FIERY FIDDLES

Beolach gets back on track

For a band of busy musicians like the members of Beolach, the past 17 months have been, to borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times.

The “worst” part of the equation is immediately obvious, as fiddlers Wendy Macisaac and Mairi Rankin, keyboardist Mac Morin and piper/guitarist Matt Macisaac have been unable to be where they shine the brightest: in front of an appreciative, lively crowd tapping their feet or moving their bodies to the Cape Breton Celtic supergroup’s insistent rhythms and intuitive interplay.

The “best” part is the momentum the group’s posthiatus album All Hands has had since it played its last pre-pandemic shows in British Columbia in the winter of 2020. Over the past year, the effervescent and focused collection of tunes has earned Beolach its first Juno Award nomination, plus a pair of Canadian Folk Music Awards and just last month, the 2021 East Coast Music Award for Entertainer of the Year.

“To come from what we just did ...,” muses Macisaac on her back patio in Halifax. “Stopping touring, not getting on a plane, not being able to perform for an audience, and learning to perform for a camera — really for lots of people but not for anyone in the room — it was really a learning curve.

“Then to have all these nominations and awards and so on, it was really good for everyone. Not just for Beolach, but for everyone who loves our music to be excited about.”

Macisaac says she has to laugh at the irony of being named Entertainer of the Year after several months without a regular slate of live concerts, but is anxious to show why they won when the band is back on stage for the latter half of the summer with a run of six shows between July 30 and Aug. 22 taking place on both sides of the Canso Causeway.

But as good as Beolach is on record, or on Zoom, it’s that live interaction that was immediately apparent 23 years ago when the quartet took shape as a Celtic Colours after-hours collaboration that keeps crowds coming back to see them.

“I think this is a Cape Breton thing, and a Maritime thing as well; we always like to pick on each other, even on stage, and that turns into something that the audience tends to enjoy,” says Macisaac. “A lot of times at the end of a show, people tell us that they enjoyed how much we enjoy what we’re doing.

“So winning Fan’s Choice Entertainer of the Year this year is either totally amazing, because we haven’t performed for anyone in a year, or ... not. So we’re just going to go with the ‘totally amazing.’ ”

While Macisaac has been able to hang with Rankin, her sister-in-strings who also lives in Halifax, she’s looking forward to that first rehearsal with Morin, currently based in Port Hawkesbury, and Matt Macisaac, who’s been living further afield while teaching at a school in Stayner, Ont. near Georgian Bay.

Beolach will also be joined by multi-instrumentalist Boyd Macneil from the Barra MacNeils for some of the shows, adding some extra spice with his skills on guitar, banjo, mandolin and fiddle.

“The five of us are going to meet at the hall in Creignish, a couple of days before the first gig in Ben Eoin, and I know that it’s going to be fun because there’s going to be a lot of people in the audience who we know that love the music,” she says.

“It cannot be anything but fun, for sure.”

After playing The Lakes Golf Club and Resort in Ben Eoin on July 30, Beolach heads to the Inverness Sunset Series at the Inverness Centre for the Arts on July 31. Then it’s a pair of mainland shows at The Stage at St. Andrew’s in Halifax on Aug. 5 and a Lunenburg Folk Harbour Society concert on Aug. 6.

The mini-tour wraps up in Cape Breton with shows at the Bras d’or Lakes Inn on Aug. 7 and Port Hawkesbury’s Tunes on the Trails series on Aug. 22. Ticket details are available on the band’s website at beolach.ca/shows.

As an added bonus, Beolach will also perform and partake of tasty treats as guests on Mary Janet Macdonald’s Tunes and Wooden Spoons Youtube live stream on Aug. 1 (visit www.tunesandwoodenspoons.com for details).

All of this activity is getting the group primed for more activity in the fall, and eventually hopping over the border for shows in the U.S. and Europe in 2022.

Macisaac says she and her bandmates have been individually going back over the older tunes on Beolach’s self-titled debut — which just turned 20 — and its follow-up Variations, to get back up to speed. But she looks forward to feeling that collective muscle memory kick in once they’re back in the same room together playing the music they’ve lived with their entire lives.

“It’s funny, I don’t know if it’s this way with singersongwriters, or all kinds of other genres, but with Celtic music, once you know what you’re doing, it’s there. Pretty much forever. It’s weird, it just comes out.

“It’s just a funny thing, but it’s a good thing.”