If you like Scottish-style fiddling, Jenna Moynihan’s Woven ought to be on your list of top releases of 2015. This young American fiddler has made an album of traditional and trad-style contemporary fiddle tunes that is bursting with contained energy and an obvious love for the music. A recent graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, this Boston native has been teaching at fiddle camps across the country and touring internationally as a member of Laura Cortese & The Dance Cards. She also has appeared on stage or recorded with the likes of Darol Anger, The Folk Arts Quartet, Atlantic Seaway, Matt Glaser, Väsen, Maeve Gilchrist, and Bruce Molsky.
For her debut solo recording Moynihan has gathered a bunch of musicians from the Berklee community to accompany her, including Scottish harpist Mairi Chaimbeul, guitarists Courtney Hartman and Owen Marshall, and fiddlers Anger, Duncan Wickel, and Alex Hargreaves. The results are quietly spectacular. For just one example, there’s the set that includes an arrangement of the piping tune “The Eagle’s Whistle” and the well-known Scottish piping reel “Major Campbell Graham MBE.”
Here’s a lovely Berklee video of “Major Campbell and a similar tune to “The Eagle’s Whistle” called “Back and Forth,” by Moynihan and Chaimbeul from their 2014 duet album of that title.
If you’re a fiddler, one of the first things you might notice is that Moynihan plays a five-string version. After I twigged to that fact I understood why it sometimes sounds like she’s playing a viola, or even being accompanied by a cello. You hear that lovely deep sound right off on the opener, a tune called “Haven” that she wrote herself; guitarist Courtney Hartman joins Chaimbeul and Moynihan on this one and a couple of other tracks, while Owen Marshall plays guitar on others, including the next one, a piping jig called “Pipe Major Jimmy MacGregor.” On this one among others, Chaimbeul plays the harp nearly like a mandolin sometimes, and like a piano others; very impressive. It’s easy to see why adjectives like “iconoclastic” follow her around. (Guitarist Hartman is also responsible for the droning harmonium on “The Eagle’s Whistle.”) Jenna duets with Anger on a very fun tune called “The Chill on Montebello,” which she wrote as a challenge in an odd tuning. There are three fiddles – Hargreaves and Wickel are the other two – on the atmospheric “O’Sullivan’s March, a traditional tune arranged by harpist Maeve Gilchrist, who produced the disc for Moynihan. The same three play on the energetic set that ends the disc, which pairs two traditional tunes “Rise Ye Lazy Fellow” and “The Mill Stream” with one by Moynihan called “The Night We Had The Bears.”
I haven’t mentioned anywhere near all the riches that are on Woven. It’s a beautiful, inspired debut from a fiddler we’re sure to hear a lot more from. If you’re a fiddle fan, you ought to have this recording. It’s available on her website and at CDBaby.
self-released, 2015
