AIDAN O’ROURKE
Fiddler and composer Aidan O’Rourke is one of today’s foremost Scottish musicians, renowned both as a founder member of Blazin’ Fiddles and Lau, and for his superb solo releases Sirius (2006) and An Tobar (2008). His original compositions have won widespread acclaim for their innovative synthesis of diverse musical styles, and he has also featured on more than 80 albums by other artists.
Growing up in the Highland port of Oban, and later on the island of Seil, O’Rourke began learning the fiddle aged eight, absorbing a variety of influences both from his music-loving, half-Irish family and from his two main teachers, George McHardy and Maurice Duncan, whose expertise covered several Scottish playing styles. He won numerous top prizes on the competition circuit, and was a three-time finalist in the prestigious Glenfiddich Fiddle Championship. Aged just 14, O’Rourke joined Perthshire-based band the Caledonia Ramblers, which also included Irish and US musicians, with whom he went on to tour the UK, Europe and North America.
While at university, he teamed up with Newcastle fiddler and flautist Claire Mann as Tabache, touring extensively in the holidays and releasing two well-received albums. Moving to Edinburgh after graduation, he was soon in the thick of Scotland’s resurgent folk scene, working with Tannas, Deaf Shepherd and Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack, meanwhile forming the folk/dance fusion outfit Sunhoney with percussionist Fergus Mackenzie. Blazin’ Fiddles began life in 1998, and would go on to achieve major success across Europe and North America, headlining most top festivals including the 2005 Proms, at the Royal Albert Hall, before O’Rourke announced his departure from the line-up in 2008. He has also performed and recorded with Scotland’s unofficial “folk orchestra”, The Unusual Suspects, and jazz/folk fusion outfit Colin Steele’s Stramash, and was voted Instrumentalist of the Year at the 2006 Scots Trad Music Awards.
O’Rourke began writing tunes in his early twenties, and swiftly emerged as a composer of exceptional flair and imagination. His 2003 suite Sirius, commissioned by Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival and featuring a 12-piece international folk/jazz line-up, was widely hailed as a landmark in cross-genre creativity, later being recorded as O’Rourke’s debut album. His second release also originated as a live project, comprising music written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of An Tobar arts centre, on the Isle of Mull, in 2007. Other major commissions include Mantra Alba, written for the Dalai Lama’s visit to Scotland in 2004; Forward! and 92.4°, composed while O’Rourke was Musician-in-Residence at Stirling’s Tolbooth venue, and Coriolis, performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at Celtic Connections 2009. O’Rourke was also a key participant in the cross-genre collectives Parallelogram and Cascade, initiated by the PRS Foundation to create new collaborative music, which premièred at London’s South Bank Centre in autumn 2006.
In 2004, O’Rourke began meeting up with singer/guitarist Kris Drever and accordionist Martin Green for a weekly jam around his kitchen table. A year later, Lau were unleashed on an unsuspecting world, leaving audiences awestruck in their wake, while critics scrabbled for superlatives to capture the trio’s wickedly potent brew of Celtic, Balkan, Americana, free-jazz, prog-rock and myriad other influences. Their dazzling debut recording, 2007’s Lightweights and Gentlemen, was followed in 2008 by a stupendous live release – shortly after Lau were voted Best Group in that year’s Radio 2 Folk Awards, a title they claimed again in early 2009, further fuelling the already avid anticipation ahead of their third release, Arc Light, in March.
With his sublime technical and expressive command, forged both from his rich native heritage and an incorrigible appetite for fresh musical adventure, O’Rourke is an artist who relishes stretching himself in different directions, and finding new common ground between them. Wherever his restless muse might lead him next, it’s sure to be a memorable journey.
