I'm convinced that Elias Alexander's main mode of sleeping is cat naps.

There's no way he has time to allow himself to get a full night's sleep. When he's not performing as a multi-instrumental phenom, or creating and recording brand new genre-bending music, or teaching from his home studio and at music camps across the country, or enjoying some mighty craic at a session in a pub, he's planning his next exciting musical odyssey.

I was first introduced to Elias's contagious musical spirit when I heard him performing at Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in North Carolina in 2016. Since then I've enjoyed listening to his recordings with Bywater Band, Soulsha, Farsan, MAC and, most recently, Ramblxr. During the 2020 lockdown period I, like many musicians, reached out online to stay connected to other musicians. I was excited to see that Elias was offering music lessons via Zoom, and I've been a devout student of his approach to Scottish/Cape Breton piping techniques ever since.

Lessons have been on a bit of a hiatus lately, however; Elias has been traveling across the states on tour with the Old Blind Dogs, followed by a week teaching at the Boston States Fiddle Camp. Touring and teaching done for the present moment, he was able to pause for a few minutes to talk about the tour and some of his music making activities.

Elias' recent tour with the Old Blind Dogs ended on a Sunday night, and Boston States Fiddle Camp started the next day. Does he ever sleep?

"No. Next question!" was Elias's answer as he laughed. Fair enough.

Getting to perform with the Old Blind Dogs for their stateside tour was a bit of a stroke of good luck. "I play with (Scottish fiddle player) Alasdair White. We have a project called Loud Weather, which is very new but just getting off the ground, and we've been good friends for a while now. So OBD basically contacted him asking if he knew any American pipers that could play their music and he recommended me. So they reached out to me, and that was it."

Ali Hutton, longtime piper for OBD, had recently stepped away from the band to focus on some other projects, leading them to nab Battlefield Band's Mike Katz for their UK tour, and Elias for the USA. A better fit could not have been found.

Elias had just a few weeks to learn the tune arrangements and memorize them before performing them for thousands of fans at 26 concerts. Thankfully, he's spent most of his life learning tunes by ear (and by sight) soaking them in through some kind of superhuman musical osmosis.

"They started sending me, I think it was probably around July that Ali actually sent me stuff. But their records are obviously online. So I just looked up their records and started kind of listening through with an ear towards learning some of the tunes. I learned some of them back in June, as I was traveling around. Then in the middle of August I was at home and I just kind of put all that together, learning the ones I had missed and then the arrangements.

"It was a long process of learning a tune occasionally and then two weeks of intense study."

Once the Old Blind Dogs (Johnny Hardie, Aaron Jones and Donald Hay) landed in the U.S., Elias had two full days of rehearsing with them in Wisconsin before their first concert.

"We went out to a lovely spot in Wisconsin, staying at the home of the McCluskey's -- they're kind of an institution out there. They have a bar and they put on amazing trad music shows, in Amish farm country about an hour outside of Madison."

I was able to see Elias with the OBD at two of their concerts in Pennsylvania, and it was obvious they were all having a thoroughly good time making music together -- a mighty craic indeed! "Yeah, I was a little bit anxious about what it was going to be like because I had never met any of them, and was going to be in a van for five weeks with three dudes that I've never met. But then literally as soon as I met them in the Chicago airport, immediately we were just all laughing. It was just so fun, really good craic the whole time. They're all such sweet people, so we ended up just having a total blast."

In addition to playing the Highland pipes and the Irish whistle, Elias lent his vocal harmonies to the mix. "I was doing some high tenor harmonies, and that was really fun for me, and I think they also really enjoyed having four voices on stage, because all three of them sing."

Elias normally plays bellows-blown border pipes made by Nate Banton, but for the OBD tour he brought out his Highland pipes along with a couple of whistles. To satisfy the curiosity of all instrument geeks, I got the lowdown on what he was playing: "So I play Colin Kyo bagpipes made by Murray Huggins in Medford, Oregon. He also taught me how to play; I grew up about 20 minutes away from Medford in Ashland, Oregon. His instruments are just -- they sound incredible, they look incredible, he's an all around genius guy and a great brewer of beer! I have a specially made concert B-flat chanter that he made me. And then I was using an E-flat whistle -- that's a Chieftain, and an F whistle -- that's an MK."

He also plugged in some pedals for effects on the whistles: "So I use two BOSS pedals: one's called the Harmonizer, and it allows me to add either octaves or harmony notes, like thirds. And then I also use a Digital Delay-7. I run the whistle through those for a more spacey sound, or if I just want to add some harmony."

After traveling across the country with OBD, Elias headed straight over to the Boston States Fiddle Camp, where he taught pipes and whistle. "Boston States is what Cape Bretoners call Boston but also kind of the entirety of the U.S. Boston States Fiddle Camp was started by Katie McNally, who's an amazing fiddle player from Boston. Cape Breton (in Nova Scotia, Canada) has a really rich traditional music scene and specific style all its own. For many, many years Cape Bretoners have been coming down to Boston to work and do seasonal work a lot of the time or just coming to live and so there's kind of a big expat community and a big history of Cape Breton music and dance in Boston. So Katie, who grew up in Boston, and grew up listening to a lot of Cape Breton music -- and going to the Canadian-American club where there are dances and stuff like that -- she plays that style a lot. So she started the fiddle camp to bring together the Boston fiddle scene with folks down from Cape Breton and also over from Scotland.

"This particular week Wendy MacIsaac was down from Cape Breton (well, she lives in Halifax but she's a Cape Bretoner, and Kevin Henderson was over from Scotland/Norway and he was teaching Scottish/Shetland fiddle as well."

Elias has plenty of musical connections in Boston.

"I lived in Boston for six years after I graduated from college and at the time I had a lot of friends here: Neil Pearlman, Galen Fraser, Hanneke Cassel, Jenna Moynihan and Laura Cortese -- all those folks, and they were all here. So it was a big center of the Scottish music community in America when I moved here, and that's how I met Katie and all those folks and kind of got involved. Katie was gracious enough to hire me to teach pipes and whistles, and to also lead some song circles. I only had one pipe student, but there were a bunch of fiddle players who would come to my classes and learn tunes."

While in Boston he's getting in some rehearsing with Alasdair White, the pair of them going by the band moniker Loud Weather. "We're going to be rehearsing tomorrow, and then we've got a couple of gigs out in Oregon and Washington in November. And then we'll be playing at the Boston Celtic Music Festival (in January) with Loud Weather 'Mor' -- the 'big' version of the band, which is Alasdair White, Neil Pearlman on accordion, Eamon Sefton on guitar, Anna Colliton on percussion and me on pipes. And that will be a whole heck of a good time."

So what's life like when he's not on the road performing and teaching?

"Well, I'm teaching and continuing to build my little online teaching business, which keeps me going through the moments that I don't have tours. I really enjoy teaching online, and I feel like I've found systems that work really well. So I'm doing that, and then I have a few recording projects to work on. ... I spend a lot of time writing songs and recording them: I write a lot of pop songs or alt-pop songs and I record those. And then I also make electronic dance music. That project is called Ramblxr." (It's spelled with an "x" but pronounced "rambler," he explained.)

"So this winter I'll be trying to finish that album up, and then also trying to finish the pop songs."

Hopefully there will be an album out by January ... but no promises!

Elias hints at some other upcoming recordings he's collaborated on, coming out in the near future, but declined to give away any spoilers.

"Fiddle Disco" is another fantastically contagious mode of music that Elias is very much into. It's a sort of fusion of Electronic Dance Music and Celtic trad. It's not a concept that he created, but he certainly has put his own unique seasonings into the musical recipe.

"There's a lot of people that have been doing similar things for a really long time, like Afro Celt Sound System, Martyn Bennett, and there's a few folks in Scotland doing it right now like Niteworks, Valtos. There's that famous Ashley MacIsaac and Mary Jane Lamond track ("Sleepy Maggie," from MacIsaac's album Hi, How are You Today?). So it's been around for a while, but I do think I have a little bit of my own spin on it: I do get a little bit more of the influence from disco in some of the tracks, and other genres like electro-funk and stuff, and every different person has their own voice. So I'm just trying to express myself and make music that I like.

"I'm not trying to just create "Celtic EDM" -- it's more like it happened very organically. Somebody asked me to put together dance music for an online dance show during the pandemic and I thought, well, I'm already making beats for my pop song, so why don't I just make a beat for this fiddle tune? And then I realized, oh -- this is actually really fun! And easy. It feels really natural to me too, because I really like electronic music. I love dancing. I love that world a lot, and I love the freedom that exists in that world. Fiddle music is dance music ... not all of it, but jigs and reels, strathspeys, these genres that we love. A lot of it's dance music, and so it feels really natural to just put beats under that, and it feels really nice to go play that stuff for people who maybe aren't familiar as much with the trad scene. But they know how to respond to a really thick, punchy kick drum and a fat snare, and then they get really excited by the fiddle or the bagpipes on top of that in a context that they're familiar with."

It's a cultural connection, Elias explained. "If you grew up hearing fiddle music, you hear it with all the rhythmic complexity and beauty that exists within it. But if you don't grow up with that culturally it can be hard to enter into that world. And so I really like that I can go to spaces where people can have access to that in a way that feels more familiar. And I love it when people dance to the dance music. I think the way that our scene has evolved to be a lot of sit-down crowds listening to jigs and reels is a bit odd. There's also totally a place for just listening to people play beautifully, but it's always nice when people are jumping around having a good time."

I recently saw a livestream performance of a Ramblxr concert in a park. When the camera panned and showed the crowd that was on the grass, it was wonderful to see the crowd of families with little kids, and older adults, jumping up and dancing while Elias was rocking out on the pipes.

"It's pretty accessible. It definitely draws a wide variety of folks at times, which feels nice. Because that's what traditional music is about: it's creating multigenerational spaces and spaces for community."

Elias expresses himself by performing on multiple instruments and voice, and making amazing arrangements. As far as I know, he might be the only person out there who is doing his own mix of Celtic music with his own vocals, playing the pipes, the fiddle, guitar and whistle while using his mixer board and live effects all on his own.

"I don't know if there's anyone out there who's doing all that, but I will say for me, it's felt like a door to expressing myself most fully, because I've always been someone who could never stop playing all the different instruments. I love playing fiddle and guitar, whistle and, obviously, playing pipes. So I think a lot of my expression in the past has come through creating arrangements with the bands. The playing was a big part of it, but also just the arrangement of the piece of music was a big source of expression for me. And so, getting to do that with my electronic music is just that, but even more so. I get to have even more control over the arrangement, and take it where I want to take it, and that feels really fun."

"And then I just get to be my whole self on stage, which ultimately I feel is what music should be. You should be able to express as much of yourself as you can, and for me, that involves playing multiple instruments -- that's part of me."

And it's just absurdly enjoyable and amazing to see someone playing music so beautifully on that many instruments.

[ visit Elias online ]