Assynt find their place at Blas
EVENT OFFERS 80TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR SINGER AND PLATFORM FOR YOUNG STARS
WITH a celebration of renowned Gaelic singer Alasdair Gillies’ 80th birthday and opportunities to hear outstanding young talents including the Skye-born piper Brighde Campbell this year, the Blas festival continues to reach across the generations as well as the Highlands and Islands.
For musicians such as Graham Mackenzie, who was born in Inverness and played concerts during the festival’s early years, it has become a touchstone event in the traditional music calendar. To play at Blas, Celtic Connections in Glasgow and the Scots Fiddle Festival in Edinburgh, say, would be laudable ambitions for any Highland-based fiddle player and not that he’s blasé about it – far from it – Mackenzie was barely into his teens when he had achieved all three.
He was 12 when he won a Danny Kyle Award for outstanding new musical talent at Celtic Connections in 2004. The same year he made the daunting trip to the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh to appear on a Scots Fiddle Festival bill that included Shetland fiddler Chris Stout. His Blas debut followed soon after and he launched his first album, Crossing Borders, at the festival in 2015. Now he’s returning with a new trio, Assynt, to introduce Highland audiences to the album, Road to the North, which they launched at Piping Live! in Glasgow.
Mackenzie grew up with Scottish music. His mother, Alison, was head of music at Culloden Academy in Inverness for 33 years (her retirement is celebrated with a tune on Assynt’s album) and traditional music was always playing in the car and at home. There was a fiddle in his paternal grandparents’ house his grandmother was longing for someone to play. So aged six, Graham obliged, beginning classical violin lessons that would take him to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and subsequently to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he added a masters degree in Scottish music to his degree in classical performance from the RNCM.
“It’s important to have experience in both styles – classical and traditional – under your belt and I’m pleased I took the classical route because it gives you the technique to get round traditional tunes,” he says. “You need the feel for traditional music, of course, but I got that through playing with young groups like the Kiltearn Fiddlers, where there were players like Lauren Maccoll and Matheu Watson, and I went to Blazin’ Fiddles’ annual music school, Blazin’ in Beauly, from the first year onwards. So the two styles of music were always happening in parallel.”
A glance at his CV confirms this. In 2008, he was in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain that played at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, having led the Highland Regional Youth Orchestra for two years and played in the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s violin section. The year before he won the first Highland Young Musician of the Year title.
He was also twice a finalist in the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, and a finalist in the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year. In addition to winning Scottish Fiddle Championships at junior and senior level, he has also won the Invitational Masters Competition in Oban as part of the Highlands and Islands Music and Dance Festival and was a runner-up in the Glenfiddich Fiddle Championships in 2010.
The trio he features with at Blas this year, Assynt, grew out of the group’s piper, David Shedden’s project as part of his studies on the Scottish music course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Mackenzie was taking his masters degree in Scottish music at the Conservatoire at the time and he and guitarist-mandolinist Innes White came on board when Shedden landed a gig at Piping Live!, Glasgow’s annual celebration of the bagpipes.
“I liked the music David was writing and I’d heard about Innes through his work with people like John Mccusker and Capercaillie, and when we got together there was an immediate rapport,” says Mackenzie. “We’re all keen on keeping the pipes and fiddle music traditions going through our own compositions, while drawing on what’s gone before, and although
David has contributed the biggest share of tunes on the album, we’ll add new material from everyone as we go on.”
Mackenzie, whose playing experience includes the multi-genre GRIT Orchestra, Birmingham-based folk group the Old Dance School and the French Baroque ensemble, Les Musiciens de Saint Julien, already has a track record as a composer. He worked with multi-instrumentalist Michael Mcgoldrick on the documentary Men at Lunch, which won an Irish Film and Television Award in 2013, and his Crossing Borders album stems from his New Voices commission from Celtic Connections in 2015.
Melodies tend to come to him in two ways. Some appear in his head uninvited but others are the result of time spent at the piano.
“In some other projects I’ve presented a composition as a fully formed arrangement that I’ve worked out in advance but with Assynt we tend to bring melodies to a rehearsal and just play them until we find what fits the original idea best and see what tunes go best together into a set,” he says. “We’re all experienced so know what’s not going to work but we still let the idea evolve and see what happens.”
The name Assynt was chosen to give a sense of the trio’s Highand identity. Mackenzie sees the group as part of the strain of Scottish bands including Breabach and Daimh, who are strong on the piping and fiddling traditions but have established individual sounds.
“We’d like people to come out and hear us and get a sense of where the music has come from,” says Mackenzie. “There are traditional tunes on the album and we chose them for their character as well as because we like them. I spend a lot of time in the car and just driving from place to place I see features and locations that will come into my imagination when I’m working on new music. So it’s good to present that kind of pictorial aspect as part of what our music represents.”
With Assynt we tend to bring melodies to a rehearsal and just play them until we find what fits the original idea best
Assynt appear at Carnegie Hall, Portmahomack on September 10 and at Glengarry Community Hall, Invergarry on September 11. Blas, which also features Gaelic singers Christine Primrose, Kathleen Macinnes and Julie Fowlis and bands including Skipinnish, Cruinn and Niteworks, runs from September 7 to September 15. Visit blas-festival.com