Caledonian Hotel, Fort Augustus, 27 June 2012

AS WELL as running their Adult Feis in February, Fèis Gleann Albainn promote occasional concerts during the year and for this one they’ve managed to snaffle something rather marvellous.

India Alba is a meeting of musical minds from India and the UK who fuse traditional music, jazz and classical Indian music to create something very special indeed. The opening tune is ‘Hawthorn Vale’, from the first, eponymous CD (2006) in which Ross Ainslie’s haunting whistle mingles with Sharat Chandra Srivastava’s virtuoso violin in duets and solos which improvise and build on each other over the solid foundations of Nigel Richard’s cittern and Gyan Singh’s tabla.

India Alba

For Ainslie, it’s a far cry from his early years in the Vale of Atholl Pipe Band, but he’s as comfortable riffing off the Hindustani violin style as he is with a set of 4/4 marches. He picks up a cittern for ‘Nitan’s Reel’, composed on a hot night in Delhi,in which Sharat gives a Scottish reel a real Indian twist while remaining a central pool of stillness and calm.

Jumping to yet another continent, Ainslie’s pipe tutor Gordon Duncan’s version of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ follows, incorporating a dazzling duet for Border pipes and tabla, and then there’s a brief reversion to some traditional style before the first half closes with a Raga taking as its theme a traditional tune for the Holi festival and featuring a symphonic progression of variations which allow plenty of scope for virtuosity. Srivastava’s virtuosity is all the more breathtaking for its lack of showiness – the music just flows through him. At one point in the second half, he swaps his violin for a Swiss Hang drum to tackle another of Ainslie’s reels, taking us into the wide open spaces where music of all cultures fuses together and becomes simply ‘music’.

After a “necklace of Ragas”, the programme ends with the joyful 9/8 jig, ‘Donald Willie And His Dog’, but after prolonged, loudly vocal demands by the audience, the musicians return for an unrehearsed John Martyn tune. It’s been an extraordinary musical journey, a concert of truly international calibre – which has taken place on a wet Wednesday evening in the dining room of the Caledonian Hotel in Fort Augustus.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

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• Fèis Gleann Albainn
• India Alba
• Jennie Macfie