Some people say they don’t know the meaning of fear, but when you look at Natalie MacMaster’s to-do list, you’d think it’s the phrase “down time” that’s doesn’t belong in her lexicon.
Besides a seemingly non-stop tour schedule and raising seven children, the Cape Breton-bred musician and her husband (and fellow fiddler) Donnell Leahy have also started the Greenbridge Celtic Fest, not far from their home outside of Peterborough, Ont. She’s also working on two books — one for children and another “biography-type thing” — and is laying the groundwork for a future symphony recording project, which has been a dream of hers for years
“I hope another baby doesn’t come along, I’ll never be able to keep up with it all!” she says with a burst of laughter. “There’s a lot of projects on the go, I guess I can’t help myself.”
At the time of this October interview, MacMaster is enjoying a rare moment of quiet in her backstage dressing room at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, just prior to a soundcheck Symphony Nova Scotia. It’s the same stage where many Haligonians might have seen her for the first time when she joined the cast of the 1991 edition of the Cape Breton Summertime Revue, and on this occasion it’s the setting for a chat about Sketches, MacMaster’s first solo release in eight years, following a pair of projects with her husband in 2015 and 2016.
Released on Nov. 1, Sketches, like the title implies, is pure, unvarnished MacMaster. She’s largely accompanied solely by her gifted guitarist Tim Edey, a frequent visitor to Cape Breton’s Celtic Colours International Festival from his home in Ireland. In fact, Edey was seen there just this past month performing with his other frequent musical companions, the Chieftains, before he joins his fiddler friend on her upcoming tour dates.
The sound of MacMaster’s playing here is pure and sweet, with powerful sweeps of the bow accented by a certain mischievous twinkle that surfaces in every cut. It’s clear she and Edey have a singular musical understanding, which was there early on when she initially got the idea to make a record together five years ago.
“I was with Tim, getting ready to record One, my first CD with Donnell, and Tim and Mac (Morin, her longtime pianist) were at my house helping us put together the stuff for that album. And then Tim and I just started playing some tunes, and I love what he pulled out of me,” she recalls.
“I said to him, ‘We are absolutely going to record something that sounds just like this.’ And finally in January of this year, I decided we were finally going to do it, after always having it in the back of my mind. Life kind of kept getting in the way, but I thought maybe we could squeeze this in.”
Making time
Thanks to a one-year hiatus for the Greenbridge fest, MacMaster found she finally had some time available for this new endeavour, and found a window where she and her guitarist could make Sketches happen.
Always the perfectionist, the fiddler spent spent a couple of hours each day over a few weeks picking and practicing tunes until two days before recording, when Edey turned up. Then came a period of intense rehearsal, followed by a productive studio session, but MacMaster felt the recordings needed a little something extra.
“I thought some standup bass would add a little bit of glue, and I was thrilled with the result,” she says of the addition of Marc Rogers, the only other musician to play throughout the record. “The funny part was watching Marc trying to follow all of Tim’s manoeuvers. After a few hours, he says, ‘This guy doesn’t play the same thing twice!’
“And I told him, ‘No, that’s the beauty of it. You cannot harness Tim Edey.’ ”
Edey, who’s also performed with New Zealand harmonica player Brendan Power and acclaimed Irish folk group Lunasa, is a gifted musician with one of the biggest contrasts of humility to talent you’ll ever come across. When you hear him go into an unexpected jazz break on Sketches, or just marvel at the tone and power of his strumming, you wonder how he could be so self-effacing, but that’s part of his charm.
So silly
“It’s so true,” says MacMaster, who likens playing with the Kent-bred multi-instrumentalist to her bond with cello maestro Yo-Yo Ma, grounded in a healthy sense of humour.
“He’s absolutely silly! Yo-Yo Ma is very silly, Tim is silly and I am silly to the core. Ask anybody who knows me well or has worked with me. So when I get with someone else who’s silly and they play great music, it’s like ‘Oh my gosh, we’re like two peas in a pod!’
“So to be quite honest, that’s the real reason. I just bond with him that way. I mean, he’s an awesome musician, but he also has a similar personality type to myself and I find it so easy to play with him, and creating something at the same time.”
There are other guests on the record, like Frank Evans playing banjo on Three Reels and Michael McGoldrick’s flute and Mark Kelso’s percussion on the MacMaster original Patricia Kelso’s. She also felt honoured to have guitarist Stuart Cameron, son of Cape Breton’s late Celtic Godfather John Allan Cameron, play on the track Tribute to John Allan.
Tribute
The Troy fiddler is distantly related to the Camerons, and she knew John Allan as part of the family long before she realized what his musical contribution to Cape Breton culture was. It was a relationship much like the one she had with her much-missed uncle Buddy MacMaster, who became revered by younger generations of Cape Breton fiddlers.
“It wasn’t until I was in my 20s, maybe a decade before he died, that I really learned to appreciate what (John Allan) had done,” she says. “I thought about how he was such a gutsy guy, who really abandoned any thoughts about what other people thought he was and just went and did it.1
“What an incredible spirit, my favourite thing about John Allan is his spirit. He could lift the dead with his music. I wish I’d known him better when he was in his prime, because I really value what he came from and what he did.”
The track is also a tribute to great Cape Breton fiddle tune composers like Jerry Holland and John Morris Rankin, who also had a kinship with the elder Cameron and her uncle Buddy.
Having Stuart along was like having a secret shot of whiskey in a cup of strong island tea.
“Recording this with Stuart was so beautiful, joyful, funny, sad ... it was really special. We just bonded so much, and it was so great to see him,” says MacMaster, who was thrilled that the younger Cameron brought along his father’s famous 12-string “car-tar” for the session.
“Of course he had to bring it, damn right. It’s a little eerie hearing it, because only Stuart can play it like his dad did, and we just sat down and played tunes. And he’d always say, ‘No, Dad always played it like this,’ and I’d learn that version, the way John Allan did it.”