Bloor Annex Summer Music Series: Elise Boeur & Adam Iredale-Gray

JUNO nominated, Canadian Folk Music Award winning instrumentalists Elise Boeur & Adam Iredale-Gray explore fiddle music in fluid, easy lockstep. Fiddler and Hardanger fiddle player Elise Boeur draws from the wells of Norwegian and Swedish fiddle music, melds in fistfuls of arcane influences, and emerges with a multi-faceted sound grounded in Nordic traditions. Adam Iredale-Gray is a versatile guitarist and fiddler with deep roots in Irish traditional music and a commitment to innovation. They each spent years touring as collaborators with diverse projects, including their acclaimed neo-folk quintet Aerialists, and all along they were playing fiddle tunes at sessions, folk dances, and afterparties. With this duo project, you’re invited into these social music afterhours, as they dig into their favourite tunes on hardingfele, guitar, and raging twin fiddles. Their show is a masterful exploration of traditional music collected from years of travel and immersion in aural traditions. A Norwegian gangar learned in the mountains of Telemark, Irish jigs picked up from countless sessions, a French bourrée lifted from a community dance – the thread that connects these pieces is Boeur and Iredale-Gray’s open-hearted, contagious love of the melodies. Their debut duo album Fiddle Tunes is exactly what the title promises; a celebration of the experience of sharing fiddle traditions the way they’ve been shared for centuries, the tune recreating itself anew with each repetition as folks sit knee to knee and play.