In 2015, Duo Mackie/Hendrix was nothing but a hapless couple of friends midnight sunbathing at the Norwegian arctic circle – a Canadian jazz purist and a Flemish linguist shooting the breeze about their differences. Years passed, lined with whispered fiddle tunes in French hotel rooms and card games on cloudy patios. Their differences balanced out into similarities, and they developed a unique approach to playing music on the fiddle and the melodeon.

In 2023, Alan Mackie and Lies Hendrix carve traditional dance music from all over North America and Europe into the forms of popular social dances in the balfolk canon: Kentucky square dances become jigs, Värmland hallings become Breton line dances, and whatever an avant-deux is they have three of them. Mackie’s intuition for jazz and bluegrass improvisation and Hendrix’s creative harmonic instincts build curious bridges between seemingly unrelated styles of fiddle music, across which exciting and eccentric music for dancing and listening can travel.