FFWD Weekly
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| MUSIC Natalie MacMaster Natalie MacMaster is a fiddling Renaissance woman. After playing in more venues across North America and Europe than she probably cares to number, she recently joined the Chieftains at a $1000-a-plate dinner honoring Luciano Pavarotti during Grammy Awards week in New York. Other highlights of the ever growing Natalie MacMaster resume include co-hosting last year's East Coast Music Awards, hosting her own CBC Radio show, being named Canadian Country Music Award's Fiddler of the Year, and, of course, acting as Donut Spokesperson for Tim Horton's (her favorite is the honey cruller - she apparently has a three-cruller-a-day habit). True to the title of her 1996 release, No Boundaries, MacMaster has shown a penchant for stretching her limits. She also proved she's as good as gold, when sales of her award-winning album reached the magic gold record level earlier this year. In addition to turning in a respectable performance at the record store counter, No Boundaries established MacMaster as an artist who could take the music of her ancestors and meld it with contemporary sounds to create a funky tableau of old-meets-new. Yet, after creating a distinct fiddle sound through her musical experimentation, MacMaster's upcoming album My Roots Are Showing sees her jumping way back into traditional territory. With a pared-down sound, My Roots Are Showing is 100-per-cent pure Cape Breton fiddling, with simple piano and guitar accompaniment. And while her return to a bare-bones sound might surprise some listeners, MacMaster explains it was the thought of not doing a traditional album that actually inspired her to release a CD of all-traditional songs. "After No Boundaries, I figured my next album was just going to be nuts, and I was just going to do a whole bunch of different stuff and just go crazy," she explains. "And then I realized what got me here in the first place was my traditional music." One advantage to doing an all-traditional album is the vast musical history of Cape Breton that MacMaster was able to choose songs from. Before recording such oldies but goodies as "B Flat Medley," "E Flat Reels" and "D Clogs," MacMaster took at least 20 tapes of all the old fiddlers with her on the road, and "just listened to them all." Through her No Boundaries album, MacMaster has attracted the attention of young audiences, and she is not afraid she'll lose her younger audience base by going back to the basics, acknowledging traditional fiddle music is probably even more attractive than she gives it credit for. "All the people that are doing Celtic music right now are not sitting in chairs, and they're not wearing old boots," she says. "We're presenting the music in a much hipper way, and in a much more contemporary way, so that's very appealing." With a full band accompanying her, there will be no old boots on stage when MacMaster plays the Jack Singer Concert Hall this Saturday. She will be playing some of the songs from the new album, but says they won't be done as traditionally in concert. As My Roots Are Showing soon hits record stores across Canada, you can bet Natalie MacMaster will be back in her musical laboratory, once again fiddling around with her musical heritage. "There's a whole bunch of stuff I haven't even tapped into yet, and I don't even know what it is," she exclaims. "I still have a lot of experimenting to do, and that's part of the fun." |