Ellen Gibling: The Bend in the Light
Ellen Gibling

It's only February, but Ellen Gibling's magical The Bend in the Light already promises to be a 2022 favourite. This totally beguiling collection captures her sincere love for Irish traditional music and Canadian folk. On the fifty-minute collection, she embroiders twelve settings with propulsive patterns and evocative melodies and executes them with the kind of authority that comes from years of playing. The album's dominated by dance music—hop jigs, reels, slides, polkas, hornpipes, and the like—but also makes room for an occasional tender moment, most touchingly the traditional Irish air “Lament for the Death of Staker Wallace.”

Like any artist, the harpist's life experiences and travels have exerted a profound impact on her musical approach and artistic outlook. After growing up in K'jipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia in a household of Scottish and English heritage and starting on the harp at age eleven, her interest in Irish traditional music grew when she studied classical harp performance at Montréal's McGill University and fully blossomed when she studied Traditional Irish Music at the University of Limerick in Ireland. As deeply engaged as Gibling is in this world, she performs in multiple other contexts too, from the flute-harp duo Ragged Robin and fiddle, voice, and harp trio Síle to the improvising quartet New Hermitage and classical orchestra and chamber ensembles. It wouldn't be inaccurate to see The Bend in the Light as the culmination of those experiences when the influence of the composers and musicians she's met in Canada, Ireland, and Scotland informs the album at every turn. Enhancing the authenticity of the project, the album was produced by Halifax fiddler Shannon Quinn, a key figure in the East Coast folk world.

The personal dimension of Gibling's release comes through in the performances, of course, but it's also conveyed through the notes she wrote for each piece. We learn, for example, that she learned the Irish hop jigs that open the album from her University of Limerick harp tutor Alisha McMahon; elsewhere we discover that Karen Iny, with whose family Gibling lived in Quebec during the summer of 2020, wrote “Maya's Waltz” for her daughter and “Forty” to celebrate her own birthday. Other tunes come from fiddlers Colin Carrigan, originally from Newfoundland, British Columbian Olivia Barrett, and Halifax-based Jeremy Finney, Maine harpist Nancy Schroeder, flutist Charlie Wilson, Irish pianist Ryan Molloy, and others, with even a couple written by Gibling herself.

A medley of traditional hop jigs inaugurates the album splendidly. Weaving “Cucanandy,” “Coleman's,” and “The Boys of Ballisodare” into a sparkling, effervescent whole establishes the project's uplifting spirit, especially when the material's executed with unerring precision and infused with affection. Lilting patterns form a foundation over which sparkling melodies glide, the parts in combination imparting a spellbinding crystalline effect. In the high-velocity medley of polkas that follows, Gibling's virtuosic command dazzles and then continues to arrest when Iny's expressive “Maya's Waltz” arrives. Stirring emotional expression is captured in the moving rendering of the “Lament for the Death of Staker Wallace,” after which a number of reels, hornpipes, jigs, and slides never fail to charm. Amidst those dance-inflected numbers appear a poignant instrumental version of the song “Duine Air Call,” an introspective meditation on loss from a 1994 album by the late composer Laura Smith, and a lovely rendition of “Wendel's Wedding” by Scottish singer and guitarist Tony Cuffe. Adding to the recording's appeal, Gibling's own “Jigs: Side By Each” proves she's as gifted a writer as player.

Her wonderful recording lends credence to the adage that the more personal art is, the more universally it resonates. Every one of the album's pieces possesses deep personal meaning for the harpist, but the authenticity of the writing and the sincerity with which it's delivered allows any human being to partake of its beauty.

February 2022