What the band carries with them for sound depends on where they are. I did my first tour with them in the winter of ’98.”Īfter touring the world for decades, The Chieftains are welcomed back to many of the same venues year after year. Shortly thereafter, he hired me to do sound for The Chieftains. In the summer of 1996, Ashley toured as the opener for The Chieftains and I met Dan Cleland, who was doing sound and also acting as tour manager. I’m from Nova Scotia, and I knew Ashley’s management people, so that’s how I got that gig. Ashley MacIsaac, a great fiddler from Cape Breton, hired me as his engineer in 1995. I started doing sound professionally in 1995. “When guitar gigs started drying out, the sound gigs started to appear. “I played guitar in bands when I was a kid, and I always had to set up the sound system because no one else could figure it out,” he explains. Mix caught up with Horton at the Paramount in Denver, Colo.Īs Horton relates it, he originally started doing sound because no one else could do it. FOH engineer is Mark Horton, who has worked with the band since 1998. The Chieftains are Kevin Conneff on bodhrán and vocals, Derek Bell on harp and keyboards, Matt Molloy on flute, Seán Keane on fiddle, and Paddy Moloney on uilleann pipes and tin whistle. On The Chieftains’ winter 2002 tour of the United States, they were joined by Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, fiddle great Natalie MacMaster, guitarist Jeff White (who has also played with Vince Gill and Alison Krauss) and sultry songstress Allison Moorer.
The Chieftains’ stature is such that they can record and tour with almost anybody: Previous collaborators have included Roger Daltrey, Nanci Griffith, Van Morrison, Joan Osborne, Loreena McKennitt, Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Sinéad O’Connor, Sting and the Rolling Stones. In Fall 2006, MacMaster is set to release her 10th recording, an album called Yours Truly, and music aficionados and fans across North America and beyond eagerly await its debut.After 40 years of recording and touring the world, The Chieftains have become an institution in Irish music, a musical idiom otherwise known for impermanence. Earlier in the year, she played a moving tribute at New York's Carnegie Hall to journalist and news anchor Peter Jennings, who had been one of her greatest fans.
In 2005, MacMaster and Donnell launched an internet radio show called Cape Breton Live, which features live performances of musicians in traditional venues across the East Coast. "Having someone you trust on tour with you to help take care of your child is a must," she says. Motherhood has barely slowed MacMaster, however, and she has already begun the touring-with-baby experience, with the help of her mother. In 2002, MacMaster married fellow fiddle virtuoso Donnell Leahy of the famed Canadian band Leahy, and in 2005 the couple were proud to announce the birth of their first child, Mary Frances Rose. She has shared the stage with Santana, the Chieftains, Paul Simon, Pavarotti, Faith Hill, Don Henley, Michael McDonald, and dozens of distinguished symphony orchestras, and has appeared on network television many times, including the Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Good Morning America shows. MacMaster's live performances are renowned for their incandescent energy and toe-tapping, rhythmic intensity. Her last release, Blueprint, combined MacMaster's own musical radiance with the cream of American roots instrumentalists, including Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, and Edgar Meyer, and won her Best Female Artist of the Year and Best Roots/Traditional Solo Recording at the East Coast Music Awards in 2005. With albums like In My Hands, which fused jazz, Latin, and the guest vocals of Alison Krauss, and the Grammy-nominated My Roots Are Showing, MacMaster has proven time and time again that she is leaving her mark on music history. The niece of famed Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster (with whom she recorded a tribute album in 2005), MacMaster quickly became a major talent in her own right. MacMaster first picked up the fiddle at age nine and hasn't looked back. While acclaimed for taking Celtic music to new heights, each album MacMaster releases displays a creativity and range that constantly pushes back the boundaries of the genre.
Well-known to international audiences as one of Canada's major talents, MacMaster has been an ambassador of traditional East Coast music, and is credited with bringing the style to its contemporary prominence. With a talent that remains both raw and wondrously refined, and backed by a band any top musician would be proud of, NATALIE MACMASTER has grown to become the musical face of Atlantic Canada, and continuously stuns crowds around the globe with her feverish fiddling and mesmerizing step dancing.
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