MacIsaac: Island guitarist an ‘innate musician’
What: Ashley MacIsaac and Quinn Bachand with Qristina Bachand and Daniel Lapp’s B.C. Fiddle Orchestra Where: St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 924 Douglas St. When: Saturday and Monday, 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:45) Tickets: Sold out Note: Bachand and MacIsaac also perform in Duncan on Thursday and Courtenay on Friday Ashley MacIsaac began performing local shows with accompaniment from Victoria guitarist Quinn Bachand in 2010, after the Cape Breton-born fiddler came across videos of the then teenaged Vancouver Island phenom on YouTube.
MacIsaac is back in Victoria this weekend for a pair of performances with Bachand at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the Douglas Street venue where the two first performed together in Victoria.
MacIsaac, 43, a former fiddle prodigy who sold more than 500,000 copies of his recordings in the 1990s and has performed with Paul Simon, David Byrne and Philip Glass, still remembers when he first saw Bachand.
“For whatever reason, I don’t think I was looking for a guitar player at the time, which I usually am,” MacIsaac said in an interview from his home in Windsor, Ont. “But I was looking for something to do with Cape Breton, and there was a video with Quinn on it.”
The pair will be joined at the gigs by Bachand’s older sister, fiddler Qristina Bachand, and Daniel Lapp’s B.C. Fiddle Orchestra, and tickets to both performances have sold out in advance. “I don’t know if it’s the English attitude there, or what it is, but there’s always been a kind vibe there,” MacIsaac said of Victoria. “The audiences are good listeners and lovers of music, so I enjoy playing for them.”
The three-time Juno Award winner was full of praise for his young collaborator, a guitarist whose skill and range — with “lots of feel and great timing and intuition” — makes him one of the best in the country, according to MacIsaac.
“I play with rock bands, I play with DJs, I’ve played in all different kinds of settings. But my natural way of playing is to play with a traditionally innate musician, and those are Cape Bretoners. Quinn is somebody who is not from there but can do that just as well as anyone else. I work with a lot of people like Quinn, but usually they are 50 and 60 years old.”
Bachand, who turns 23 on Saturday, was five when he first picked up the guitar, similar to MacIsaac’s path.
But while Bachand has earned praise in both Celtic music and jazz circles, and recently graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music, MacIsaac has stuck to his roots.
“I’ve made a career of letting people think I do multiple styles of things, because of my fashion sense,” he said with a laugh. “But when it comes down to it, I’m simply playing standard Cape Breton and Irish and Scottish melodies. When I play those, the context of the setting may change how it is presented. And that has always been the case.”
MacIsaac said he hasn’t discussed with Bachand what they are going to play. He expects 90 per cent of it will be the music they played together during their previous performances.
“The tunes we played when I first met him are the tunes that are my favourites. I didn’t play easy stuff with him, let’s put it that way. That’s what blew me away.”
Fans should expect heaps of traditional fiddle, with a variety of jigs, reels, airs and marches interspersed with MacIsaac solo hits such as Sleepy Maggie.
“If I had the virtuosity to play bluegrass fiddle, or pick up a guitar and play jazz, I’d by this point be David Foster and producing albums and being very sensible. But I just stomp my feet and play tunes. I’m pretty straightforward.”
At the end of the day, MacIsaac said he doesn’t mind being called a one-trick pony. “I’ve done 25 years of this. That’s a pretty good life for a pony.”