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. Natalie will be performing in Scotland at the Aberdeen Music Hall on October 5, 2013. 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. the kids all step dance and play fiddle, as well as a variety of other instruments. their father is the extraordinarily gifted fiddler from lakefield, ontario, donnell leahy, and their mother is natalie macmaster, the award winning fiddler from cape breton, nova scotia. “Blue Bonnets Over the Border” features throbbing electric bass and swirling strings–and a pounding drum program that, ironically enough, suggests a bodhran. the macmaster leahy kids are mary frances, michael, clare and julia. 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. 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.
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