Elias Alexander hails from Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But this piper, singer and songwriter has lived in a lot of places including Scotland, where he apparently worked as a tree planter, and New Orleans, and Vermont where he attended Middlebury College, and Boston, one of the centers of Celtic music and arts in North America. All this living and getting around has rubbed off and given him a mature perspective from which to make music. He and his Bywater Band create some fine songs and tunes in the traditional Scottish vein on their debut album Bywater.
Alexander plays an unusual type of bagpies called border pipes, also known as lowland pipes or half-long pipes. They’re based on the highland pipes but are filled by means of a bellows squeezed between arm and torso. Anyway, it’s a subtly different sound than you’ll hear on most other bagpipe recordings. He’s joined by the rest of the Bywater Band members Eamon Sefton on guitar, Kathleen Parks on fiddle, Patrick Bowling on flute and uilleann pipes, and Nate Sabat on acoustic bass.
The album opens with songs: the opener is from Tim Eriksen called “I Wish The Wars Were All Over, ” here paired nicely by a lively jig named “Bywater,” while the closer is one by Alexander called “Earth and Stone,” honoring his grandmother who was the inspiration for one of the verses about facing hard times with grace. She’s also the inspiration for another tune called “Grammy’s Trip To Oregon,” about her move to that state when she was 97 years old. It’s joined by two other tunes, one by Alexaner and the traditional “Antrim Rose,” a peppy tune featuring Bowling on high whistle. You can listen to that set here.
Another fine set is called “Murray’s” for Alexander’s first pipe teacher. Parks does some lovely fiddling on the opening tune, a Scottish number originally a Gaelic song called “Oran nan Giomach”; the second tune is a lively pipe piece by that pipe teacher Murray Huggins, named after a feature in Ashland called “Alice Piel Walkway” with Bowling doubling on flute with alacrity. The fourth tune of this suite pairs both the border and uilleann pipes to great effect.
I think the prettiest tune is the one called “Lilly’s Welcome to Vermont,” which Alexander wrote for fiddler Lilly Pearlman, sister of Neil Pearlman who conributes accordion to three tunes here. Bowling, Parks and Alexander do triple duty on the lively melody for a lengthy, impressive section.
There’s more, including some more lively tunes and some slower more stately ones. It’s a good mix, all played with feeling and skill, always a good combination. Good liner notes make this a nice package all ’round. Check out Elias Alexander and Bywater Band for some top-notch music in the Scottish tradition with lots of contemporary influences.
(Fresh Haggis, 2016)
