Islander at the edge: Aidan O’Rourke

It was the great Traveller singer Belle Stewart who pinpointed something about Aidan O’Rourke when he was 14 years old. The young fiddler was playing a set of marches at a ceilidh in Fort William, up the coast from where he lived on the island of Seil, and the fearsome Stewart – who famously did not suffer fools gladly – leaned over to his parents and jabbed a finger in the lad’s direction. ‘He has it’, she declared. ‘The conniach.’ The term translates approximately as ‘soulfulness’, ‘depth’, ‘an innate connection with the past’. It’s that inexplicable yet very tangible thing of ‘getting’ the inner meaning of music and somehow being able to make it sing.

O’Rourke would ride the school bus from Seil to Oban with a shinty stick in one hand and a fiddle case in the other. His first teacher was a retired butcher, George McHardy, who lived on the same council estate. At first McHardy charged £2.50 per lesson; soon he stopped charging, but the lessons continued and the pair would sit and play tunes together. Other early influences included cassette tapes sent back from pub sessions on the west coast of Ireland, which O’Rourke would replay on repeat until the tape ran slack.

That formative encounter with Belle Stewart in 1989 led to him joining his first band, The Caledonia Ramblers (with Stewart’s grandson), and touring North America during his school holidays. He joined the Highland supergroup Blazin’ Fiddles in 1998; he co-founded Lau in 2006, and the trio has since pioneered a unique sound in progressive, politically charged folk music.

Today Aidan O’Rourke is one of Scotland’s tradition-bearers in the truest sense – which is to say he keeps the heritage alive by going to the source and making it new. He’s restless, and hasn’t shied away from testing the edges of traditional form: try his epic cycle 365, with a tune composed for every day of the year. It brought him together with jazz pianist Kit Downes and produced an astounding catalogue of melodic and harmonic invention. Or there’s his score for the film Iorram, first- ever feature-length Gaelic cinematic documentary, which wraps new instrumentals around archive voices to hypnotic effect.

While O’Rourke’s various collaborations will continue searching and stretching, as we’ll see in his Scotland Unwrapped events, he seems increasingly interested in stripping back his aesthetic to get at the rawest and realest essence of the tradition. From the subtle, trance-like intensity of his duo performances with piper Brìghde Chaimbeul to curatorial projects reviving Gaelic archives and Scottish Enlightenment music, his work is about finding the heart of the thing: the nuance, the grit, the conniach.