With a celebration of renowned Gaelic singer Alasdair Gillies’ 80th birthday and opportunities to hear outstanding young talents including the Skye-born piper Brighde Campbell this year, the Blas festival continues to reach across the generations as well as spanning the Highlands and Islands.

For musicians such as Graham MacKenzie, who was born in Inverness and played concerts during the festival’s early years, it has become one of the touchstone events in the traditional music calendar. To play at Blas, Celtic Connections in Glasgow and the Scots Fiddle Festival in Edinburgh, say, would be laudable ambitions for any Highland-based fiddle player and not that he’s blasé about it – far from it – MacKenzie was barely into his teens when he had achieved all three.

He was twelve when he won a Danny Kyle Award for outstanding new musical talent at Celtic Connections in 2004. The same year he remembers making the daunting trip to the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh to appear on a Scots Fiddle Festival bill that included Shetland fiddler Chris Stout. His Blas debut followed soon after and he went on to launch his first album, Crossing Borders, at the festival in 2015. Now he’s returning with a new trio, Assynt, to introduce Highland audiences to the album, Road to the North, which they launched at the recent Piping Live! festival in Glasgow.

MacKenzie grew up with Scottish music. His mother, Alison, was head of music at Culloden Academy in Inverness for thirty-three years (her retirement is celebrated with a tune on Assynt’s album) and traditional music was always playing in the car and at home. There was a fiddle in his paternal grandparents’ house that his grandmother was longing for someone to play. So at the age of six the young Graham obliged, beginning classical violin lessons that would take him on to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and subsequently to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he added a masters degree in Scottish music to his degree in classical performance from the RNCM.

“I feel it’s really important to have experience in both styles – classical and traditional – under your belt and I’m really pleased that I took the classical route because it gives you the technique to be able to get round traditional tunes,” he says. “You need the feel for traditional music, of course, but I got that through playing with young fiddle groups like the Kiltearn Fiddlers, where there were players like Lauren MacColl and Matheu Watson, and I went to Blazin’ Fiddles’ annual music school, Blazin’ in Beauly, from the first year onwards. So the two styles of music were always happening in parallel.”

A glance at his C.V. confirms this. In 2008, he was in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain that played at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, having also led the Highland Regional Youth Orchestra for two years and played in the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s violin section. The previous year he won the inaugural Highland Young Musician of the Year title.

He was also twice a finalist in the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, as well as being a finalist in the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year. Plus, in addition to winning Scottish Fiddle Championships at junior and senior level, he has also won the Invitational Masters Competition in Oban as part of the Highlands and Islands Music and Dance Festival and was a runner-up in the prestigious Glenfiddich Fiddle Championships in 2010.

The trio he features with at Blas this year, Assynt, grew out of the group’s piper, David Shedden’s preparations for his final project as part of his studies on the Scottish music course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. MacKenzie was taking his masters degree in Scottish music at the Conservatoire at the time and he and guitarist-mandolinist Innes White came on board when Shedden landed a gig at Piping Live!, Glasgow’s annual celebration of the bagpipes.

“I really liked the music David was writing and I’d heard a lot about Innes through his work with people like John McCusker and Capercaillie, and when we got together there was an immediate rapport and we just seemed to gel together,” says MacKenzie. “We’re all really keen on keeping the pipes and fiddle music traditions going through our own compositions, while obviously drawing on what’s gone before, and although David has contributed the biggest share of tunes on the album, we’ll be adding new material from everyone as we go on.”

MacKenzie, whose playing experience also includes the multi-genre GRIT Orchestra, Birmingham-based folk group the Old Dance School and the French Baroque ensemble, Les Musiciens de Saint Julien, already has a track record as a composer. He worked with multi-instrumentalist Michael McGoldrick on the documentary Men at Lunch, which won an Irish Film and Television Award in 2013, and the music on his Crossing Borders album stems from his New Voices commission from Celtic Connections in 2015.

Melodies tend to come to him in two ways. Some appear in his head uninvited but others are the result of dedicated writing time spent at his second instrument, the piano.

“In some other projects I’ve presented a composition as a fully formed arrangement that I’ve worked out in some detail in advance but with Assynt we tend to bring melodies to a rehearsal and just play them over and over until we find what fits the original idea best and see what tunes go best together into a set,” he says. “We’re all quite experienced now so we generally know what’s not going to work but we still like to take our time and let the idea evolve and see what happens.”

The name Assynt was deliberately chosen to give a sense of the trio’s Scottish and specifically Highand identity. MacKenzie sees the group as part of the strain of Scottish bands including Breabach and Daimh who are strong on both the piping and fiddling traditions but have established their own individual sounds.

“We’d like people to come out and hear us and really get a sense of where the music has come from,” says MacKenzie who has inherited his mother’s teaching gene as well as her side of the family’s interest in traditional music. “There are some traditional tunes on the album and we chose them for their character as well as because we like them as tunes. I spend quite a lot of time in the car and just driving from place to place I see features and locations that will come into my imagination when I’m working on new music. So it’s good to be able to present that kind of pictorial aspect as part of the flavour of where and what our music represents.”

Assynt appear at Carnegie Hall, Portmahomack on Monday, September 10 and at Glengarry Community Hall, Invergarry on Tuesday, September 11. Blas, which also features Gaelic singers Christine Primrose, Kathleen MacInnes and Julie Fowlis and bands including Skipinnish, Cruinn and Niteworks, runs from Friday, September 7 to Saturday, September 15. For further information, log onto blas-festival.com