In Full Flight

Having taken a five– year gap between his first two albums and forced us to endure a three–year wait, no one could accuse Gavin Whelan of exploiting his fast–rising profile as the finest tin whistle player of his generation. Happily, In Full Flight finds him back in the Mill Studios of his native Dublin and reunited with a crack team who include the magisterial Colm Murphy on bodhrán, guitarist Donnacha Moynihan, Aogán Lynch on concertina, Peter Eades on keyboard and, contributing a new and vivid colour this time around, Dave McNevin’s combustible banjo.

There is a seamless blend of traditional, largely West Clare–accented, tunes and new(ish) material on offer, clearly more musically mature and technically assured, all nimbly held together by a nuanced feel for the past and an incisively intelligent approach to the temperament of the present. Opening with a set of reels kicked off by Charlie Lennon’s infectious ‘The Leitrim Fiddler’, Whelan sets his stall out with a winning brio, moving through hornpipes, jigs, reels and the sublimely melancholic air ‘An Páistín Lionn’ with impeccable ease. He’s no less adept on the uilleann pipes, with the slow Scottish air ‘Dark Lochanagar’ making a haunting solo companion to a lively brace of guitar–and–bodhrán jigs. Pushing the whistle to extremes of high drama and pulling it back into whispered intimacy, Whelan makes a strong case here for being regarded as the most eloquent, and certainly the most exhilarating, whistle player in Ireland at the moment.