Chasing the Sun is the latest recording from young Scottish pianist and composer James Ross. Produced by Calum Malcolm (The Blue Nile, Lau, Martin Taylor, Scottish Chamber Orchestra) the album is a seven-movement suite evoking a day’s and a year’s westward journey along Scotland’s north coast. Seamlessly interweaving folk, classical and jazz elements, Ross on piano is joined by renegade string quartet Mr McFall’s Chamber and Fraser Fifield on soprano saxophone, small pipes and whistle.

The result is a stunningly beautiful album with a very strong sense of time and place, from the scintillating jubilance of a sunny, white-capped sea to an elegiac twilight, evoking centuries of lives lost along Scotland’s stern north coast. Ross plays and writes as one who truly loves his instrument and his medium, just as he loves the musical traditions that first nurtured his talents, and the rugged, timeless yet mercurial vistas amid which he grew up.

Chasing the Sun was originally co-commissioned by the Blas Festival and Celtic Connections and premièred to tremendous critical acclaim.

“Shifting fluently through tempos, time signatures and moods, adding and subtracting layers of instrumentation, colour and texture. . . the music’s alternating passages of tranquillity and turbulence, sadness and exultation vividly conjured such splendours as a winter storm and a summer sunset; the quickening of spring or the majesty of the Northern Lights.” Northings

Twice nominated for Composer of the Year at the Scots Traditional Music Awards, in 2008 and 2010, Ross is in the vanguard of a new Scottish folk-based piano repertoire. As both a player and a composer, James has a truly magical way with a piano. In his hands, this least traditional of instruments – according to conventional wisdom – attains fresh creative communion with Scotland’s living folk heritage. Distilling these elements with classical and jazz influences, Ross’s music encompasses the whirl of a Highland reel and the woe of a Gaelic lament; the primal grandeur of his native Caithness landscape and the cosmopolitan melting-pot of his adopted Edinburgh home.

Chasing The Sun will be released on Trinkle Records (TR001) on 16 April.

Source: Riotsquad Publicity