From festival stages and concert halls to raucous August nights at fiddle camp, the Flyers are here to make sure New England music has a seat at the table as a distinct and vital American tradition. All residents of the great state of Maine, Katie McNally (fiddle), Emily Troll (accordion), Benjamin Foss (guitar), and Neil Pearlman (piano) cut their teeth playing for contra dances and learning from the greats. Individually, they’ve toured the world playing Irish, Scottish, and Quebecois music and they bring this wellspring of knowledge and technical prowess to the American music that was born from these traditions.

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Fraser has a concert and recording career spanning over 30 years, with a long list of awards, accolades, radio and television credits, and feature performances on top movie soundtracks (Last of the Mohicans, Titanic, etc.). In 2011, he was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame.

In additional to performing, Fraser has motivated generations of string players through teaching at string and dance camps across the globe.

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– Antti-J Janka-Murros, Kansanmusiikki Magazine

Teho. is a Finnish power-fiddle duo that explodes musical boundaries while having roots deeply in the tradition. Teho’s fiddlers grew up in Central Ostrobothnia, Finland – an area known for its extremely virile and rich folk music life.

Their music combines fluently Finnish traditional fiddling, Norwegian Halling, Swedish Polska, Bebop, Western Swing, and contemporary folk music. Improvisation also plays a big part of the duo’s sound. Tero Hyväluoma and Esko Järvelä are both top-notch names in the Nordic folk music field and cross-over freelancers without genre boundaries. They have played together for years in various different bands and projects, including one of the most well known Finnish folk bands, Frigg. Teho.’s debut album was nominated for a Finnish Grammy (Emma Awards) in 2018. 

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With a 20-year background studying polyphonic music around the world, Lauren Breunig, Jeremy Carter-Gordon, Lynn Rowan, and Will Rowan share a vibrant energy onstage with a blending of voices that can only come from decades of friendship alongside dedicated practice. The ensemble shifts effortlessly between drastically different styles of music, drawing their audience along on a journey that spans continents and centuries, illuminating and expanding on the profound power and variation of the human voice.

There’s another, crucial dimension to Windborne that guides and roots their artistry. They are adherents to folk music’s longtime alliance with social activism, labor and civil rights, and other movements that champion the oppressed, the poor, and the disenfranchised. Their songs burst with lyrics that, while penned decades or centuries ago, still ring true in modern times, and Windborne’s dynamic harmonies breathe new life into these songs.

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Polky stands out for its distinctive elements, including the mesmerizing traditional vocals and incorporation of the ‘suka,’ an ancient lap fiddle reconstructed from historical paintings. Marta Solek, an accomplished suka virtuoso, has performed alongside esteemed Polish artists like Same Suki, Maria Pomianowska, and Nikola Kołodziejczyk. Furthermore, the lead vocalist, Ewelina Ferenc, earned the prestigious title of Traditional Singer of The Year at the 2022 Canadian Folk Music Awards. Through their performances, Polky introduces Polish culture to North American audiences, embodying the role of cultural ambassadors for Polish modern traditions.

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The band has received critical acclaim from NPR’s “Shuffle,” SWR2 in Germany, All About Jazz, Jazz Weekly, and Cleveland Magazine. From the specific dialects, stories and songs of Italy’s pre-industrial past spring Alla Boara’s dynamic and touching performances that inspire listeners of any heritage to treasure their ancestral roots and to revel in our shared humanity, which is as surprising, playful, mournful and tender as the songs themselves.

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​For more than 20 years, guitarist Christine Tassan has led her boat with brio, aplomb and an absolutely contagious dynamism. One of the rare female jazz guitarist and gypsy jazz soloists, also singer, composer, author, director and producer, she takes part in numerous musical projects in Quebec and on the international scene, both as a leader and as a guest musician.

In 2003, she founded her gypsy jazz and swing songs group, Christine Tassan et les Imposteures, which was immediately successful and became a must of the gypsy jazz scene. Unique in its kind, this feminine ensemble performed in more than 600 festivals and venues in Quebec, Canada, Europe, United States and China.

In 2020, alongside Les Imposteures, here she comes with this new quintet project, “Voyage Intérieur”, which brings together ten instrumental compositions. We can discover a new facet of the guitarist, with electric and bebop sounds.

2022 – Nominee JUNO Award, best jazz album

2022 – Nominee Prix Opus, best jazz album

​2021 Nominee FÉLIX/ADISQ, best jazz album

​2021 – Nominee GAMMIQ, best jazz album

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Andrew Wells-Oberegger is a Canadian composer, musical arranger, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He has been professionally involved in the early and world music scenes for over twenty years and is known for his mastery of an impressive variety of instruments such as classical guitar, renaissance lute, oud, bagpipes, saz, mandolin, bouzouki and santoor. Relying on a solid academic training coupled with his knowledge of international musical traditions gained through master classes, he adds singing as well as playing various flutes and three singular types of percussion —daff, req and Italian tamburello — to the extended list of his possibilities. 

He was featured on more than twenty albums with various ensembles including La Nef, La Mandragore, ESEM, Cercamon, De Lònga and La Strada. Many of the projects bearing his signature have also been awarded or nominated for the ADISQ gala, the Opus Awards and the Canadian Folk Music Award.

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Yacouba exposes new audiences to the enchanting sounds of the kora—a 21-stringed instrument that is plucked and produces a distinctive sound that is quickly associated with West Africa. Throughout West African history, the kora was played as a solo instrument by djelys, or storytellers, whose roles in society were to perform for kings, nobility, and village chiefs. The songs sung by djelys were stories that had been passed down from generation to generation, and captured the oral history of the people and culture of West Africa describing social life, cultural identify and family backgrounds.

Yacouba also leads his own band, SIYA, meaning “source” in Bambara. The sound of SIYA represents the breakthrough of the past few generations of Western African musicians who have opened up this musical experience to new audiences, incorporating additional instruments and spanning musical genres. The other instruments of SIYA include the N’goni, a traditional guitar that was used by griots during the Manding Empire prior to the kora; the “talking drum”, a small drum held on the shoulder of the player and hit with a curved stick or the hand to mimic phrases of the human voice, requiring great dexterity by the player; the calabash, that is easily recognized by its deep resounding bass sound frequent to West African music; and an acoustic guitar and/or trumpet both of which adds to the more modern approach.

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The release of their second album, Ode & Ballade, released in 2024 has sent them touring the globe once again across North America and Scandinavia, selling out venues and making new friends and fans wherever they go. This acclaimed album comprises stories of medieval saints and sacred wells, fair maidens outsmarting presumptuous knights, beautiful or boisterous drinking songs, thieves meeting their fate, heartbreaking love songs, and groovy dance tunes. CBC Music, Robert Rowat gave this advice: “If you’re lucky enough to have a cottage to escape to when the warm weather hits, take this album with you.” And Leslie Barcza wrote: “I think it speaks for itself, the musicianship, the powerful invocation of times gone by. The whole CD is magical like that, sometimes in Swedish sometimes French, sometimes English.”

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