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"I gravitate toward quality musicianship-that's what I grew up with," says MacMaster, who earned a Grammy nomination in 2000 for My Roots Are Showing in the Best Traditional Folk Album category. The common thread of bluegrass turned out to be a happy coincidence. MacMaster, a native of Canada's Cape Breton Island, says her only motivation in choosing guests for the album was to feature the best acoustic musicians she could find. But that's not what prompted Celtic fiddling virtuoso Natalie MacMaster to enlist some of the world's top bluegrass pickers-including Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Edgar Meyer-for her latest album, Blueprint. It's like returning something that was borrowed and has been in constant use but is still in good working order."īiography (Courtesy the Artist’s site, 2005)īluegrass and Celtic music are close cousins, with shared roots dating back several hundred years. "It's pretty cool to be playing in the country where Cape Breton music originally came from and wasn't heard in quite the same for a very long time. "I always get a special buzz from playing anywhere in Scotland," she says. for Canada, Rounder Records for the USA and Greentrax Recording for the UK and Europe, her album 1998 My Roots Are Showing, on which she revisited favourite tunes with formidable zest, has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Traditional Folk Album category in the annual awards to be held in Los Angeles on February 21, 2001.Īlthough her concert schedule now takes her all over the world, Natalie has a special fondness for playing in Scotland, where for the past two years she has appeared at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival with the String Sisters, a fiddle extravangaza featuring Shetlander Catriona Macdonald, Altan's Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, Chicago-based Irish American Liz Carroll, Liz Knowles of Cherish the Ladies and Norwegian Annbjorg Lien.
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Her third album, Fit as a Fiddle, won her the Instrumentalist of the Year prize at Canada's East Coast Music Awards in 1994 and she has since won a further three nominations for that category, as well winning SOCAN awards as Entertainer of the Year and Songwriter of the Year for her composition Get Me Through September. Natalie made her first album, Four on the Floor, when she was just sixteen. It mightn't have sounded the hottest the first few times but we managed and I just continued on with it because it's a fun thing to do and it's something you don't see all that often." Anyway, we tried it and, my god, we managed to do it. This wasn't unique, I've since learned that Jerry Holland, who's a great Cape Breton fiddler, did the same thing when he was a little boy.
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We had five fiddlers and two step dancers and we decided we'd all try to play the fiddle and step dance at the same time. "That name wasn't our idea, we hated it, but somebody called us that and it stuck. Her simultaneous fiddling and dancing routine began with a young group called, she winces, the Special Seven. Three months after picking up the instrument, Natalie gave her first concert and it has been, she says, "go, go, go" ever since. "But when I tried this fiddle it fitted me perfectly and I managed to get Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the Glen Coe March out on the first night."Įncouraged by these quick results, she "just kept going" with a little help from her father, whose brother, Buddy, is one of the great masters of Cape Breton fiddling. "I'd fooled around on piano a little bit when I was a kid but nothing serious," she recalls. Then, aged nine and a half, Natalie picked up the fiddle which a grand uncle had passed on to 'whichever MacMaster learns to play it'. Natalie's mother, who played fiddle music constantly around the family home in Inverness County, taught Natalie to step dance from the age of five. Learning to dance and play fiddle (although not necessarily at the same time) was almost inevitable in a family steeped in the musical heritage of their Scottish ancestors which has been preserved in the original raw, exciting state in which it crossed the Atlantic at the time of Highland Clearances. It's a sight and sound that has left audiences and critics spellbound from Canada and the USA to New Zealand and the Far East and has earned MacMaster invitations to guest with the Chieftains, Phil Cunningham and a whole host of other artists. The brilliant young fiddler from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia not only plays with the prodigious verve synonymous with the Cape Breton fiddle style, she performs some remarkably intricate step dances as she plays, a kind of one-person Riverdance which can expand into a full-on kickathon when her accompanists join in. Natalie MacMaster has to be seen as well as heard.
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PLUS Biography (Courtesy the Artist's site, 2003).