Learning from Masters

PETER URPETH chatted with the Lewis-born fiddle maestro back on home ground for the Hebridean Celtic Festival

I CAUGHT UP with Alasdair in a quiet corner of Stornoway’s An Lanntair arts centre some hours after Alasdair’s gig with Calum Alex MacMillan at the festival [see review]. He began by describing their tuition as youngsters on the island.

“As young lads we had both been taught by the piper Iain Morrison from Back, and Calum was a year above me in School [the Nicolson Institute, Stornoway]. When it came to music at school we were at a different level in terms of the stage of our development to a lot of the other students, and so we were allowed to go off to a small room on our own, known as The Cupboard, and we’d go in there and play the chanters and basically have the craic and while away the time playing tunes.”

Whilst Alasdair White’s raise to the mighty ranks of the Battlefield Band has been much covered, Calum Alex MacMillan of Point was born into a house full of Gaelic music, being the son of Seonaidh MacMillan, lead singer with the influential Gaelic band The Lochies. At the age of 18 he won the gold medal at the Mod and went on to win the equally prestigious Sean Nos competition at the Pan Celtic Festival. I wondered if their different routes through the maze of pathways in Gaelic music since leaving school had changed the music they played as young lads?

Island music is always in flux, because of the nature of islands and of island communities

“Well, Calum’s open enough, talented enough and intelligent enough to expand on that. He is also a member of the band Daimh, and in many ways he is the perfect singer to have in a band like that because he is not precious about singing, it is just something that he does. It is very natural, intrinsic, and he has no axe to grind in that respect! When we were rehearsing for the gig today, we were concerned that we might be doing too much of this or that, but when it comes to it, the music is what it is.”

It is very exciting, I suggest, to hear so many male Gaelic singers like Calum Alex at the Heb Celtic Festival.

“The Heb Celtic Festival is almost unique in its focus on that. This year, apart from us you’ve had Mary Ann Kennedy & Na Seoid, and there was last year’s opening concert with the focus on Murdo MacFarlane. No slights on the other performers, at that concert last year – everyone there was outstanding – but I remember very clearly the Calum Alec / Fraser Fifield performance of Murdo MacFarlane’s ‘Tobair Tobair Sìolaidh’.

All the way through the concert you were going ‘that was good that, that worked nicely’, but there was one point in the concert where the hairs on the back of your neck stood up! The male voice in Gaelic song is such an important one. It can be incredibly powerful, and very poignant and it has been overlooked an awful lot, but not so much now, and that is largely because there are so many great exponents.”

Has the fact that the male voice has been somewhat overlooked anything, I ponder, to do with new trends in the marketing of Gaelic music.

“Well the marketing is inevitable. If you are in a position where you have to get yourself gigs and you have to try to sell a band, then its inevitable, and there’s no harm in that. I think it is a good thing that a lot of the girls are very good singers, especially in that it might bring people to the music who would not normally listen to it, and they go on to find music that they might not usually listen to.

“I mean, Julie Fowlis has made a great break through. She’s working with a great record company, they’ve really kind of pushed her and she’s working really hard and that’s brilliant because it has taken a lot of people into the music, and that’s all you can hope for.”

Sitting as we were in the shiny new facilities of An Lanntair, at the evening ceilidh of a music festival that brings thousands out to hear music in Stornoway, I asked Alasdair how his upbringing on the island had influenced his playing?

“When you’re learning your instrument you do go through a number of stages in terms of your influences and your development. When I started, I started off playing classically, but then my teacher, Ian Dick, left the island and I was for a while, left to my own devices musically.

“But then Jackie Nicol and Douglas Leadbetter helped me and encouraged me, and kept me on the right track with tuning and fingering, and that kept me going. After that I got help in traditional music from Ian Crichton and Jimmy Budge. Jimmy was a member of the Sawmill Band and he was just full of music. They were two huge figures in my musical upbringing, and in music in the island.

“Iain Morrison was my piping instructor and I got so much off of him just in terms of playing pipe tunes. You hear things about piping tutors being ogres, but Iain Morrison was the best piper in his day – there can be no doubt about that. Iain gave me piper Allan MacDonald’s The Moidart Collection, which is a classic collection that I still get tunes out of today, and it was great to learn those things from these masters of island music. I was so privileged to learn from them.”

Is there, though, a distinctive island style of fiddle playing that he had picked up on as a young lad?

“Island music is always in flux, because of the nature of islands and of island communities. Island communities are always in a constant state of transition. When it comes to a fiddle style I would tentatively say that there is one developing. Again I’m sure that there was one at one time but it got decimated through the clearances, the two world wars and so on.

“The only reason that piping got going again was because of the military and that’s why piping is now so strong. In terms of the fiddle style, I think total credit has to go to the likes of Donald Loudy MacLeod – he taught the boys who now organise the Taransay Fiddle Festival, and that has contributed so much to the islands’ musical identity.”

“For a Lewis style, then you’d have to extrapolate that from the singing and from the piping. For instance, there was a set of puirt a beul that we played at the end of the concert today and that is as close as you will get to a true ‘island’ style. To get that style you’ve got to hone in on the way that the people used to sing, especially the puirt a beul, because that was the way they had of preserving the tunes, you’ve also got to look at the whole area of ‘vocables’.

“You’ve also got to look at the piping style – and there is a distinct west coast style and a Hebridean piping style, which was very much influenced by Donald MacLeod and by Iain Morrison as well.

“There are certain things in that style – an example is the way that we play the tune ‘Major Morrison of Ballantrushal’ – such as the fact that you don’t ‘cut’ notes as much as some other players, and there are not so many cuts and dots, they are not so pronounced, and the music is played a bit more open.”

© Peter Urpeth, 2008

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• Alasdair White