Review: CARRY THEM WITH US, Album

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Friday 7th July 2023.

Carry Them With Us is the latest album from Skye musician, Brìghde Chaimbeul. The first time I heard the name, Brìghde Chaimbeul, it was, understandably, mispronounced by Anthony John Clarke, the MC of Fairport Convention's Cropredy Festival in Oxfordshire UK in 2016.

The festival is a ‘by invitation only’ affair, but each year Fairport Convention offers a Cropredy slot to the winner of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, and that year the 17-year-old piper from Skye was the winner, and she was joined on stage by her older sister, Màiri, on clàrsach (Scottish harp), and Michael Ferrie on guitar.

Her performance on Scottish smallpipes and whistle was utterly mesmerising, and while she was very much the centre of the show, the other two young musicians delivered stunning performances throughout. Ferrie's subtle and understated finger style formed an ethereal foundation for the two sisters to build upon, and build they did, Brìghde's complex and often lightning-fast piping mirrored by the dexterous and unfailing fingers of her sister, Màiri, as they flew over the clàrsach with impossible speed and accuracy.

I was so struck by their performance that as soon as I returned to Australia I ordered a set of Scottish smallpipes for myself, and sought out any recordings that I could find of any of these extraordinary players. Alas, all I could find were CDs featuring Màiri with her ensemble Aerialists, for the teenage Brìghde had yet to commit any of her playing to commercially available recordings, but that has all changed now, of course.

In January 2019, Brìghde Chaimbeul offered The Reeling, which, according to the blurb, was recorded live, without overdubs, in the historic East Church in Cromarty, on the Black Isle. These largely traditional Scottish and Bulgarian tunes were performed by Brighde on the Scottish smallpipes, with the addition of an ancient harmonium found in the church.

September 2022 saw the release of LAS, with Ross Ainslie and Steven Burn, which featured some original tunes by Chaimbeul, Ainslie, Damien O'Kane, Andy Cutting, Javier Tejedor, and Niall Vallely, as well as traditional tunes from Scotland and Bulgaria. They were taking us beyond the usual Scottish piping repertoire, but still in a relatively familiar and safe way.

In April 2023, however, there was a ground shift, as Brìghde formed a collaborative partnership with experimental avant-garde saxophonist, Colin Stetson, to produce Carry Them With Us, with a guest appearance by Jamie Murphy on Uilleann pipes.

The intriguing album title comes from the storytelling of the late Iain Sheonaidh, ‘Smus’ (John Smith), of South Uist, a virtually monolingual Gael, who, alone in the world, could still recite the Fingalian Chant, Duan na Féinne. “If someone asked for one that he didn’t want to tell just then, he’d say, ‘I didn’t carry it with me.’” Chaimbeul says. “So it’s the idea of carrying all the stories and the songs with us.”

Chaimbeul is deeply immersed in her culture and has lived experience of it and studied it at university level, but she does not just nostalgically revisit the old tunes, songs, tales, dances, and customs of the Hebrides, she applies what she has learned and been virtually soaked in, into a very contemporary interpretation of island lore.

The first track on the album, Pilliù: The Call of the Redshank, begins with a long introduction of the drones slowly coming into tune, and is explained in the album notes in a piece of all but untranslatable Gaidhlig prose. Is it from a tale told by Iain Sheonaidh, ‘Smus’? I honestly do not know, but the final line, “Oh” says he “you would want nothing except to listen to them”,  goes to the very nature of piping.

“I’m always led by the drone,” Chaimbeul says. “To be a piper you must have a natural attraction to drones. That’s the minimalist aspect, the atmosphere it creates, rather than a rhythm. The other side is melody, one or two of them in a tune, repeating them so it becomes trance-like, and getting lost in them a little bit.”

She appears to have infected Colin Stetson with her love of the long notes of the drones and, in their improvisations in the two tracks, Crònan, and Uguviu, you can hear the drone sounds being shifted through their chordal grounds, seeking out new harmonies for harmony's sake, rather than as a background for a lively melody, or a slow air.

The melody of the simple and repetitive waulking song, Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom, is transformed as Stetson searches for new harmonic options and, together, they mould and shape it, as it begins to accelerate into a complex insistence, the phrases from the chanter challenged by another voice, another rhythm, to create a woven fabric out of the very air itself.

Many of the tracks start with the sound of the air coursing through the bellows themselves, breathing life into the pipes, waking them from their slumber, powering their voices, allowing them to speak and tell the urgent tales that simply must be told.

It's such a strikingly honest thing to do, and allows the listener to experience not only the melodies and arrangements but the actual mechanics of the instrument. Chaimbeul pushes that notion even further by using a contact microphone on her chanter, which allows the sound of her fingers rhythmically striking the chanter to be heard, sounding almost like an accompanying bodhran.

One of the many wonderful features of these recordings, and perhaps the most emotive, are the tracks that include Chaimbeul's intoxicating voice, singing in Gaidhlig, telling the stories directly to us just as they have been told from time immemorial, adding even more texture and density and personalising the entire experience.

That Brìghde Chaimbeul is a very fine piper goes without saying, but she is also an innovator and an ethnomusicologist with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, whether learning tunes and techniques of Gaida playing in Bulgaria, or poring over dusty tomes and field recordings in university libraries as grist to feed her experimental mill.

The collaboration with Colin Stetson was a remarkably brave decision to make, but it not only worked brilliantly, in retrospect it seems to have been an inevitable and almost obvious pairing.

This is not an album of bagpipe tunes in strict tempo that you can have on in the background while you iron your kilt and nibble some shortbread. I believe that Martyn Bennet would have loved it, but your Pipe Major might not.