In the past year, Natalie
MacMaster has moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia, near her birthplace on
Cape Breton, to Lakefield, Ontario. She also accompanied the traditional
Irish folk group the Chieftains on its recent United States tour, along
with performing 85 dates of her own in the U.S. and Canada ("it
was my lightest year in ten years," she says of the mere 100 total
gigs). And she spent time in Nashville recording her next CD with fiddler
and producer Darol Anger and a who's who of contemporary string musicians.
But despite all this moving around, Cape Breton, the island that defines
the northeastern edge of Canada's Nova Scotia province, is never far
from MacMaster's heart or her music. "I think home stays with you,"
she reflects. "I don’t try to keep home a part of me, it
just is. I couldn’t get away from it if I tried."
Now 30, MacMaster has been bringing the Cape Breton style of Celtic
fiddle music to a steadily growing audience since she was in her late
teens. It has remained the cornerstone of her art, even as she’s
incorporated elements of contemporary pop and dance music over the course
of seven CDs. Now MacMaster ventures into the realm of contemporary
North American string-band music on her much-anticipated upcoming collaboration
with Anger, due for release in September on Rounder Records.
In
the Blood
Growing up in Cape Breton, MacMaster says she first began hearing music
"in the womb." Her mother passed her love of music, which
she played at home constantly, to Natalie and also taught her to step
dance at age five. Her father came from a family of musicians and dancers
that included Natalie's uncle, famed Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster.
"I've got a blood line," she says. "Genetics and environment
gave me this passion for traditional music, particularly the fiddle.
I can remember as a kid not wanting to go to sleep until I heard music."
MacMaster started taking fiddle lessons when she was ten, learning traditional
tunes by ear, most of them off her mother's hundreds of cassette and
reel-to-reel tape recordings of fiddlers, including her uncle, entertaining
at Cape Breton house parties. "There's the bulk of what I learned,
and it's by ear," she says. "Stop and rewind. There's no mechanism
to slow it down, just repeat, repeat, repeat."
MacMaster can't even count the number of fiddle tunes she's learned
in this way. "Would I be at a thousand," she wonders. "I
don't know. I’ll tell you this, I've forgotten more than I remember."
Many of the jigs, reels, and strathspeys she performs also are so old
she doesn't even know their names.
Yet for all this immersion in traditional fiddle music, MacMaster also
was exposed to the same pop acts as most teens who came of age in the
1980s. "I grew up listening to all the popular bands, Duran Duran
and Michael Jackson. I was a huge fan of Prince when I was young, when
that Purple Rain record came out," says MacMaster, who understandably
scoffs at the perception of Cape Breton as an isolated, self-enclosed
environment.
These pop influences show themselves in the shimmering keyboards and
funk rhythm section that are incorporated into much of the music on
the first disc of last year's album Natalie MacMaster Live! (Rounder),
which was recorded in 2001 at the Arts Centre in Mississauga, Ontario.
It's on the second CD of the two-disc set, recorded at a Cape Breton
square dance in 1997 with only piano and acoustic guitar for accompaniment,
that MacMaster fully, gloriously displays the propulsive energy, intense
attack, escalating dynamics, and melodic lyricism of the island's fiddle
style.
"It's fun, but after the second hour of it, it becomes tiring,"
MacMaster admits. “It's three or four hours. It's challenging.
You have to have a lot of tunes, you have to have a huge repertoire."
'A
Lilt in There'
At first, when asked what makes the Cape Breton style distinctive, MacMaster
answers simply, "It’s just good music." Then, warming
to the question, she elaborates: "Cape Breton music is Scottish
[in origin], but it's very different from music in Scotland. I'm told
the music in Scotland had strong classical-music influences at some
point in the last couple hundred years, and as a result you have the
existing style of Scotland music. Cape Breton doesn't have that, so
you have a more traditional style of Scottish music [there]."
She points to the music's rhythm in particular as its distinguishing
feature. "I guess it's a bit more even, there's a lilt in there."
MacMaster notes that traditional Irish fiddle music takes the same tunes
at a faster tempo that requires more slurred notes in a single bow and
lots of rolls. By comparison, "Cape Breton has what you call the
cut," she says, "a triplet in the bow that's very typical.
. . [and]
I hardly play a roll at all."
“It’s as if the gang in Cape Breton didn’t have as
much contact with Irish music, because it’s not as smoothed over,”
concurs Chicago-area Irish fiddler Liz Carroll, who played with MacMaster
in the String Sisters, an all-female fiddle supergroup that performed
at the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow in 2000 and 2001. "The
Scottish players play smoother. They attack more 'dah-dah' versus 'BUH-DA.'
It's almost as if there's a bounce in the bow."
Darol Anger echoes Carroll's sentiments. "She's a melodist, but
she's also a drummer," he says of MacMaster's fiddle playing style.
"She pounds her foot pretty hard when she plays. She's got that
kind of magical thing where the fiddle appears to be simultaneously
driving the beat and pulling it back."
Given Cape Breton fiddle music's strong rhythmic emphasis and its role
at the center of communal dances, it's no wonder that dancing is a regular
part of MacMaster's concerts, as she bursts into a flurry of dance steps
while sawing away at her instrument.
"Most people at home dance—can do a step—it's very
common," MacMaster explains. "I do it in my show because I
like to think it's fun to watch, it provides the show element of the
performance. I do some steps outside of the traditional steps, little
booty steps," and the Michael Jackson-inspired moonwalk, which
she learned in fourth grade.
"She's a great, great player, and I'll tell you what, she's one
heck of a performer," Carroll says admiringly. "I’ve
met a lot of great players who, like me, put their head down and play.
Natalie lifts her head up and looks at the audience and puts on a show.
I think a lot of fiddle players would give their eyeteeth to have that
ability.
"It seems to be a trend with these Cape Breton players that they
all are fireballs,"” Carroll continues. "She certainly
has made a splash—blonde hair flying, looks great, loves the music—and
I think she saw that it could be popular to anybody anywhere and went
for it."
Something
New
While showmanship and pop-music embellishments have become a larger
part of MacMaster's performances, she steered her music in a different
direction on her new recording, inspired by listening to Alison Krauss'
Forget About It CD and admiring the pure, simple sound of the
record’s acoustic arrangements.
"A lot of times when I go into the studio, I think big," she
explains. "Big sound, big production, lots of players, and more
drums. I think drums. But my style of music doesn't need a rhythm section
to get out the rhythm. So I just wanted to focus more on embellishing
those qualities of the music a little more naturally."
In pursuing this aim, she recruited Darol Anger, whom she's known for
nearly a decade through Mark O'Connor's fiddle camp and melting pot.
Anger in turn brought MacMaster to Music City to work with what he calls
"the Nashville mafia," among them banjo players Alison Brown
and Bela Fleck, mandolinist Sam Bush, dobro player Jerry Douglas, bassist
Edgar Meyer, and many other session aces, plus Cape Breton musicians
and members of MacMaster's own band.
"She wanted to make a Nashville record with the people who are
at the front of creating a North American string band style," Anger
points out. "It was really the time for her to do that. It was
time to put her with world class string musicians, put her in a larger
context."
While the formidable accompanists he'd assembled have decades of combined
experience playing together, Anger reports that newcomer MacMaster held
her own with them. "To hear Natalie crash into there is like watching
a nuclear reaction," he says. "She’s a very strong personality.
Natalie put out so much energy, and got everybody a little bit more
inspired than they usually get."
Anger wrote several new tunes for MacMaster's CD, as well as arranging
her own compositions and traditional material in ways that stretched
their usual melodic and harmonic boundaries. "He writes from a
totally different perspective than I do," MacMaster observes. "He's
got a bit of a jazz perspective. I was playing notes and movements that
I'd never done before, and it challenged me. After you've been playing
tunes for years, you don't have to practice them, but this gave me something
to sink my teeth into."
Yet from all reports, MacMaster's personality remains evident amid the
unfamiliar arrangements and new accompanists. "What I love about
it is there's no denying me," MacMaster says. "Yes, I'm playing
with different musicians and they're playing different styles that I've
never played before, but it works so well, it embellishes and flatters
Cape Breton fiddling."
"She's really capable of playing anything," marvels Anger.
"The very best fiddle players have their own personal energy and
self-expression. If you talk about the Cape Breton style, she does it
as well as anybody and stays true to the style, but you don't notice
it. You notice this foundation of energy, this very individuated personality
that is expressing music.
"The depth is already there," he continues. "She can
get wider. She's got a lot of integrity. I think however she goes, she's
going to take on musically what she feels at the time. That's going
to grow in a very organic way. I think she's doing herself a favor by
stepping out into the larger world of musicians."
Liz Carroll concurs. "She’s continuing to grow, you don't
know where she's going to end up," she says. "I'm sure she's
going to take a whack at a lot of different types of music.”
Meanwhile, MacMaster is introducing audiences to the distinctive sounds
of her home. "I'm not intentionally trying to bring Cape Breton
to the world," she muses. "I'm just playing what I love to
play, and I'm following my path, and everything is unfolding. The result
of that is I'm traveling, I'm playing for audiences, and they're coming
to hear Cape Breton music, they're visiting Cape Breton Island."
What Natalie MacMaster
Plays
Natalie MacMaster plays
a 1927 Marc Lebert fiddle. "It was given to me by a very generous
man," Ontario accordionist Bill Burnett, who was willed the instrument
by his late friend, the fiddler Bill Crawford. "For my wedding,
he gave me another one; that one's in the shop now. It could be a great
fiddle, we don't know yet." MacMaster uses Pirastro strings, a
Hill bow, Hill rosin, a Shure wireless unit, and an L.R. Baggs pickup.
