
With members hailing from Prince Edward Island’s Evangeline region and the most remote reaches of Québec – the windswept Magdalen Islands – twin sisters Emmanuelle and Pastelle LeBlanc join musical forces with Pascal Miousse to create a sophisticated sonic signature that combines tight vocal harmonies, layered foot percussion, and virtuoso acoustic instrumentation.Their trademark blend of fiddle, guitar, accordion, octave mandolin, whistles, piano, bodhrán, jaw harp and percussive dance result in a tour de force of traditional and contemporary music.
Performing and teaching extensively on three continents, the name Vishtèn is synonymous with Acadian music worldwide. The group has released five award-winning albums, the latest winner of the 2016 East Coast Music Award for Roots/Traditional Group Recording of the Year.
A Michigan native living in Boston, fiddler Rachel Reeds has immersed herself in the Cape Breton and Scottish musical traditions and has become a familiar face at sessions, camps, workshops, and house parties around New England.
Summer 2017 marks the release of her debut album, ‘Sparkjoy’. Produced by acclaimed fiddler, Hanneke Cassel, the album is rooted in the traditions of Cape Breton and Scotland and presents driving arrangements of original and traditional tunes. Joined on piano by Cape Breton fiddler and pianist Andrea Beaton, the album also features Hanneke Cassel (fiddle, piano), Natalie Haas (cello, Alasdair Fraser), Yann Falquet (guitar, Genticorum), and Katie McNally (fiddle, The Katie McNally Trio).
Rachel has played for dances at the Canadian American Club of Watertown and DEFFA, has performed at the Tamworth Lyceum, taught at the inaugural Cape Breton Weekend at Pinewoods Camp, and has been a session and workshop leader for the Boston Scottish Fiddle Club. She served on the organizing committee of BCMFest (Boston’s Celtic Music Festival) from 2011-2014, has been a frequent performer at BCMFest, and produced a Cape Breton feature for the 2017 festival’s Nightcap Concert. Rachel is the 2013 New England Regional Scottish Fiddle Champion.
Alden Robinson learned to play the fiddle as a child growing up in coastal Maine. His earliest lessons came from Tamora Goltz, Katie Newell, and from the teachers at Maine Fiddle Camp. In college, he studied Irish fiddle in Ireland at University College Cork, and in several pubs.
For the past five years or so he has toured and recorded with The Press Gang, an Irish trad band from Portland. He also loves playing for contra dances and performs to several dance bands, including “Riptide”, which features Owen Marshall and Glen Loper. When he’s not playing with these groups, you can often see him carrying his fiddle around the streets of Portland to play in the city’s busy music scene.
Owen has performed and recorded with many of traditional music’s top performers including Aoife Clancy, Liz Carroll, Darol Anger, John Doyle, Andrea Beaton, Jerry Holland, Ari & Mia Friedman, his own traditional Irish trio “The Press Gang” and the acoustic trio “Haas, Walsh and Marshall”. His music has appeared on NPR’s “Thistle and Shamrock,” BBC television, and the back of his left elbow has appeared on MTV. In addition to being a respected performer, Owen is in demand at music camps throughout New England and the U.S., where he shares his approach to accompanying traditional music.
