I said shake, rattle and reel

When it's cool for kids to play the bagpipes, you know Scotland's contemporary music scene is thriving

Although it has yet to make much impression on the mainstream music press, the Scottish contemporary roots scene – being extensively showcased this Edinburgh Fringe in concert series at the Queens Hall and the Reid Hall – is currently one of Britain's most diverse and dynamic music sectors.

While most of the metropolitan media cling stubbornly to obsolete stereotypes involving woolly jumpers, beards and beer bellies, a new generation of Scottish bands are merrily mixing up traditional idioms and instrumentation with everything from salsa to hip-hop and reggae to jazz, and exporting the results around the world. Edinburgh at festival time, in fact, is often one of the few chances in the year for home audiences to catch many of these acts, so busy are they globe-trotting not only through Europe, the US and Canada, but frequently as far afield as India, South-east Asia and Latin America.

One of the most original and distinctive sounds to emerge from all this activity comes from a line-up of three voices and two harps, collectively known as Shine and performing at the Reid Hall tomorrow. Singing in English, Scots and Gaelic, with a repertoire ranging from ancient ballads and Burns songs to compositions by Nick Drake and Sting, Shine are the trio of Alyth McCormack (vocals), Corrina Hewat and Mary Macmaster (both harp and vocals).

They've been likened by one delighted venue promoter to "a mixture of Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, early Clannad and the Mediaeval Baebes", while Scotland's Sunday Herald, reviewing their debut album, Sugarcane, earlier this year, summed up their style of music as "sweetness stunningly offset by piquancy, starkness and steel".

Hewat, whose original training was in jazz, says: "We do set out to be pretty radical, to let rip a bit in going for a really contemporary feel. All our stuff is very carefully arranged; we spend a lot of time working out every detail of the parts and harmonies."

McCormack, who grew up singing traditional Gaelic songs in her native island of Lewis, agrees. "Whatever songs we do, we tend to take them apart completely, break them right down and then reconstruct them, so they often end up sounding completely different from the original – but definitely sounding like us."

These intricately parcelled-out vocals, variously tinged with jazz, gospel, African, Middle Eastern and Balkan hues, are complemented by the commanding sound of two Camac electro-harps, modern incarnations of Scotland's oldest musical instrument, which expand the already richly textured palette with a powerful bass end and shimmering layers of reverb. The boldness of Shine's approach is particularly striking given that traditional song, as opposed to instrumental tunes, tends to be regarded as particularly sacrosanct by that purist faction (un)popularly known as the "folk police".

"You do have to tread carefully," agrees Hewat, "and any kind of fusion-style treatment is always going to provoke some opposition. But at the same time, I'd say we are still traditional in the sense of res-pecting the material, always focusing on what a song is actually about. These songs are stories, essentially, and the priority is to put that across."

The purist cause is in any case a fast-dying one in Scotland, with Shine's interplay between traditional fidelity and 21st-century cosmopolitanism being far more representative of the country's current crop of folk-based acts.

"I think one of the key changes, since the first wave of younger musicians came on the scene and the whole fusion thing kicked off, is that playing the fiddle or bagpipes when you're 11 or 12, or into your teens, has gone from being nerdy to something really quite cool," says the singer and multi-instrumentalist Brian McNeill, formerly a member of the folk outfit the Battlefield Band, who now runs a degree course in traditional music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. "There are waves upon waves of kids coming through, whose playing is already at an amazingly high level."

The fiddler Aidan O'Rourke, who has played two storming shows this Fringe (with his cutting-edge fusion outfit Sunhoney and young traditional champions Blazin' Fiddles), may be a relative stripling himself at 27, but he too is impressed by the mettle of those snapping at his heels. "I often work as a tutor," he says, "and with a lot of these 16- to 20-year-olds you find yourself running out of tunes to teach them – they already know them all. They're like sponges, some of them, for learning new stuff, all these kids with their dyed hair in their Limp Bizkit T-shirts, and the standard of musicianship is just frightening."

As O'Rourke implies, this influx of youth feeds naturally into continued cross-fertilisation, with today's new wave of players having grown up listening to the same popular music as their peers. Among the acts still to appear on the Fringe, for instance, is the 21-year-old piper, flautist and whistle player Finlay MacDonald (Queens Hall, 20 Aug), one of the inaugural RSAMD graduates. He performs with a band featuring rock, jazz and dance musicians. The fresh-faced trio Fine Friday (Queens Hall, 19 Aug) rearrange classic ballads to resemble edgy acoustic pop songs, between times mixing jazz, blues and funk influences into a multicultural melange of traditional and original tunes.

One effect of such contemporary approaches, however, has been a concomitant upswing of interest in their traditional underpinnings, with bands like Malinky (Reid Hall, 18 Aug) and Keep It Up (Queens Hall, tomorrow) revisiting and reinvigorating these sources with no less vigour or imagination than their more overtly experimental peers. Ultimately, it's this dynamically fertile symbiosis between old and new, tradition and innovation, that makes today's Scottish music scene such an exciting place to be.

Reid Hall, 0131-662 8740; Queens Hall, 0131-668 2019.

Blazin' Fiddles' new album, 'The Old Style', is out now on Birnam CD. Sunhoney's debut, 'November', is released on Vertical Records on 23 September