Elizabeth Nicholson and Stringed Migration - Fly Not Yet

乐队名称：Elizabeth Nicholson and Stringed Migration
专辑名称：Fly Not Yet
公司厂牌：Waterbug
风格类型：Folk, Celtic, Acoustic
发行日期：2008
视听主页：www.myspace.com/cremoneamusic
官方网站：www.stringedmigration.com

Stringed Migration 弦游乐队 是由来自波兰的多乐器演奏家 Elizabeth Nicholson 伊丽莎白·尼科尔森 创办的。其中 Elizabeth Nicholson 演唱、竖琴和吉他；Eddie Parente 小提琴和中提琴；Bob Soper 打击乐、小提琴、演唱和吉他；Rob Barrick 低音提琴和苏格兰 smallpipes

The Band:

Elizabeth Nicholson & Stringed Migration is a Portland, OR-based acoustic quintet that performs a lush synthesis of Celtic and international roots music with a twist of jazz. Comprised of five multi-instrumentalists whose individual careers have garnered regional, national, and international recognition, the band is enjoying a rapidly growing reputation in the Northwest folk world. With the recent release of their debut CD "Fly Not Yet" (which opened at number eleven on the international folk radio charts), they have assumed a place on the world’s folk music stage.

Stringed Migration features a cast whose diverse backgrounds touch upon Latin music, Balkan music, Americana, rock, Mediæval music, classical Indian music, Western classical music, and jazz, yet all have deep roots in traditional Irish and Scottish fare. “The idea,” says founder Elizabeth Nicholson, “is to allow everyone in the band to draw from the full spectrum of their experience, rather than conforming to a rigidly defined idiom.” The resulting sound pays true homage to the American melting pot, revealing technical mastery, nuance, spontaneity and heart.

Stringed Migration is: Elizabeth Nicholson on vocals, harps, and guitar; Eddie Parente on violin and viola; Bob Soper on percussion, fiddle, vocals and guitar; Rob Barrick on double bass and Scottish smallpipes; and Jim Chapman on Irish and Greek bouzoukis and Irish whistles.
The Recording:On Fly Not Yet, the band crafts arrangements that seamlessly blend cultural influences to stunning effect:“Unquiet Grave” -- the album’s opening track – merges a traditional Scottish ballad with a Lebanese dance tune, highlighting the complementary harmonic structure of each melody and giving the song’s dark story an added layer of depth. In the second track, a reel from Cape Breton is uplifted by a merengue backbeat and treated with a dazzling jazz improvisation, courtesy of violinist Eddie Parente. The third, title track, reveals an elegantly straightforward treatment of an Irish song, centered around Elizabeth Nicholson’s lithe vocals. Subsequent tracks showcase the band’s range, from the driving medieval dance “La Rotta,” to Bob Soper’s plaintive singing on the Appalachian ballad “Lord Thomas,” to a whimsical treatment of the Irish hornpipe “Galway Bay,” which sets a harp solo to a rock rhythm. The final track on the album is also the darkest: “And Am I Born to Die?” places an American shape-note song within a mournful, chamber-inflected string arrangement.

Member Bios:

Singer/harpist ELIZABETH NICHOLSON is at the vanguard of a new generation of Celtic musicians. Considered among the top American interpreters of Irish traditional music for harp, her studies have also included classical, Paraguayan, and mediaeval harp, and she has stretched the traditional boundaries of the instrument into rock music and country blues. Her recent CD of traditional and original music, Sink or Swim (Waterbug Records) was released to widespread critical praise and international airplay, including a spot on Fiona Richie’s Thistlepod, which highlights outstanding new Celtic releases.

Violinist/violist EDDIE PARENTE first came to prominence as a member of the critically acclaimed Irish ensemble Touchstone (Green Linnet Records), and with subsequent performances with members of the renowned Celtic supergroups The Bothy Band and Silly Wizard. Eddie has since proved himself to be a master of multiple genres, performing in bands that range in style from Americana (The Oregon Trail Band), to Tango, mariachi, Indian, classical, and more. However, he is perhaps best known for his immense prowess in the realm of jazz, and has filled concert halls throughout the world touring under his own name as a jazz soloist.

BOB SOPER is counted among Portland’s most astonishingly versatile multi-instrumentalists. A rock and jazz drummer from a young age who also studied classical Indian percussion at the Ali Akbar College of Music, he went on to learn the Irish fiddle, ultimately becoming one the Northwest’s most sought after players. Also an accomplished guitarist and vocalist in both Irish and American traditional styles, he’s been a member of some of the region’s most beloved and successful ensembles, including the Irish bands Cul an Ti and Grafton Street, as well as the old-time/country-blues group The Pagan Jug Band.

Born into a Scottish piping family, ROB BARRICK grew up playing with the City of Victoria Pipe Band, one of the world’s top-rated bagpipe ensembles. Today Rob is recognized as among the West Coast’s premier Scottish pipers, and is in high demand as an adjudicator for piping competitions throughout the US and Canada. Also a veteran bass player, Rob has toured extensively with renowned Irish singer-songwriter Peter Yeates and his band New Shilling, performing at most of the nation’s larger Celtic festivals and appearing with some of the genre’s top players, including Kevin Burke and Johnny Cunningham.

Bouzouki and Irish whistle player JIM CHAPMAN has been an active member of the Northwest’s Celtic music community for over twenty years, having played with the celebrated ensemble Wild Geese, as well with luminaries of Irish traditional music such as Martin Hayes, Kevin Burke, Randal Bays, and Johnny B. Connolly. In addition to Irish music, Jim has studied classical piano, composition, and Balkan bouzouki, and has appeared twice on whistles as a soloist with the Salem Symphony Orchestra playing work by master harp-guitarist John Doan.

Reviews of "Fly Not Yet":

Based in Portland, Oregon, Elizabeth Nicholson & Stringed Migration are an acoustic band with a repertoire of mostly Irish and Scottish traditional material. Though (so I judge from photographs) a young woman, Nicholson is already a formidably skilled harpist and a striking vocalist besides. She's surrounded herself with four comparably gifted musicians (fiddle, guitars, pipes, percussion, bass) with experience in a range of genres, including rock, jazz, classical, Appalachian and Middle Eastern.

Celtic sounds, however, are very much at the forefront, with others incorporated with charming, unforced ease. Though the playing and the arrangements are sophisticated and modern, they don't feel that way, which I mean as flattery. The consistent excellence notwithstanding, nothing showy is happening here, and the band seems at once to be floating outside time while yet rooted firmly in place. As the best bluegrass bands do, the finest Celtic ensembles -- happily for all of us who love the music -- never run short of creative approaches to what are in prosaic truth a finite store of ideas. Of course, the longer this goes on, the higher the level of technical excellence and musical imagination required. That's not a problem here; in Fly Not Yet, Nicholson and company achieve the desired, if in lesser hands elusive, feat of feeling both familiar and fresh.

The line-up consists of instrumentals and songs in approximately equal measure. The latter comprise, with a couple of exceptions, classic Scots ballads from the Child canon: "The Unquiet Grave," "Lord Thomas" and "The Dewey Dens of Yarrow," performed with the sort of resonance that separates masters from neophytes. Ballad singing, like blues singing, is a whole lot more demanding than it looks. My personal favorite vocal cut, however, is the title piece, with lyrics by the 19th-century Irish poet Thomas Moore set to an air ("Planxty Hugh Kelly") associated with 17th-century Irish harper Turlough O'Carolan.

Among the instrumentals, the traditional Italian harp piece "La Rotta" and an old Swedish fiddle tune identified simply as "Waltz from Orsa" join in exquisite medley. A Lebanese melody shows up as an intro to "Unquiet Grave," and the klezmer "Romanian Hora" shares medley duty with "Galway Bay" (not to be confused with the song of the same name). Fly Not Yet, let us hope, is just Stringed Migration's first flight.
-Jerome Clark, rambles.net, March 2008

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专辑曲目：

01 Lebanese Melody - the Unquiet Grave
02 Paddy Fahey's - Cape Breton Reel
03 Fly Not Yet
04 La Rotta - Waltz From Orsa
05 Paddy's Rambles - Funky Reel
06 Lord Thomas
07 St John's Jig - the Barn Swallow - Mt Tabor Reel
08 The Dewey Dens of Yarrow
09 Romanian Hora - Galway Bay
10 Am I Born to Die