by Michelle Osborne

Artist: Liz Carroll
Album: Lake Effect
Year Produced: 2002

Ask anyone about great American fiddlers and the name Liz Carroll is sure to come to the forefront of anyone who knows anything's mind. Beginning with winning both Junior and Senior All-Ireland championships before she turned 20, she has produced four brilliant solo albums received a National Heritage Award Fellowship (1994), and was named "Irish Traditional Musician of the Year" by the Irish Echo (2000).

Lake Effect (the title a tribute to the particular type of heavy snowfalls that occur in Chicago and the northeast as winter storms come across the Great Lakes) is Liz's most recent solo album. Accompanied by John Doyle on guitar, the album is a beautiful showcase both for Liz's fiddle playing and her composition skills. It takes a true understanding of the tradition to compose tunes which seem to be a part of it and yet still retain their unique character. She does this easily and has, in fact, done this on all her albums.

A quick glance at the back cover of this album highlights one peculiarity of this album: The Turtle Island String Quartet. Rarely does the combination of classical ensembles with Irish traditional music produce anything but very trite music. Traditional music dressed in a tuxedo and paraded out as "Celtic." With Liz's touch, as well as this particular string quartet, this is not what we get. Instead, we get the Catherine Kelly's/Lake Effect tune set, an absolutely brilliant setting of a traditional tune, followed by one of Liz's own. The setting itself is jazzed up, with rhythm set up in the lower instruments and interjections by the higher violins. While not entirely traditional, it fits the music amazingly well and is the principal highlight of this album. Other highlights are the Liz Carroll tune "The Ghost," a beautiful air composed for a scene in a Marina Carr play, and an absolutely brilliant rendition of the traditional tune, "The Morning Dew."

Buy the Album: Lake Effect