Brenna Mac Crimmon Biography A Canadian folk singer

Brenna Mac. Crimmon - Biography A Canadian folk singer from Toronto, Ontario, has been performing, studying and teaching Balkan and Turkish music since late 1980 s. In Toronto, she worked with local Turkish and Macedonian ensembles before eventually deciding to “go to the source” and learn more about the music and the cultures that produced it. She spent a year as a guest student in the folk music division of the Turkish State Music Conservatory in 1985 -86. Back in Toronto she continued to work with community groups and lead the Altin Yildiz Orkestar – arguably Toronto’s first Balkan-Gypsy Band. In 1995 she returned to Istanbul with the intent to sojourn for “six months to a year”. That stay lasted 5 years. While she loves all types of Turkish and Balkan music, she was drawn to the points where that music overlaps in Turkish musical culture. During her years in Turkey she worked many wonderful traditional musicians, clarinetist Selim Sesler, accordionist Muammer Ketencoğlu and Baba Zula, a Turkish Psychedelic Folk Art Rock band. She is a featured performer in “Crossing the Bridge’’, Fatih Akın’s 2005 documentary of the Istanbul music scene. Her theatre work also includes musical director of the multiple awardwinning Volcano production of “Goodness”. In 2010, she found herself in Moscow as a member of the cast of “Bobble” with Bobby Mc. Ferrin and in the summer of 2011 she toured across Europe with Balkan beat DJ Shantel and the Bucovina Club Orkestra. She has recorded several times with the aforementioned musicians, has appeared as a guest on many albums and film soundtracks in Canada, the US and Europe. She has taught Turkish and Balkan song at workshops across North America, in France, in Turkey and Japan. Her current projects include a retrospective of influential Turkish song-writer Fikret Kızılok with Toronto musicians Jack Mc. Rae and Deb Sinha, an electro-acoustic mélange of Turkish and Greek songs with Berlin trio Alcalica, a high spirited twoperson Hootenany with Toronto singer Alan Gasser, singing and playing songs of the Eastern Mediterranean with Jayne Brown, Sophia Grigoriadis and Maryem Tollar as Nazar-i Turkwaz and trying to bridge the gap between ukulele and Turkish folk music.