Hi friends.
I just came home from a concert with a Canadian fiddle player named Calvin Vollrath. He was great. He played mostly canadian trad music (from the west coast), wich is very similar to Irish music. He also played quite a bit of Irish tunes. I had a chat with him afterwards. What a great guy, very chatty, friendly and humble. Anyone heard of him? Apperantly he has made over 40 recordings and is very popular in Canada.
Cheers
I’ve heard of him and learned a couple of his original tunes from a fiddler who attended a fiddle camp where he taught. I had the impression that he played quite a bit of Metis music. Did he play any of that when you heard him?
Steve
Sorry Steve but what is metis music??
The Metis are First Nations people living in Western Canada. I don’t know a whole lot about them except that they have a distinctive fiddle tradition. Anne Lederman, a fiddler from here in Ontario, has studied their music extensively and played it around Ontario. Some of it reminds me of some old time West Virginia fiddling with crooked tunes and sometimes open tuning. I looked up Vollrath’s web site but didn’t find any reference to Metis music. You can hear some of his fiddling at his site so maybe I was mistaked about the Metis connection. The Emma Lake camp was the place my friend studied.
Steve
Allright. No I don’t think he played any of that stuff. He played mostly the style I know as Colorado area type dance tunes and the like. Very reminicent of Irish traditional music.