Soma

The Belfast uilleann piper John McSherry sprang to fame with the band Tamalin in the 1990s, before moving on to Dónal Lunny’s Coolfin, appearing in the first incarnation of Lúnasa, collaborating with Mike McGoldrick, and recording a stonking duo album with fiddler Dónal O’Connor with whom he also plays in At First Light. He has always been a technically gifted piper and, in his younger years, veered towards the flashy. Of late, however, his playing has become as multi¬layered as the title of his debut album, Soma. Does this refer to the body, to the Indian plant with intoxicating juice used in religious ceremonies, or to the perfect drug described by Huxley in Brave New World? Whatever the case might be, McSherry’s brand of ‘soma’ is a thoroughly exhilarating, sometimes tantalising, high-stepping bundle of fun and, occasional, whimsy.

McSherry plays solo on only one track, the enchanting slow air, ‘Aisling Gheal’, and is accompanied on keyboards by O’Connor on two others: the appropriately mournful ‘An Bhean Chaointe’ (The Keening Woman) – a daringly low-key opening track – and the low-whistled ‘Bádai na Scadán’, another slow air learnt from O’Connor’s mother, the late singer Eithne ní Uallacháin. Elsewhere he’s equally at home in the company of sister Joanne (fiddle), brother Paul (guitar), Ruben Bada (bouzouki and guitar), Tony Byrne (guitars) and percussionists Francis McIlduff and Israel Sanchez. The leaps and switchback turns of ‘The Wave-Sweeper’ recall the sadly unappreciated invention of Davy Spillane’s boundary-crossing Atlantic Bridge, while, contrastingly, the set of tunes kicked off by the jig ‘The Rambles of Kitty’ with its sudden change to the reel ‘Miss Ramsey’s’ is thoroughly redolent of Bothy Band-era Paddy Keenan. Yet McSherry soundly remains his own man on this hugely engrossing and often inspiring album.