Dana Lyn

Bio:

Brooklyn-based Dana Lyn's versatility as a musician is drawn from a strong classical music background in both the violin and the piano and an equally strong background in traditional Irish music. She has performed in esteemed venues such as New York City’s Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, and has performed in headlining groups at the National Folk-life Festival, Celtic Connections, the Cork Folk Festival, Milwaukee Irish Music and Sebastopol Festivals.

As a traditional Irish fiddle player, Dana has recorded and toured with the Green Fields of America, the late Johnny Cunningham, Grammy Award-winning vocalist Susan McKeown and NEA Award Recipient and noted folklorist Mick Moloney. She was featured on ‘The Raw Bar’ and ‘Geanntrai’, two documentaries on traditional Irish music that aired on RTE 1 in Ireland and has been a fiddle music instructor at the Catskills Irish Arts Week and the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis and Elkins College.

In 2008, Dana was cast as an onstage musician in the Public Theatre’s production of Hamlet, which was performed in Central Park as part of its annual Shakespeare Festival. She was also cast as an onstage musician in the first year of the Bridge Project, a venture co-produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Old Vic and was directed by Academy-Award winner Sam Mendes, which traveled to Singapore, New Zealand, Spain and Germany in the summer of 2009.

Dana has released two albums of traditional Irish fiddle music with guitarist Junji Shirota. Her third release, entitled “Looking for the Early Opener,” presents traditional fiddle music alongside her own emerging musical expression. The album features seven original compositions, the first ever recorded collaboration between a fiddle player and a beat-boxer and alternate cross-tunings: “The overall effect is of intimate and occasionally disturbing warmth and contact as Lyn transports you. Beautiful." (James O’Brien, the Irish Edition, 2005). Other recording credits include Grammy-winning folk album, “High, Wide and Handsome” by Loudon Wainwright and the upcoming Walkmen release, “Lisbon.”

More recently, Dana has focused on string arranging and her own compositional projects; her string arrangements are featured on Mick Moloney’s highly acclaimed release “If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews,” and both her pop and classical arrangements were performed by the US Army Strings at the 2010 Savannah Music Festival. She plays in and arranges for “Bach Reformed”, a duo with multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose, which focuses on the re-contextualization of the Bach Solo Cello Suites and Violin Partitas (www.bachreformed.com). She also plays in and arranges for the Yeti String Quartet, Dionne Werewolf, the Nuala Kennedy Band, and the Pride of the Subway Ceili Band.

She holds a degree in Violin Performance from Oberlin Conservatory.

Member Since:

April 13, 2007

Members:

On "Prelude": Rob Moose, tenor guitar

On "Snowfall": Rob Moose, violin

On "Drunken Gauger": Brendan Dolan, piano; Lindsey Horner, bass

Influences:

waves, words, and the weather

Sounds Like:

a technicolour fish with a cornucopia tied to its ass (wait. do fish have asses?)

Record Label:

Early Opener Productions