Album Notes

Shawn Prescott Haussler

Born and raised in Northern California on the San Francisco Bay peninsula, Shawn began her musical career playing flute in her grammar school band. As a teen, she began singing with a group of folk musicians that would gather at a friend's house, and her love of folk music was born. She began to experiment with various folk traditions, had a very brief affair with the guitar and banjo, but eventually found Celtic music. After taking a rather long break from music as she began a nursing career and started a family (Shawn has 12 year old triplets), she took up music again, adding the tin-whistle to her repertoire (and later, the low whistles as well), and began playing regularly with a group of folk-musicians at a local pub in Half Moon Bay. In 1999, Shawn moved with her family to the Sierra Foothills, near Nevada City, where she met Maggie McKaig and Luke Wilson (among many other fine musicians) and formed the group The Celtic Wonder Band, releasing their CD, Small Wonder, in 2004. Not long after arriving in the foothills, Shawn had laid her hands on a celtic harp for the first time, and deciding she needed to have one, was soon playing harp, and in April of this year, also added the tenor guitar to her growing family of instruments and included it on her CD. While growing up, Shawn was exposed to a great deal of jazz, from her father who loves jazz and played his records constantly, and from her uncle, a jazz musician who plays sax and flute. In her new solo recording, Taking The Air, Shawn has incorporated some jazz elements on several of the cuts by asking her friend John to play his jazz/blues-style guitar while she added some improvisation with her flute and whistles, and by playing freely with rhythms and instrumental breaks. Some of the pieces on the CD are done more simply, in order that the beautiful, timeless melodies be allowed to soar, or that the lyrics of a song be given one's full attention, and others have Shawn doing her own 2 or 3 part harmonies and layering her various instruments over each other. This CD truly has something for everyone.