Kevin Burke is upbeat about the current state of Celtic music. Though its mass appeal may have waned over the past decade, the veteran Irish fiddler notes that its hard-core following is on the rise. He sees a movement back to the genre’s community roots in reaction to glitzy international stage productions like Riverdance, while at the same time there’s a greater appreciation of the diversity of Celtic tradition.

“It’s all very healthy,” says Burke, reached at a hotel in Massachusetts, where he’s on tour with his group Celtic Fiddle Festival. “To my mind, the level of musicianship has never been higher—both in Ireland and here in America. As I move around, I find an increasing number of people getting together to play in small gatherings. There’s a real love for the old tunes and an openness to new ones. It reminds me of how things were when I started out playing.”

The son of immigrants from County Sligo, Burke grew up in London, where, as a teenager in the ’60s, he honed his fiddle skills at regular music sessions in Irish pubs and absorbed the essence of the traditional style. “By hanging out so much with people who mostly came from the West of Ireland and had the old tunes in their blood, I soon developed a similar deep attachment,” he says.

Ingrained passion has fired Burke’s playing with many of the top Irish acts and artists, including Christy Moore, the legendary Bothy Band, guitarist Mí­cheál í“ Domhnaill, and his own tradition-based band, Patrick Street. His long-time interest in music from related traditions led to the creation of Celtic Fiddle Festival in 1993 with fellow fiddlers Johnny Cunningham from Scotland and Christian Lemaí®tre from Brittany, and, later, English guitarist Ged Foley.

The quartet was originally intended to be a one-off touring project, but proved such a success that it has stayed together and released five stellar recordings. After Cunningham succumbed to a heart attack in 2003, he was succeeded by Québécois fiddler André Brunet, who plays on Equinoxe, which was released in February.

“The idea behind our concerts is to showcase three styles of Celtic music in one evening,” says Burke. “Each individual plays a solo set in the first half, highlighting how distinctive each tradition is from the others. Then we come together in the second half to highlight their links.”

For Burke, the kinship between the fiddle traditions goes beyond the obvious one: that they’re all of rural origin and were all intended for dancing. “If you really delve into the tunes, you get a sense that there’s a deep political thread: the struggle of the underdog, the peasant nations trying to fight for themselves, but at a certain point developing their independence through their art. Down through the ages it’s been stomped on by the authorities, but the defiance of these people has lived on through the music, and you can still hear it today.”

Celtic Fiddle Festival plays Richard’s on Richards on Saturday (March 15).