Donnell Leahy and Natalie Macmaster: Stretching stylistic boundaries in surprising ways
By David McGee
CANVAS
Natalie Macmaster & Donnell Leahy
Linus Entertainment
Back in 2002, when Novia Scotia’s Natalie Macmaster wed Ontario’s Donnell Leahy, Canada could boast a true new musical power couple. The oft-awarded (both musically and academically) Macmaster was widely viewed as the foremost practitioner of Cape Breton fiddling, whereas Leahy was a key member of the legendary Leahy family band, whose popularity nation-wide rivaled any other Canadian-based artist’s. Settling in Lakefield, Ontario, Macmaster and Leahy begat a family band of their own, numbering, to date, seven children, some of whom occasionally sit in with their parents, including on this, the couple’s third album together (the first being 2015’s Bob Ezrin-produced One, followed a year later by A Celtic Family Christmas). The family’s combined album sales reportedly top the one million mark.
Macmaster, while certainly a traditionalist, has made a habit of stretching the Cape Breton stylistic boundaries, adding more pronounced Scottish flavors to her repertoire along with jazzy flourishes and even a smidgen of rock ‘n’ roll energy driving certain numbers. In planning their first full album in almost seven years, Macmaster confessed, in her liner notes, to indulging “in full musical freedom, throwing patterns from the past aside.” Indeed, the couple’s arrangements of mostly original tunes, plus a couple of vintage chestnuts, push into other territories while remaining true to the music closest to the two fiddlers’ hearts.
‘Woman of the House,’ Natalie Macmaster and Donnell Leahy, Gaelic vocals by Rhiannon Giddens, from Canvas
Case in point: “The Case of the Mysterious Squabbyquash,” a sizzling fiddle workout equal parts country hoedown and strathspey that soars into rock territory when co-producer Elmer Ferrer injects a wailing, texture altering, Bonamassa-like guitar solo into the proceedings. On the other hand, intense but tender moments surface, such as occurs on “So You Love,” wherein the twin fiddlers, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Mary Frances Leahy (their 17-year-old daughter) interlock on a beautiful, exotic melody betraying Gypsy Jazz sources. Speaking of sources, Macmaster returns to the Cape Breton style’s deepest source, Scotland, in the high stepping workout, “Woman of the House,” featuring Rhiannon Giddens declaiming Gaelic lyrics in bursts of rock and blues energy.
‘The Case of the Mysterious Squabbyquash,’ Natalie Macmaster and Donnell Leahy, guitar solo by Elmer Ferrer, from Canvas
‘Caramelo,’ Natalie Macmaster and Donnell Leahy, from Canvas
In the intriguing “Carmelo,” Josemi Carmona’s Latin-tinged guitar soloing, alternately contemplative and aggressive, adds an air of mystery to the ambience created by the muscular fiddling and restless percussion, as Ms. Leahy soars aloft in exhilarating variations on the melody. Robyn Cunningham offers a plaintive lead vocal to key the reflective, hopeful emotions the lyrics limn ahead of the arrangement opening up into a dense, widescreen panorama of fiddling and percussion flurries, before returning to the folkish serenity of Ms. Cunningham’s vocal supported minimally, to great effect, by a soft guitar-percussion backdrop ahead of a final instrumental flurry underscoring the optimism informing the narrative. Then, immediately following and closing out the album on a bracing note, comes Natalie and Donnell’s “Voice Memo 3049,” which his exactly 1:29 of two fiddlers in feverish dialogue playing with and off of each other in a witty coda to the whole affair. Quite a busy canvas, this, in keeping with what we’ve come to expect from these adventurous artists, who nevertheless never fail to surprise.
