EJ Ouellette's "The Fiddle Funnel Sessions" is an energetic salute to fiddle music, blending the rich traditions of New England, Celtic, Acadian, Scottish, Irish, and French-Canadian music into one delightful instrumental package. In 37 minutes of nine original tracks, Ouellette turns years of learning, performing, and living with traditional fiddle music into a project that feels both firmly anchored and creatively innovative.
The release explores the message a piece of music tells without words. Rhythm, arrangement, and group playing tell their own stories. Each work has its own identity while helping shape the broader evolution of New England's live fiddle culture. The result is an album that honors the past without being confined to it. One of the highlights is "Elegant Sunrise," a beautiful, emotive tune that quickly showcases the album's ability to build ambiance through instrumental music. “Strathspey Delnabo” adds a character to the collection, while “The Boston Jig” provides the kind of vivacious energy that makes violin music contagious. Ouellette, in particular in these three tracks, shows her ability to shift from elegance and tradition to rhythmic intensity without losing a strong sense of uniqueness.
"Maggy in Majorca" is one of the album's most intriguing stories, a song named for Ouellette’s fiddle and born out of a lifetime of crossing musical borders. The theme covers trips across New England’s Celtic-Acadian traditions, as well as musical encounters in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, West Africa, and America. Instead of treating those influences as separate destinations, Ouellette engages with them, showing how one instrument can be spoken in other cultures while remaining rooted in its origins.
"The Fiddle Funnel Sessions" is mainly instrumental, except for one vocal piece, “In the Green Room,” which adds another layer of depth to the album's largely melody-driven storytelling. What is really interesting about the project is the sense of movement. This is not just an album of traditional fiddle music gazing back, but one that shows how tradition can continue to evolve through new compositions, partnerships, travel, and performance.
With "The Fiddle Funnel Sessions", EJ Ouellette presents listeners with a vivid musical crossroads where history, exploration, and creative innovation converge. It’s a warm reminder that the fiddle’s tale is still being penned, one tune at a time.