Bio:
For twenty years fiddler and composer Andrew Finn Magill (Finn) has been pursuing parallel careers in traditional Irish music, Brazilian choro, jazz and American fiddle, the result of many years living abroad and a childhood growing up at The Swannanoa Gathering in Asheville, North Carolina where he studied every summer with dozens of Irish, old-time, bluegrass and swing fiddle masters. His six albums constitute thousands of hours dedicated to each genre and the basis of Finn’s original music which is founded on the principle of collaboration. Over the last ten years he has performed with John Doyle, Rising Appalachia, Charm City Junction, Open the Door for Three, Greg Ruby, The Paul McKenna Band, and Peter Mawanga in venues that include Milwaukee Irish Fest, Celtic Connections, Olympia Hall in Paris, France, DisneyWorld, and Malawi’s Lake of Stars Festival.
In 2005 he debuted with Drive & Lift, an Irish fiddle album that has been featured on NPR and multiple official Spotify playlists. In 2009 Finn was awarded a Fulbright-mtvU Fellowship to spend a year in Malawi co-writing and co-producing a concept album about HIV/AIDS with Malawi pop icon Peter Mawanga. The result Stories of AIDS: Mau a Malawi is a soundscape of traditional Irish and Malawian sounds reimagined as Afro-pop with a riveting message of social justice. It was the inspiration for a multimedia show of the same name Finn wrote and co-directed with Jon Haas and Joseph Megel and debuted at the University of North Carolina’s Memorial Hall in October 2011.
In 2016, Finn released the two-part concept album Roots and Branches which spans from traditional Irish music to new acoustic jazz. Roots debuted at #46 on the Folk DJ charts and writes Grammy-winning Americana artist Tim O’Brien:
“He has learned from and now plays with the best in the genre. On Branches you can hear a new musical voice emerging. I’m gonna keep listening for Finn Magill.”
In 2014 Finn moved to Rio de Janeiro to study Brazilian choro music. He has been an ambassador of Brazilian violin ever since and has founded many Brazilian music groups including O Finno, Violino no Choro, Brazilian Strings Trio (with fellow American violinist Ted Falcon and Brazilian guitarist Nando Duarte) and Canta, Violino! the album of which was released on Ropeadope Records in 2018. Says Brazilian percussion legend Airto Moreira of Chick Corea and Miles Davis:
“Its nice to see fresh, young musicians carrying on the traditions of Brazilian music. Finn Magill displays a love and authenticity that can fool you into thinking he is from Brazil. His style is playful and light, yet soulful and passionate. Congratulations!”
Fascinated by the connections between the fiddling traditions of Ireland and Scotland and their musical cousins of oldtime and bluegrass, in 2018 Finn created the lecture series “The Evolution of Irish & Scottish Fiddle in our Appalachian Mountains” which is a musical presentation for adults that explores the connections between these styles through their fiddle tunes. This lecture series is part of a larger commitment to music education and Finn has taught traditional Irish music, bluegrass, choro, and old-time at over a dozen fiddle camps across the U.S, Scotland, Brazil, and France.
In 2019 Finn received a 2019 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship award to make an album of original music which will be recorded in 2020 and released sometime later that year. Finn currently tours with Dave Curley (of Slide & One for the Foxes), Alan Murray (The Colin Farrell Band), Seán Gray (formerly of The Paul McKenna Band), Brazilian group Canta, Violino!, as a solo artist and as a periodic sidemen with dozens of other artists in various genres.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
"I’m gonna keep listening for Finn Magill." - Tim O’Brien
"Andrew Finn Magill is a leading fiddler in a new generation of musicians." - Martin Hayes
"Serene and incredibly soulful, North Carolina fiddler Andrew Finn Magill encounters the tradition in a manner reminiscent of Keith Jarrett on The Melody at Night With You." - Siobhan Long, The Irish Times
“Its nice to see fresh, young musicians carrying on the traditions of Brazilian music. Finn Magill displays a love and authenticity for Chorinho that can fool you into thinking he is from Brazil. His style is playful and light, yet soulful and passionate. Congratulations!” - Airto Moreira (Weather Report, Miles Davis, Chick Corea)
“Andrew Finn Magill is an extraordinary violin virtuoso who has taken a super deep dive into Brazilian music and culture. Check out his “muito calor” original tunes —they have all the energy and groove of Rio, with a healthy helping of American spin and improvisation! Meu Deus!!!!!" - Matt Glaser, Artistic Director American Roots Music Program Berklee College of Music
"A great depth and understanding of traditional Irish music" - Mairéad Ní Mhoanaigh (Altan)
“He is an innovator and composer with clearly his own signature.” – grammy nominee, Liz Carroll
"Sweet swinging fiddle playing with a deep understanding of the roots of this music, a very creative imagination and beautiful violin technique" - Mike Marshall
“He is very talented and hard working. He’s just an absolute natural” – Brian Conway (All-Ireland fiddle champion)
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).