Teviot Row House, Edinburgh, 15 April 2011

HIGHLIGHTING the increased opportunities and developmental infrastructure now available for folk-based musicians to spread their compositional wings, Edinburgh harpist Ailie Robertson’s new instrumental suite, Traditional Spirits, began life as a short piece written (aptly enough, given its title and subject) via a Distil creative workshopping weekend in 2007. Thanks to a grant last year from Creative Scotland’s New Music Fund, Robertson has now expanded it into the 50-minute “musical soundscape of whisky making” premièred here, complete with accompanying CD release.

The composition featured three movements, each comprising three or four shorter sections, and was performed by an eight-piece ensemble of leading contemporary players, with Robertson joined by fiddlers Adam Sutherland and Patsy Reid, pianist James Ross, guitarist Tom Oakes, Fraser Fifield on soprano sax and whistle, double bassist Conrad Molleson and percussionist Mattie Foulds.

Ailie Robertson

In broad terms, the music followed and sought to evoke the sequence of processes by which Scotland’s national spirit is created, although this structure proved looser at some points than others. Its opening segment, ‘Islay Dawn’, for instance, a slow-stealing, piobaireachd-style melody led by the harp, with other instrumental layers gradually and delicately shaded in, vividly conjured the vying chill and warmth of its title, but seemed perhaps a little generic as an introduction to such a specifically referential work.

Later on, too, separate sections in the second and third movements – ‘The Angel’s Share’ and ‘10,000 Days and Nights, I Will Wait for You’ – both alluded to whisky’s protracted maturation, and while the latter in particular, with its lovely harp solo leading into a graceful duet with Fifield’s sax, dreamily signalled the long passage of time, the two between them suggested a slight uncertainty of purpose.

More successful, as regards the piece’s overall shape, was Roberston’s deployment of the traditional slip-jig ‘Ho ro mo bhobag an dram’ (The Favourite Dram) as a recurring motif, mostly slowed down from its usual quick tempo to both winsome and mellow effect. This provided for some some particularly effective harmonic alignments and dynamic progressions on its initial appearance in the first movement, while later recapitulations helped establish some sense of a through-line.

Other individual sections that stood out strongly included ‘The Cooperage’, with its punchy funk rhythms echoing the cask-makers’ craft; the boldly dissonant, increasingly agitated (although rather too brief) ‘Boiling Point’, mimicking the wash being fired in the stills, and the suitably merry final reel, ‘Amber Gold’, saluting the finished spirit’s release.

Taken as a whole, the piece did lack somewhat in overall coherence, and could have made more varied use of its sonic palette, but nonetheless demonstrated plenty of original and ambitious writing, marking an impressive first foray into the challenging realm of extended ensemble composition.

An unannounced but very tasty hors d’oeuvre on the menu was a short preceding set from Rura, the young Glasgow-based outfit who won a Danny Kyle Open Stage Award at this year’s Celtic Connections. Fast, forceful but exceptionally tight and cleanly articulated tunes are their main stock-in-trade, centred on the richly fused interplay of Jack Smedley’s fiddle and Steven Blake’s Highland pipes, buoyed by agile, sharp-accented grooves from guitarist Chris Waite and David Foley on bodhran.

The debut appearance by a newly-recruited singer, Adam Holmes, performing a doleful, self-penned, Americana-style number, came across – understandably – as more of a work-in-progress, but going by the calibre of the rest, this element should shape up fruitfully in future.

© Sue Wilson, 2011

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