Natalie Haas

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #137 (August/September 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Natalie Haas

Inspiration and Exploration

by Kerry Dexter

Natalie Haas has been working on a tune book, a book of transcriptions from two albums she and Alasdair Fraser have made together, Fire and Grace and In the Moment. Haas plays the cello, and Fraser the fiddle. "There are a lot of string players who really want to get their hands on this music. It's something I've never tried to do before, because Alasdair and I are very much of the philosophy of not writing anything down," Haas said, laughing. "Just remembering it, or sometimes forgetting it on purpose,
and that's how new things get created. It's been a really interesting process to go back and look at all this material from a more critical, analytical perspective, and write it all down. So I'm figuring out how to notate all the things that I do, which are not necessarily within traditional Western classical notation!"

The roots of the music Fraser and Haas make are in Scotland, and so is the lively and conversational nature of their instrumental collaborations. Fraser, who is from Scotland but has lived for many years in California, is an eloquent player and a respected teacher whose fiddle camps in both the United States and Scotland continue to train, inspire, and connect people with music. "Alasdair likes to really inspire people to play music. He's not that particular about what kind of music it is, just that you do play, and he passes that on," explained fiddler and singer Laura Cortese, who spent many of her summers at Fraser's Valley of the Moon Camps in California.

So did Haas, and she's now a teacher at the camp. But she came along to Valley of the Moon almost by accident. Her younger sister, Brittany, is a fiddle player, and she's also made a professional career in music; she is now touring with the Boston-based roots band Crooked Still. They grew up in California, and it was because of her sister's interest that Haas picked up a cello in the first place. "I was nine when I started on the cello," Natalie Haas recalled. "My sister had started on the fiddle a year before; she is younger than me but had actually started playing before I even picked up an instrument. And it was actually her violin teacher who recommended that I take up the cello so we could play duets together, and also wouldn't be in a competitive state of mind. So that was how I got introduced to the cello. I didn't choose it for myself, but I was very lucky that it was chosen for me because it turned out to be a perfect match."

[cover #137]