![]() MacMaster returned to her roots on 2011's Cape Breton Girl, a collection of stripped-down traditional tunes featuring piano and fiddle, and in 2015 she teamed up with Donnell Leahy (leader of the Celtic family group Leahy) on the collaborative One. It was followed in 2006 by the similarly themed Yours Truly. After 2002's Live, MacMaster's put out the ambitious Blueprint, a progressive Celtic juggernaut that employed a full drum kit and numerous co-arrangers and session musicians. The gold-selling In My Hands arrived a year later, followed by the U.S. MacMaster released her second album for Warner Brothers Canada in 1998. MacMaster's fiddling has also been heard on television commercials for Tim Horton Donuts and General Motors Pontiac. The following year, she spent four weeks as the opening act for the Chieftains on their tour of the United States. In 1995, MacMaster performed for more than 80,000 people as the opening act for Carlos Santana in Chattanooga, Tennessee. MacMaster has maintained such a busy schedule as a performer that she had to turn down an invitation to be a featured musician in the Irish music and dance production Lord of the Dance. The album was dedicated to the memory of her grandmother, Margaret Ann Beaton, who would often sing Gaelic lyrics to songs that she was learning on the fiddle. She was also named Fiddler of the Year by the Canadian Country Music Association. In addition to hosting the East Coast Music Awards, MacMaster received awards for "Female Artist of the Year, Roots/Traditional Artist of the Year and Instrumental Artist of the Year. MacMaster's first album released by Warner Brothers Canada, No Boundaries, included "Drunken Piper" (featuring vocals by Cookie Rankin of the Rankin Family), and established her as one of the top musicians in Canada. ![]() Tracks from MacMaster's first two albums were reissued by Rounder as A Compilation in 1997. After releasing two self-produced cassette-only albums - 4 on the Floor in 1989 and Road to the Isle in 1990 - MacMaster expanded her following with her first release in the United States, Fit as a Fiddle, which received an East Coast Music Award as Best Roots/Traditional Album of 1992. ![]() She took formal lessons along with her cousin Ashley MacIsaac, with whom she played as a youngster. Inspired by the musical members of her family, MacMaster began playing fiddle at the age of nine on an instrument given to her by a great-uncle. Whether performing with her band or a classical orchestra, MacMaster has thrilled audiences for decades with her exciting fiddling and dynamic stage persona. She has toured with the Chieftains, Faith Hill, Carlos Santana, and Alison Krauss and is a mainstay of multiple folk and roots music festivals. She has released dozens of acclaimed albums since emerging in the late 1980s, including the gold-selling Fit as a Fiddle (1993) and In My Hands (1999), and wide-ranging efforts like Yours Truly (2006), Sketches (2019), and Canvas (2023). During the past four decades, the fellow Canadian has produced such high-profile records as Pink Floyd's The Wall, Kiss's Destroyer, Lou Reed's Berlin, Peter Gabriel's self-titled solo debut and all of Alice Cooper's career-defining albums from the early 1970s.Fiddler Natalie MacMaster has turned the music of Cape Breton, an island off the east coast of Canada near Nova Scotia, into an international phenomenon. We have to record.' So we put everything else aside and said, 'This is what we're doing' and made it happen.Įnter a totally unexpected guest to serve as the project's producer: Bob Ezrin. It got to the point where we said, 'OK, this is ridiculous. Basically, this project should have been done eight years ago. It just kept getting delayed, and there was never any time. "Natalie and I intended on recording together for awhile, but I had projects planned and she had projects planned. Any Cape Breton music I heard came from my mother playing it on the piano. I listened to accordion music because I had a friend who was an Irish accordion player. But I listened to my father play the fiddle. I grew up in Ontario without that kind of style around me. She grew up in Cape Breton listening to Cape Breton fiddlers. "We have very different styles," Leahy said. ![]()
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