Fred Morrison

Bagpipes and bluegrass might seem unlikely musical bedfellows, but for the brilliant Scottish piper Fred Morrison, one of Celtic music’s most profoundly skilled and audaciously inventive exponents, they form a wholly natural alliance. His latest album project, Outlands, featuring such top Americana luminaries as producer Gary Paczosa (Dolly Parton, Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek), banjo/guitar ace Ron Block (Alison Krauss & Union Station) and Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Tim O’Brien, sets out to explore the inherent connections Morrison perceives between their traditions and his.

“I’ve always heard a really strong affinity between my own South Uist background and the Irish travelling pipers’ style played by people like Paddy Keenan,” he says, “and when I started playing the Irish pipes myself, I also found this deep-down rhythmic connection with bluegrass music – to me it’s as if they’re all one and the same.”

Morrison maintains a busy touring schedule, having settled into working with a hand-picked pool of leading instrumentalists, including Ed Boyd, John Joe Kelly, Steve Byrne, Paul Jennings and Matheu Watson. His current bluegrass project, meanwhile, has him more fired up than ever before – and given Morrison’s uniquely impassioned approach to music, that’s saying something. “The point I’ve reached now with my playing and my writing – it’s like everything’s just kind of at one,” he says. “I’ve never felt I was quite there with it before, but now I know where I’m at, I know what I want to do, and I know I can do it. I heard this Uist-Irish-bluegrass connection in my head, and I knew I could make it work.”