About

Each year, a new roster of musicians are featured in the Best of Boxwood concert tour, with performances across Nova Scotia part of Musique Royale’s Summer Festival. This tour celebrates the energetic, traditional dance music of Maritimes Canada, Scotland, Ireland and more. Taking place annually in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the Boxwood Festival is renowned for its inspiring, multi-generational environment of workshops and concerts centered around traditional music and early music, with experts and amateurs providing an immersive artistic experience. The Best of Boxwood tour showcases the fruits of these collaborations across Nova Scotia.

Led by Chris Norman, Boxwood Festival’s founder and equally a world renowned master of the wooden flute, this 25th anniversary tour welcomes back beloved Cape Breton fiddler and baroque violinist David Greenberg, Brid Harper (one of Ireland’s leading traditional fiddle players over forty years) and American singer songwriter Colin Cotter. Concerts take place at historic venues in Annapolis Royal, Eel Brook, Sherbrooke, Iona, Arichat and Tatamagouche.

For more please visit: https://boxwood.org/canada/

About the Artists

Chris Norman, flutes

Powered by his love and mastery of the simple wooden flute, Chris Norman has gained an international profile over the past three decades via his critically praised work as a performer, composer, teacher, flute-maker and builder of a musical community.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chris developed an early passion for traditional Maritime, Celtic and French Canadian music. As a performer and composer, he is a champion and standard-bearer for these forms while simultaneously exploring their boundaries and fusing them with classical styles. The recipient of numerous grants and commissions, Chris has shared his creativity and ingenuity around the world in the form of compositions featured on National Public Radio, the CBC, the BBC, and concert halls from Canada to New Zealand. His composing and playing have also appeared in more than 40 commercially released CDs which range from solo efforts to recordings as part of a duo or ensemble. His recorded work has earned numerous awards, including Indie Awards for best Celtic Album and best Seasonal Album, and a CBC Listeners Choice Awards. He has toured as a solo performer in recitals and with orchestras, as a duo with violinist David Greenberg and with his eponymous group The Chris Norman Ensemble. He has also been a prominent player in international touring ensembles such as Helicon, Skyedance, the Baltimore Consort and Scotland’s Concerto Caledonia.

He is a maker not only of music with the flute, but of flutes themselves, creating bespoke instruments for players worldwide. In this pursuit he has received mentorship from prominent flute-makers Rod Cameron, Robert Bigio and Michael Grinter among others. He is well versed in traditional machining techniques as well as CNC and 3D modeling, and is a talented hand-engraver of his silverwork in a flare-cut style, having studied under master engravers Sam Alfano, Diane Scalese, and Rod Cameron.

He is the driving force behind Boxwood Festivals, whose annual weeklong celebrations of traditional music have taken place in Canada, The USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on-line for the past 26 years. As founder and director of the festival, Chris unites and inspires musicians, teachers, academics, flute-makers and engages a multi-generational, multi-disciplinary community – an achievement that is the subject of a documentary film Scattering of the Stars released in 2017. In recognition of his significant, unique and wide-ranging achievements he was presented with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for contributions to the arts in Canada in 2012, and awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa by Dalhousie University in 2015.

David Greenberg, Baroque violin, Cape Breton fiddle

For over three decades, David has enjoyed a double career as a Baroque violinist and Cape Breton fiddler. His fluency and experience in these two genres makes him uniquely qualified to interpret the wild music of 18th-century Scotland. David is a graduate of Indiana University’s Early Music Institute, where he studied with Stanley Ritchie. He has performed, taught, and recorded primarily in North America and Western Europe, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and the Far East.

David has performed with Tafelmusik, Red Priest, Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, Concerto Caledonia, Apollo’s Fire, Ensemble Caprice, La Nef, Toronto Consort, Seattle Baroque, Les Voix Humaines, Chris Norman, Suzie LeBlanc, Doug MacPhee, and Musica Pacifica. He has performed as guest soloist/director with several orchestras, including the Calgary Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Nova Scotia. He has recorded over 80 CDs, including with most of these ensembles and collaborators, as well as three groundbreaking Scottish-Cape Breton-Baroque recordings with his own ensemble Puirt A Baroque in the 1990s. David co-authored The DunGreen Collection (1996), an influential treatise on Cape Breton fiddling. He is also a composer and arranger. Many of his tunes have been recorded by Cape Breton musicians such as Buddy MacMaster, Carl MacKenzie, Jerry Holland, and The Rankins.

David enjoys sharing his passion and knowledge about Baroque and Cape Breton music in workshop settings, including his online courses and monthly in-person & streamed Hobbit House CB teaching sessions. His current solo touring program is called Multiple Voices for One (also the name of his new recording, released on Dec 2, 2022).

Brid Harper, fiddle

Bríd Harper is regarded as one of the leading Irish traditional fiddle players of the last forty years. She grew up close to the east Donegal village of Castlefinn and started playing the fiddle at the age of nine. There is music on both sides of her family. Her grandfather Stephen Harper was a fiddler and came from a musical family. On her mother’s side her uncle Frank Kelly is a well known fiddler.

In the mid 1970’s Bríd began taking music lessons with Pat McCabe at her local branch of Comhaltas. She was also heavily encouraged by her parents who brought her to sessions and fleadhanna. There was a lot of Irish music in the house in the form of LPs and Cassettes. She won all the underage competitions at the annual All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil both in the Slow Air and Dance Music categories. In 1988 she won three prestigious titles - Senior All Ireland, Fiddler of Dooney and Oireachtas na Gaeilge.

She is an MA graduate of the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance at University of Limerick. She has toured extensively and performed with many great musicians including Dermot Byrne, Steve Cooney, Arty McGlynn, Nollaig Casey, Maeve Donnelly, Harry Bradley, John Doyle, Sylvain Barou Nicolas Quemener and more. Bríd is highly respected and much sought after as a teacher. She has tutored at Summer Schools and workshops throughout Ireland, The UK, The USA, Canada, many parts of mainland Europe, New Zealand and Australia.

She has appeared on every major broadcast channel on the island of Ireland as well as BBC Alba Scotland. She has featured on local radio stations in France, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Her much anticipated solo recording “Bríd Harper” released in 2015 was described by Tradconnect.com as “solo fiddle of the most exquisite kind” and “ one of this year’s best traditional albums”. Bríd is also a member of the SíFiddlers formed in 2018 which is made up of 13 female Donegal fiddlers. They released a recording in 2020 showcasing some of the most popular and better known Donegal repertoire. Bríd who resides near Dungannon Co Tyrone teaches fiddle on a one-on-one basis from her home and in recent times has begun composing tunes in her spare time. She is a visiting tutor and performer at The Irish World Academy in Limerick University.

Colin Cotter, singer songwriter

Colin Cotter is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, and creative-at-large from the San Francisco Bay Area. He has played gigs from coast to coast in the USA, toured internationally in Canada, Ireland, and Spain, and teaches regularly at some of the top folk music camps in the country.

The main musical endeavors in Colin’s life at the moment include an edgy, electro-acoustic adventure with fiddler / violist Ryan McKasson that the two are calling Old Growth Graveyard; an intergenerational acoustic groove, energized trio called Joe Craven & Frisky! with Joe Craven and Sumaia Jackson; duos with fiddlers Sumaia Jackson and Adrianna Ciccone; sideman backing guitar work; solo performances; and the occasional one-off collaborations. He has released several albums with the bands he co-founded, MAC (Perfectly Manufactured Reality, 2018) and A Thousand Years at Sea (4 releases between 2009-2014) and has multiple new releases in the works with his current projects.

Colin grew up fully immersed in music. When he was four years old, his mom gave him a fiddle and began teaching him to play the tunes she had learned herself as a child, building on several generations of a family tradition in Finnish folk music. Immediately upon attending fiddle camp a few years later, he fell in love with the Scottish and Irish traditional tunes and songs that would come to play a lead role in his ongoing musical journey alongside Americana, rock, pop, funk, and a wide array of improvisational jam bands (for lack of a better term). When he needs to put a label on the music that this organic mélange of influences produces, he often goes with, “California Celtic.”

In addition to being a fine fiddler and singer, Colin is an accomplished self-taught guitarist, having taken to the instrument both for the practical purpose of accompanying himself singing and out of a deep affinity for sitting in the rhythmic belly of the beast when playing with fiddlers. Over the years, he has crafted a unique approach to expressing on the instrument that he couples with an effort to artfully indulge spontaneity and seek adventure as much as possible in the music he makes.