Artist Category: Trad | Page 7

Talisk

Ground-breaking, chart-topping, genre-bending, globetrotting, instantly enthralling… it’s little wonder that Talisk rank highly amongst the most in-demand folk-based groups to emerge from Scotland in the last decade and more.

Mohsen Amini (BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ Musician of the Year 2018), Graeme Armstrong and Benedict Morris (BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2019) fuse concertina, guitar and fiddle to produce a truly innovative, multi-layered signature that has captivated audiences around the globe. At its core, three seemingly acoustic instruments – but in the hands of three master craftsmen; one unmistakable, bold sound and a captivating live show.

Alongside extensive touring, Talisk have stacked up major awards for their explosively energetic, artfully woven sound – including Folk Band of the Year at the BBC Alba Scots Trad Music Awards, a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award, and the Belhaven Bursary for Innovation. Appearances at leading festivals across multiple continents have amassed a die-hard following – including closing out Saturday night’s main stage at the 2019 Cambridge Folk Festival, Denmark’s Tønder Festival, the Rainforest World Music Festival in Malaysian Borneo, WOMADs UK, Chile and Las Palmas, Edmonton Folk Festival, Milwaukee Irish Festival, three back-to-back years at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and six appearances at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections.

Following their critically acclaimed debut, Abyss, Talisk’s sophomore album, Beyond, quickly amassed five star reviews and rose to No.1 in the iTunes world music charts upon its late 2018 release. With streaming figures into multiple millions, and new music on the horizon in 2022, audiences worldwide are hotly anticipating the latest chapter from a group lauded by leading world music magazine Songlines as: “incredibly infectious and endearing… fresh, invigorating, accomplished.

SeaSmoke

Songs from the American traditions, dronally reimagined by this group of freewheeling improvisers including but not limted to: Warren Senders, Junko Fujiwara, Vijaya Sundaram and lloyd Thayer.

Warren Senders’ long experience as a Hindustani vocalist transforms the group’s renditions of American song material into entirely new experiences.

Cellist Junko Fujiwara has been performing and advocating innovations in contemporary and improvised music while teaching and maintaining Western classical and jazz traditions over a span of nearly thirty years.

Vijaya Sundaram is a musician and composer with decades of experience as a singer, sitarist, guitarist and songwriter. As a voice actor her poetry readings have been featured on Public Radio International. A former public school teacher and current college professor, she is currently active in Boston-area theatrical and musical performances, including the Christmas Revels,Apollinaire Theater and Bridge Repertory Company.

Lloyd Thayer is an International Noise Merchant who plays Dobro, but will also attempt anything with strings on it. He is also a hermetic underground legend in the place where such things are archived.

Featuring originals and songs by Pete Seeger, Ornette Coleman, Harold Arlen, Bob Dylan, Hoagy Carmichael, and others.

Lone Piñon

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared–thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.

Fernando Brandão Quartet

Flutist, composer, author and educator Fernando Brandão has performed extensively as a bandleader, sideman, chamber musician and as a soloist with several ensembles and prominent orchestras both in his native Brazil and the US.

Using concert, alto, bass flutes and pífanos, Fernando performs across an eclectic repertoire of traditional and contemporary choros, sambas, bossas, frevos, ijexás, baiões, maracatus and other styles, allying jazz improvisations to an authentic Brazilian sound. He leads his own ensemble with formations that varies from Trio to Nonet, the bands Alma (contemporary South American music) and Bohemia Carioca (gafieira), and he is an active member of the groups Pablo Ablanedo Octet and Trio Choro Brasil.

He has produced and co-produced 5 CDs, and his latest, Sem Tradução (Without Translation) features nine original songs with lyrics by carioca poet Pedro Lago, by Fernando Brandão, Rosangela Santiago and Robson Santiago, both from Bahia. It also features Marcella Camargo as the lead singer and 14 prominent musicians from the Boston area. His vocal and instrumental compositions are centered mostly around Brazilian styles, and feature traditional and contemporary language and arrangements. His compositions have been recorded by Choro das Três, guitarist Almir Cortes and New World Guitar Trio.

The Aya & Tano Collective

Led by Aya Safiya and Tano Brock, The Aya & Tano Collective is a Boston based eclectic musical project that plays traditional Greek, Turkish, and Albanian music.

Both Aya and Tano grew up in the SF Bay Area where they were raised in a thriving community of Balkan, Greek, and Turkish musicians. In 2015, they embarked on a journey to Eastern and Southern Europe in search of music. With the songs they collected throughout their travels, they began to build a repertoire and perform regularly. Since moving to Boston, they have connected with Panagiotis Aivazidis, a qanun player from Serres, Greece, Cypriot bassist Manos Stratis, and Palestinian percussionist Alber Baseel. Together they play music from various regions of Greece with an electrifying chemistry.

Rakish

Rooted in tradition with an ear toward the future, contemporary folk duo Rakish embodies earnest musical exploration and demonstrates an infectious playfulness on stage. In their sound together, it is evident the two friends share an unbridled love for the traditional sounds of Celtic and American music, and the tight ensemble of a group with years of collaboration under their belt. Strings Magazine says: “Explorative and versatile, the duo draws evident inspiration from not just the deep and wide history of Scottish and Irish Celtic composition, but also the precision-focused structures of classical chamber music and a whole array of improvisational styles.”

Known for her toneful and award-winning fiddle playing in the Celtic music world, Maura Shawn Scanlin grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Maura is a 2-time U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion and a winner of the Glenfiddich Fiddle Competition in Scotland. Her clawhammer banjo playing and songwriting, also featured in the duo, hold the regional music of her homeland close. Maura finds her niche combining influences from a widespread musical journey with the sounds she grew up around.

Steeped in the Irish music communities of Washington D.C. and Baltimore, MD where he was raised, acclaimed guitarist Conor Hearn developed a keen interest in literary theory and poetry, a unique well of material from which he draws unending musical inspiration. His settings of modernist poems, like James Joyce’s Chamber Music, epitomize the duo’s approach: the dexterous alchemy of the old and the new into something wholly Rakish. A keenly sought-after collaborative guitarist, Conor performs with many of the most renowned names in Celtic music today. His guitar style combines bass and rhythm for a uniquely powerful and precise sound.

Rakish, embracing the unconventional connotation of their namesake, create and perform music with verve. Recent highlights of their travels include performances at the Library of Congress, Celtic Colours International Music Festival, Prince Edward Island’s Festival of Small Halls, the Corvallis Celtic Festival, and Official Showcases at Folk Alliance International. They have taught at esteemed fiddle camps across the country including Alasdair Fraser’s Sierra Fiddle Camp, Folk College, Katie McNally’s Boston States Fiddle Camp, and Hanneke Cassel’s Pure Dead Brilliant Fiddle Weekend.

On Now, O Now, the duo’s sophomore release (out October 11, 2024) it is clear Rakish cannot be pigeonholed into one genre and is most comfortable occupying the in-between. Together they journey through Celtic and Americana styles, deftly showcasing how to bring forth something new from the deep well of tradition. They are touring their new album across the country throughout the fall of 2024 and into 2025.

The CowCatchers

The CowCatchers are a string band trio featuring Jess Fox on fiddle, Tim FitzPatrick on guitar, and Tim Rowell on Banjo.

Christine Delphine Hedden

Christine Delphine Hedden is an artist who draws upon many wells: traditional, classical and contemporary. She is a composer, a fiddle player and violist, a percussive dancer, an improviser and a storyteller in word and song. Her debut solo album, “When the Aster Blooms” is a diverse storybook of original tunes and songs, inspired by her native New England folk music and her love of Irish traditional music.

Becky Tracy & Keith Murphy

Becky Tracy (fiddle) and Keith Murphy (guitar, mandolin, piano and foot percussion)

Becky and Keith are dynamic performers of traditional music from Newfoundland, Quebec, Ireland, France and beyond. Tracy’s fiddling pulses through tasteful arrangements of dance tunes and resonates with beauty on traditional slow airs. Keith’s gentle and expressive singing in English and French is balanced by the drive and power of his guitar playing and foot percussion. Combined, they produce a range and richness of sound that is striking for a duo. Their playing is seamless, the result of years of playing together and touring across the U.S., Canada and in Europe. Their repertoire also includes Keith’s original compositions (many of which are included in the Black Isle Music tune collection). He is a prolific tunesmith with a writing style strongly based on traditional dance music.

Keith and Becky were two thirds of the popular Vermont trio, Nightingale and are veterans of several other bands including Childsplay and Assembly (Keith) and Wild Asparagus (Becky). They can be heard on recordings of all these bands and many others. Becky released her first solo recording, Evergreen, in 2001. Suffer No Loss (2014) is Keith’s most recent solo recording – a beautifully sparse collection of traditional songs from Newfoundland and New England.

Martin Hayes

Martin Hayes is regarded as one of the most significant talents to emerge in the world of Irish traditional music. His unique sound, his mastery of his chosen instrument – the violin – his acknowledgement of the past and his shaping of the future of the music, combine to create a formidable artistic intelligence.

He has drawn inspiration from many musical genres, but remains grounded in the music he grew up with in East County Clare. He has a unique ability to place the tradition within a wider contemporary context, creating a unique and insightful interpretation of Irish music.

Martin Hayes’ soulful interpretations of traditional Irish music are recognized the world over for their exquisite musicality and irresistible rhythm. He has toured and recorded with guitarist Dennis Cahill for over twenty years, and has collaborated with extraordinary musicians in the classical, folk and contemporary music worlds such as Bill Frisell, Ricky Skaggs, Jordi Savall, Brooklyn Rider and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra as well as many of the greatest traditional Irish musicians over the past thirty years. Martin has contributed music, both original and traditional arrangements to modern dance, theatre, film and television. He has performed on stage with Sting and Paul Simon and recently recorded with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. He is the artistic director of Masters of Tradition, an annual festival in Bantry, Co. Cork and a co- curator for the Marble Sessions at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.