Brìghde Chaimbeul, Carry Them With Us, Germany, Glitterbeat, GB 139 CD / vinyl LP (2023)
Albums of instrumental music centred around one or two instruments are a dime a dozen these days but the very though of one dominated by the novel combination of Scottish smallpipes and saxophone would be enough to wake up most people and make them sit up, let alone actually hearing it. The surprise for me though is not that the combination works and works well, but that the musicians involved, Brìghde Chaimbeul on the smallpipes and Colin Stetson on the sax, push each other on six of the nine songs on Chaimbeul’s third solo album “Carry Them With Us”, to the extent that they end up weaving an entrancing faerie world loosely based on, and extending into darkly ambient territories far beyond, the folk stories and myths of Chaimbeul’s Scottish Highland background encapsulated in the album’s songs. By the way, for those unfamiliar with Chaimbeul’s choice of instrument, the smallpipes is a different instrument from the better-known Great Highland bagpipes: it is worked by bellows under the arm so the player does not need a blowpipe and is able to sing while playing the instrument at the same time (which Chaimbeul does on three tracks). The sound is much more mellow and in Chaimbeul’s playing, which emphasises the instrument’s potential for creating long drones, can express a variety of emotions, some quite contradictory, almost all at once.
The songs on “Carry Them With Us” are based on stories with themes of desire and longing, and the dangers of falling in love with strangers and dallying with beings that come from another dimension of existence. An early track “Banish the Giant of Doubt and Despair”, which starts out slowly and then speeds up through the main melody’s repetition and the variations and changes that follow, revolves around the tale of a giant who can’t resist dancing to the song of an underwater princess, and who dances faster and faster until he falls into the sea and drowns. The song not only has a trance-like quality but its tones take on the hardness and precision I usually associate with electronic instruments which make the music even more machine-like and hypnotic. A later song “Òran an Eich-Uisge /Song of the Waterhorse” is based on stories about the ech-uisge, a dangerous shape-shifting water spirit known in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Manx for its habit of luring men and women to it when in the guise of human or horse, later drowning its victims in lochs and devouring their flesh.
Most songs on the album already possess distinct melodies but Chaimbeul and Stetson’s playing and interpretations bring forth emotions of longing, nostalgia and wistful melancholy for an equally if not more distinctive universe where humans and beings from another world interact almost constantly and magic seems to be part of the very air that humans and their fellow animals and plants breathe. At times telling where the smallpipes end and the sax begins, and vice versa, is very difficult as the two instruments harmonise and blend sounds and melodies so well, and the peak of these instruments’ playing and improvisation comes in ” ‘S Mi Gabhail an Rathaid (I Take The Road)” in which the smallpipes and sax overlap in a series of hiccuping sax licks and reverberations and pipe drones.
Appropriately the album’s title “Carry Them With Us” refers to the origin of the nine songs in the stories and folklore of the Scottish Highlands: as long as the music is played, it will carry the stories and the culture that inspired it and moreover create new stories for its audiences. That surely was the aim when Chaimbeul and Stetson recorded the album and in this, they have succeeded very well.