When fiddler and vocalist Liz Faiella begins a plaintive Irish ballad in her delicate, haunting voice, a noisy pub crowd quiets down to listen. And when she and brother, Dan Faiella, who plays guitar and low whistle, dive into lively reels and jigs, someone needs to check the pulse of anyone who doesn’t feel the urge to get up and dance.
The siblings have produced their first album, At Long Last, and will celebrate with a Hometown Release Concert at Umami in Northwood on Friday from 8 to 10 p.m. Admission is $5, and the new CD will be available for purchase.
They have performed at numerous music festivals including the Boston Celtic Music Festival, the New England Folk Festival, the Acadia Trad Festival and New Hampshire’s Seacoast Irish Festival, and play regularly at contradances throughout New England.
The album was recorded at Jim Prendergast’s Mill Pond studio in Portsmouth.
“For our first recording experience it was great to have somebody who was so encouraging, showing us the ropes,” Faiella said. “He knew what he was doing. He’s a wonderful guitarist and is really familiar with the genre. We kind of geeked out about Celtic music together.”
It was hard to choose which songs to include on the album, Faiella said. She thought of the Marie Kondo method of decluttering, by keeping what brings you joy.
“We know a lot of songs,” Faiella said, “and had to ask ourselves what can we not leave off the CD? What is absolutely essential that we absolutely love? What do we love? That was the main criteria. Although we didn’t set out to select a good mix of tunes, we wound up with a collection that’s a pretty good representation: death-filled love songs, upbeat happy-sounding reels, intense jigs. We always end our performances with ‘The Parting Glass’ so we ended our CD with that.”
Some of the songs are Irish, some are Scottish, and some are from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Scottish immigrants settled in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“Depending on who you ask, ‘The Parting Glass’ is either Scottish or Irish,” Faiella said. “We tend not to take sides on that because it could get us in trouble.”
One song, “Ten Thousand Miles,” is British.
“We learned that song from a British singer, Nic Jones,” Faiella said. “It’s a bit outside of what we normally would do but we just love Nic Jones so much that we had to include it.”
And “Marcel Martin” was written right here in New England by Will Welling, a contradance musician.
“If you ask Dan and I what our favorite to tune play nowadays is, that’s one of the first ones that comes to our minds; it’s so joyous,” Faiella said.
Labels aren’t always important, though. New England contradance music, which has been played here for hundreds of years, is a pretty broad umbrella, Faiella said. It encompasses a lot of Scottish, Irish and Cape Breton songs as well as tunes that were written more recently in that style.
“The lines are very blurry,” she said. “We say we play music from the Celtic and New England tradition but the definitions are pretty fluid.”
The Faiellas play many of their tunes in medleys, a traditional way of playing Irish, Scottish, or Cape Breton tunes. The first selection on the album, “The Bridal March from Unst / The Holly Bush / The Mason’s Apron / Marcel Martin (W. Welling),” is an example.
“These tunes all sound good going from one to the next,” she said. “They might have some sort of energy change. In the first medley, it’s a slow air, then a jig, which is slightly more upbeat, and then it goes into a reel, and then it goes into another reel in a different key so each time we’re upping the energy level in some way. It’s a trajectory of going from something slow and sweet to something energetic and peppy.”
This medley is Dan Faiella’s favorite on the CD.
“That last tune of the set, ‘Marcel Martin,’ was a tune I grew up listening to on David Surette and Rodney Miller’s album New Leaf,” he said. “It was great to get a chance to record it.”
The siblings frequently perform with other musicians, sometimes together and sometimes separately.
“I’m going to be playing at the Highland Games in Lincoln with a band call Clan Du later this month,” Faiella said. “It’s a Scottish rock band that I listened to a lot in high school and I just recently got the call to play with them. Scottish rock is a fun genre. They have a lot of traditional music, but they have a drummer and an electric guitar.”
Faiella is chairwoman of the folk, jazz, and popular music department at the Concord Community Music School, where she also teaches fiddle and coaches folk ensembles. She also established the Fall Fiddle Festival, which is in its third year, at the school and coming up Oct. 13.
“Dan and I will be playing at that,” she said, “along with a ‘gypsy jazz’ fiddler named Jason Anick – he’s fabulous – and Katie McNally, a Scottish fiddle player.”
At last year’s Fiddle Festival, Winifred Horan, who is the fiddler with the Irish band Solas and who played with the group Cherish the Ladies, needed an accompanist. Dan Faiella was available. Since then, he has been touring with the Winifred Horan Trio. He recently spent a week in Maine at the Acadia Trad Festival, run by the Acadia School of Traditional Music & Art , where he accompanied Horan and his sister.
“I have been fortunate to collaborate with a number of folk musicians around New England in the past few years,” Dan Faiella said. “This past week I got to accompany Hanz Araki and Colleen Raney from Portland, which was great fun. Learning their arrangements of traditional songs and familiarizing myself with their repertoire was a great experience.”
New collaborations are exciting, he said. They always lead to a new sound, and help him to expand his musical vocabulary.
“You also have to listen especially closely when you’re accompanying someone for the first time,” he said. “It’s like a conversation with a person you’ve never met. You’re getting to know them and getting to know how they interact.
“Accompanying Liz is different,” he said. “We’re both so familiar with each other’s style that we can pick up on what the other’s doing pretty easily at any given moment.”
Dan Faiella studied with David Surette at the music school and with John Doyle, who he called one of the greatest Irish guitar players in the world, at a music camp in Acadia.
“There are so many influences on my playing,” he said. “My traditional influences include the guitarist and singer Nic Jones, as well some harp players like Michelle Mulcahey. Over the past few years I’ve enjoyed taking arrangements from other instruments like harp or fiddle and trying to emulate some of the stylistic tendencies of that instrument.”
In addition to expanding his guitar skills, Dan Faiella is also pursuing an art career. He spent four years between high school and college doing an art program and is now a senior at the University of New Hampshire studying studio art and music.
Liz Faiella recently visited Ireland and has some advice for people who find themselves in a place where Irish music is being played.
“During the instrumental music there’s a hubbub and it’s all kind of contributing to the chaos,” she said. “When somebody sings a song, the etiquette and tradition is for everyone to be quiet and to listen – to give that person the floor and let them tell their story.”