Natalie MacMaster

Natalie MacMaster first picked up a fiddle at the age of nine and has not looked back. The niece of famed Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster, Natalie quickly became a major talent in her own right. After winning numerous East Coast Music Awards for her early traditional recordings, she began taking Celtic music to new heights with albums like In My Hands, which featured elements of jazz, Latin music and guest vocals by Alison Krauss. To her accomplishments, she has recorded and released seven albums in Canada and the US, received both a Grammy nomination and Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album for My Roots Are Showing, another Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album for In My Hands and several Canadian Country Music Awards for Fiddler of the year. She has shared the live performance stage with acts such as Carlos Santana , The Chieftains, Paul Simon, Luciano Pavarotti, Alison Krauss, Mark O’Connor and dozens of distinguished symphony orchestras. Natalie has performed on ABC Television’s New Year’s Eve broadcast at the special request of one of her greatest fans, host Peter Jennings. She’s created, financed and produced her very own nationally broadcast network TV special. Two of her CD’s have charted on Billboard’s Top 20 Selling World Music charts and four have been certified ‘gold’ (50,000 + sales) in Canada. On her latest release Blueprint, Natalie is once again pushing the boundaries of traditional music, fusing her brilliant fiddling with the cream of America’s roots instrumentalist community including Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Edgar Meyer. “Alison Krauss was the artist who first got me listening to American traditional roots music,” recalls MacMaster. “With this album, maybe I can do the same thing and attract people to traditional Cape Breton music.” Natalie’s live performances are a testament to her incandescent musicianship and boundless energy featuring foot-tapping rave-ups, heart rendering ballads and world-class step dancing. Constant international touring has proven she is equally adept at setting the house on fire with her exceptional band as she is at hypnotizing a crowd while alone in the footlights. When Natalie fronts a top-notch orchestra two musical worlds converge and the music goes through a breathtaking metamorphosis. Natalie’s fiddling fireworks on traditional and contemporary Celtic melodies, combined with the silky string sections of the symphony, generates a kind of “Traditional Fusion” delivered with ferocious energy felt by the musicians and audience alike. To simply describe an evening with Natalie MacMaster is a difficult proposition. In fact, many of her enraptured fans often leave her show completely speechless.