Ross Ainslie - Las (2022) [gnodde]



Gaelic, bagpipes, folk, gaelic smallpipes.

With LAS, Brighde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes have delivered a highly accomplished album that, probably more than any other you’ll hear this year, unifies innovation and tradition.

Innovation can take many forms. It seems reasonable to suggest that new advances in music go hand in hand with breakthroughs in the technology used to make that music or that cutting-edge songwriting is politically or philosophically inseparable from the time of its creation. But folk music tends to muddy the waters a little: the ‘structuralism-lite’ approach stumbles in the face of tradition. How is a folk musician meant to make it new when the genre seems, by definition, to be tethered to the past?

Scotland’s smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, musician and composer Ross Ainslie, and Irish guitarist/drummer Steven Byrnes seem to have the answer. Chaimbeul uses a traditional – and to some extent unfashionable – instrument in an entirely new way. Her 2019 debut, The Reeling, was a hypnotic, drone-oriented exploration of her instrument’s capabilities that touched on the techniques of modern composition while maintaining contact with the music of the past: the tunes, which came not only from Scotland but also Bulgaria, carried an inherent strangeness, an eerie beauty which Chaimbeul’s preternaturally gifted playing helped to expose. Likewise, Ainslie is no stranger to experimentation, his reflective Vana album of 2020, “designed to be listened to, continuously, from beginning to end”, found him exploring global music through a Scottish lens.

It’s a democratic set-up with each member of the trio credited equally in terms of arrangement. Alongside the traditional material, Ainslie and Chaimbeul contribute original compositions to create a dynamic that seems to draw from jazz as much as folk. But the real innovation on LAS comes in the way the tunes are composed and performed. Each one is in the key of C, and while that might not sound all that impressive to someone unversed in the history of smallpipes, it is actually the first ever example of an album to feature double C smallpipes. So if this music sounds new, if it is imbued with the ungraspable spirit of otherness, that’s because what you are hearing is genuinely unprecedented.

Tracks:
01 - Green Light Set
02 - Bulgarian
03 - The Badger & The Weasel
04 - Gavotte Pourlet
05 - John Patterson's Mare
06 - Dod's
07 - Strathspeys and Reels
08 - Lichko Lio
09 - Irish
10 - Susi and Ben's

All in MP3 @ 320kbps