King of the Blind

Originally from California, now based in Boston, the young uilleann piper Joey Abarta names his second album after a tune he found in John & William Neal's 1724 A Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes, attributed to famed 17th-century blind Celtic harper, Turlough O’Carolan. O’Carolan wrote the beautiful tune for ‘The Faery Queen’, also from the Neal's collection and featured here, although in the album's excellent, detailed notes, Abarta explains a more complex history, and how O’Carolan perhaps didn't compose the tune but elaborated on the main themes of an older version. As for the title track, it too has a long, plaintive reach in terms of its music, deepening into a cavernous, hollow space illuminated by bright and curious notes rising out from the drone.

The pipes tend to be one big jar of Marmite for listeners, and an hour of largely solo performances – his wife Jackie O’Riley, a step and sean nós dancer, plays foot percussion on several tunes – may not be for everyone, but with drones and pipes at the forefront of 2020s folk-music making, King of the Blind mixes innovation and tradition while paying tribute to Irish piping luminaries such as Séamus Ennis and Willy Clancy.