Sultans of String: Oak Plains Reel
3x JUNO Award nominees Sultans of String return with “Oak Plains Reel,” the debut recording with the band’s new lineup. Featuring bandleader and Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal recipient Chris McKhool, guitarist Kevin Laliberté, bassist Drew Birston, and acclaimed nyckelharpa and fiddle player Saskia Tomkins, the new track is a spirited celebration of ancestral stories, musical heritage and the natural world.
Inspired by a powerful sense of place, the song and its accompanying video “Oak Plains Reel” was written and filmed in one of southern Ontario’s rare oak savannas at a time when the surrounding Green Belt is increasingly threatened, and connects directly to a sense of place and the importance of protecting the natural environments that inspire and define us. An endangered Canadian landscape, the oak savanna is an open, park-like ecosystem interspersed with tallgrass prairie. Found primarily in southern Ontario, these landscapes are now among the world’s most threatened ecosystems, fragmented by agriculture and urban development.
The track also marks an exciting new chapter for Sultans of String with the addition of Saskia Tomkins. A UK-born, classically trained musician with a background in folk and jazz, Tomkins is an All-Britain Champion Irish Fiddler and a master of the nyckelharpa, a traditional Swedish bowed string instrument straight out of Tolkien’s Middle Earth that features wooden keys that change the pitch of its strings. Her distinctive instrument brings an otherworldly new colour to the band’s already adventurous sonic palette.
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