The Bend in the Light

Hailing from K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia, classically trained Ellen Gibling’s keen interest in Irish traditional music is given free rein in The Bend in the Light. An emerging figure in Canada’s East Coast folk fraternity as part of the trio Síle and, with flautist Erin Dempsey, one-half of Ragged Robin, Gibling got a master’s degree in Irish music at the University of Limerick in 2019. Her debt to tutor Alisha McMahon is repaid in the delicately buoyant set of hop jigs that opens what proves to be a pleasingly engaging recital.

Gibling’s playing marries classical precision and restraint (paying dividends in the slow air ‘Lament for the Death of Staker Wallace’) with an expressive warmth and delight in Irish music that produces a joyful set of polkas gleefully borrowing from Cork accordionist Jackie Daly and Leitrim flute player Dave Sheridan. Tyrone composer Ryan Molloy’s ‘Louise’s Reel’ receives sprightly treatment. Deftly accommodated influences from closer to home include Gibling and producer Shannon Quinn’s delicately sparkling arrangement of Laura Smith’s ‘Duine Air Call’, Olivia Barrett’s avian-inspired ‘Northern Journey / Dawn Dance’, and Maine harpist Nancy Schroeder’s delightful ‘Giddy’s Hornpipe’, an exquisite miniature that sounds like an antique music-box slowly winding down to stillness and silence. Gibling may well be a name to watch.