The Chaimbeul amalgamation of soundworlds

Scottish piper Brìghde Chaimbeul played a solo set at KW Studios downtown this past Saturday, November 8th. She'd already been on tour for over two months, however this show in Vancouver – her first time being here – was only the second of her North American leg. Between then and today, she played Mount Vernon, Seattle, and Portland; she plays twice in California this weekend, then five more American dates this month.

I brought up Chaimbeul's latest album, Sunwise, this summer in one of our 'Outside the Changes' album roundups. I called it "[a] mostly soundscaping album from the piper [...] It does have a couple fiddle-tune moments plus vocal lilting."

That's indeed what we heard throughout the show last Saturday. Chaimbeul began with the droning first track "Dùsgadh/Waking", delivered a couple more tracks including the chimes and lilts of "A' Chailleach", and closed with the reel "Bog an Lochan".

Chaimbeul has a previous album, Carry Them With Us, released in 2023 on the same German record label called Glitterbeat. From that record, she performed "Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom (I Am Disposed of Mirth)", a piece that had been its lead single. This music was a collaboration between her and another drone-friendly artist, from a generation older: saxophonist Colin Stetson.

She also has a debut album, The Reeling, from 2019 – when she was 20 years old – on the British label River Lea Records. She is thus labelmates with a favourite artist of mine, Sam Amidon, who put out his record called Salt River there.

Chaimbeul has performed and recorded with the likes of Caroline Polachek ("Blood and Butter", time 2:50) and been written up in The Wire as her international media profile has grown. Her own music unites ambient, New Age, folk, electronic (through her effects pedals) and improv sensibilities, making her an ideal candidate to pack a small room in downtown Vancouver with the weirdos like us who key in on such things. The only interruption in her music was when she pulled out a small book and read, in a soft voice, a folk tale about an old faerie-man who played the chanter and appeared suddenly in a family's farmhouse. "I'm going to tell you a story," she said as the only context.

Chaimbeul was born and raised on Skye, an island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides. I went there once.

In the summer of 2016, I played in Scotland with the North Shore Celtic Ensemble. They were making their fourth appearance at a festival that no longer exists: the Aberdeen International Youth Festival. I had started playing with them in large part because my local friend Kirin Lamb happened to also be there the previous time they went, in 2013, and befriended them over there; then she started playing with them back here that fall, and when they asked her to recruit additional musicians from our CapU jazz program, I happened to see a printed poster she'd put up in the Fir building lobby the week before I dropped out.

In Aberdeen, we played several sets across a whole week. A novel word was on everyone's lips: Brexit. The referendum happened about a month prior, with over 60% of city votes having come in on the Remain side. I knew so little about Scotland or Scottish music that I just kept thinking about "Aberdeen" by Spirit of the West. I'd been playing that song at various gigs around the province with its writer Jay Knutson, who was a co-founder of the Celtic Ensemble. Jay stands to my left in the photo below.

We extended our trip, chartering a bus to drive us across Scotland from east to west, where we had a show at Skye Live Festival in the island's capital of Portree. We drove over two hours from Aberdeen to the city of Inverness, past Loch Ness, and then another hour-plus before we reached the Skye Bridge.

Hector was our young and handsome tour guide. As we approached the bridge, he spoke on his mic from the front of the bus. He wanted to play us a piece of music over the bus speakers, one that could speak to the mood of driving over the bridge into the Hebridean landscape. This music, he said, also happened to connect Canada with Skye. The artist was a piper born in St. John's, Newfoundland. His mother is a Scottish writer and academic from Skye, and he made his name as an award-winning musician in Scotland from his teens through to his death from cancer in 2005, at age 33. His music merged traditional folk with electronic experimentation. His name, Hector said, was Martyn Bennett, and this – right as the bridge deck came into view on the only sunny day of the trip – was "Blackbird".

Last weekend, Chaimbeul wore all black for her show at KW. I knew what she looked like, but I'll chalk it up to the room's crowded nature (and the median attendee's youthfulness) that when she walked right by me en route to the stage for the start of her set, I didn't clue in. I'd discovered her on Matt Carmichael's album dancing with embers back in the spring. She plays on two tracks: the ballad "beckoning night" and the hornpipe-ish tune "aglow".

I heard Chaimbeul's Sunwise between when it came out at the end of June and when I recommended it on the Upsample podcast in early August. I started following her on Instagram around that time, which unveiled a connection she has to me, my friends, and another show I ended up attending this week. I'll share that with you soon below.

But first, I have to mention something else I saw through Chaimbeul's Instagram. On August 21st, the British magazine Crack published an article titled "Pay It Forward: Brìghde Chaimbeul on Martyn Bennett", which quotes Chaimbeul in her own words. She says Bennett, who died when she was six years old, was a major reference point for her specific instrument:

"I started playing smallpipes when I was 14, 15. Martyn played a lot of smallpipes, and at that time – even now – they’re not as well known as other pipes. It was quite rare to find any recordings or videos or anything at all of people playing them. I was listening to Hamish Moore and Martyn Bennett."

The article links to a Bennett track called "PLAY" from his album with producer Martin Low, Hardland. In the piece, Chaimbeul says that Hardland "was a lightbulb moment with [Bennett's] music. He plays some tunes that are slightly different to Highland tunes, more baroque-influenced from the Lowlands. But he recorded them on the smallpipes, and one track has this crazy sub-bass – this, like, blast. It starts quite traditionally, and then suddenly goes doooof."

"He was amalgamating soundworlds," Chaimbeul says. Of course, she did the same with us; of course she knew of Martyn Bennett.

Much of Bennett's music was lost on me when I first heard it nine years ago. I had come up playing straight-ahead jazz, and I was only just beginning to play folk music.

The folk scene was fresh to me in 2016 through the view of my newest musical partner and close friend, violinist Gabriel Dubreuil. Gabriel had just graduated from the Berklee College of Music and moved back to BC to start his own career. Among musicians in his world who went to Berklee around the same time, one trio of students caught my attention. It featured two fellow Canadians: Vancouver violinist Elise Boeur and guitarist Adam Iredale-Gray, who emerged out of Victoria and is associated with Mayne Island. The third member of the band was harpist-keyboardist Màiri Chaimbeul, Brìghde's older sibling.

This band is Aerialists. I became aware of them in 2016 and 2017, when they released their self-titled EP and toured around the country. Their touring band included noted Vancouver jazz bassist Wynston Minckler.

There are too many connections to cover. Adam Iredale-Gray had been the co-founder of a folk-rock band called Fish & Bird; their drummer was Ben Kelly, who became the drummer with me, Gabriel, and Jay Knutson in our band, Early Spirit. As for Wynston, he plays in Gabriel's current band, Collage Trad, who just dropped their first EP.

Aerialists' second album Group Manoeuvre got a Juno nomination for Instrumental Album of the Year in 2019, with Gordon Grdina's China Cloud winning. It opens with two of Màiri's compositions. Iredale-Gray plays electric guitar, and the band's mix of prog-rock and fiddle tunes is immediately tangible.

I didn't keep up with the band after that, at least not until I saw they were touring in BC this month, supporting their latest album I Lost My Heart on Friday. On "The Birds", Màiri's harp carries the melody for several minutes. It's only after the fiddle enters that we hear a guest: Brìghde's drone materializes, and moments later, it's the younger sister holding it down on small pipes.

Aerialists' seven BC tour dates, remarkably, are exact matches with Brìghde's first seven North American dates. It was thus that I heard the band play the Lido this past Tuesday, November 11th. Joining Màiri, Iredale-Gray, and Boeur were drummer Stefan Hegerat, who happened to be a subject at Rhythm Changes earlier this year as a bandleader, and bassist Alan Mackie.

The Barking Sphinx Performing Society, directed by Cole Schmidt, presented the show as part of a forthcoming regular series. A band called LETTR OPENR featuring Schmidt, Feven Kidane, Nebyu Yohannes, and Kevin Romain played the opening set. They had performed only once before: May 18th at Romain and Schmidt's co-curated series, Lost Dog Sundays at the Hargrove space in Mount Pleasant. Lost Dog Sundays also returned this week with the announcement of a show on November 30th.

LETTR OPENR played from the same book of music at both shows, but they'd grown more comfortable with it as of this week, taking some liberties. The signature Schmidt writing style was on display: concise riffs and lines that everybody syncs up on, then mostly free improv often with a couple people at once, and a freewheeling de facto drum concerto all the way through to short organized endings. Romain is the perfect drummer for that. Schmidt used his effects pedals to create a virtual bassist, throwing a repeated chording figure or a drone underneath his melodic playing. Kidane and Yohannes had mellower contributions than Schmidt and Romain, but their horns were sympatico in the new group, lining up with the guitar when necessary while also finding the space for their own things.

Aerialists were not on the same wavelength as LETTR OPENR (or the Lido itself) in any sense. Their music, sounding in line with their new record, was a tightly-arranged set with both traditional fiddling and proggy moments. Iredale-Gray played mostly acoustic guitar with an indefatigable right hand for trad-playing, plus some electric guitar to adorn the prog-rock tunes with washes. The band all wore in-ear monitors like they were making a tour stop at a rock club, which I suppose they were, as a matter of intent and logistics.

Màiri played fiddle-tune melodies on the harp with their right hand and keys on a small synth with their left; the keys plus electric bass gave the group a heavy bottom end, though the drumming sounded great on the curtained Lido stage. Like at Brìghde's show, vocal lilting and Gaelic singing livened up some of the tunes.

We're close enough to the new year that I'm confident I won't hear a weirder pairing of bands in 2025 than this one. But that's an amalgamation of soundworlds too: something you can always count on Màiri or Brìghde Chaimbeul to deliver.