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.
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.
Evan Murphy is a guitarist and vocalist from Boston, MA. He is the guitarist and lead singer of the bluegrass band Mile Twelve. Evan was born and raised in Boston, MA. He received his degree in Theater and Music from Boston College. In college Evan was attracted to the rich Folk and Bluegrass scene of the Boston area. He now performs regularly as a solo artist and as a member of Mile Twelve.
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.
Clara Stickney and Jamie Oshima are Joy Compass, a Maine-based duo known for their expressive and groovy music for contra dancing. Surrounded by traditional music all of his life, Jamie delights dancers with his genre-blending and dynamic use of rhythm instruments (guitar, piano, mandolin, and foot percussion). Drawing from her classical background and love of traditional tunes, Clara Stickney provides melody lines both playful and compelling on the fiddle and occasionally on the harp. Together they co-create a sound that dancers respond to with joy.
Danse Cafe performs traditional dance music from Brittany and the Auvergne for listening and dancing. The group came together at workshops, camps, performances, and through a common love of the beautiful, captivating french and breton traditional dance music. They play an variety of instruments, some indigenous to France and Brittany, some not – fiddle, guitar, banjo, accordion, clarinet, mandolin, hurdy gurdy, and various percussive and rhythmic accents. Every year, the band hosts FESTIBAL, a French and Breton music dance workshop and party, in western Massachusetts. Danse Cafe is:
Cynthia Thomas – fiddle
Doug Feeney – guitar, banjo
Peter Stolley – accordion
Thomas Gajewski – clarinet, mandolin
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.
