Album Review: Katie McNally - Flourish

Like listening to the fiddle? Gaelic styled music? Then Katie McNally's Flourish is the CD for you.This is all instrumental, all the time - Katie's fiddle backed by the flat guitar, upright bass, piano, and cello. It's soothing music, but also I can't seem to get the final sequence of Napoleon Dynamite out of my mind while listening. Not sure why. I guess its cheerful and soothing. Pair with a pint of Harp or Aberlour Scotch. Cheers.

As a new generation breathes new life into the old tunes, and as young musicians are joyously pulled between multiple traditions, Boston fiddler Katie McNally has arrived as a driving force behind Celtic fiddling in New England. Pushing ever deeper into the Scottish fiddle tradition, Katie’s new album, Flourish, brings both Scottish and Cape Breton music together around the central core of her new compositions in the Celtic tradition. Katie’s a formidable fiddler, capable of drawing forth the unspoken emotions from the old melodies, but also capable of dazzling runs on her instrument. As a tune composer, there’s a real sense of playfulness to her compositions. She writes angular rhythms into her tunes in the subtlest ways, and delights in racing through these rhythms, her fiddle bow bobbing and weaving along the tracetrack she’s created. There’s a lift in her bow, a kind of weightlessness that only the best players have. It’s remarkable to hear this kind of maturity in a so young a fiddler.