ALICE and Fanø Free Folk Festival proudly present a special Free Folk Mondays-event with the incredible Scottish bagpipe player Brìghde Chaimbeul. Ymers Pizza – aka Maria Bertel – will open the evening with a powerful trombone performance.        

Selected Womex 2020 Showcase Artist, Winner of the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Horizon Award, and 2016 BBC Radio 2 Young Folk award Brìghde Chaimbeul is one of Scotland’s most exciting young musicians. A native Gaelic speaker, her style is rooted in her indigenous language and culture, but draws inspiration from a variety of piping traditions such as from Cape Breton, Eastern Europe and Ireland.

Her debut album ‘The Reeling’ has had an extraordinary response since it’s launch at a sold out Celtic Connections show at the start of 2019. It was named as Folk Album Of The Month by The Guardian, given five star reviews in both fRoots and Songlines, lavished with praise by BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction and listed as one of The Quietus’ Albums Of The Year So Far. The Reeling was voted one of the 20 Scottish Albums Of The Year by the Say Awards (out of 293 submissions) and secured a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award nomination for Brìghde. Musicians as diverse as Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon and Anna von Hausswolff have expressed their love for the record on social media, and Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys invited Brìghde to collaborate with him and James Yorkston at a special show in Kirkcaldy.

Ymers Pizza
Whether in duo with saxophonist Johs Lund, in solo or with the band Selvhenter, Maria Bertel has been pushing the trombone in its physical limits while uncovering new territories for the instrument. Playing her horn through a stack of amps and developing distinctive extended techniques, she delivers ecstatic walls of textures redefining the trombone for the 21st century.