Exploring the Bluegrass Connection

SUE WILSON caught up with Uist piper Fred Morrison ahead of the launch of his third solo recording, Outlands

THE GREAT Scottish piper Fred Morrison – a former member of Clan Alba and Capercaillie, and seven-times winner of the prized Macallan Trophy at Brittany’s Lorient Festival – has recently been exploring new common ground between Celtic piping and bluegrass music.

Fred Morrison in Asturias

SUE WILSON: On the face of it, bagpipes and bluegrass isn’t the likeliest of combinations – how did it come about?

FRED MORRISON: I guess the very start of it was when I lived in Amsterdam for a while after I left school – I used to play with a band there that had a five-string banjo, and I just fell in love with that sound.

The other key thing was when I started learning the uilleann pipes, 10 or 12 years ago – I’d always been really inspired by the Irish travelling pipers’ style, the way people like Paddy Keenan and Finbar Furey played, and I found a really strong connection between that and the South Uist style I grew up with.

Then the more I brought these two elements together, the more they also reminded me of bluegrass music – it’s just how I hear it. I think what they have in common is a really rootsy, earthy rhythmic drive, a lot of very strong self-expression, and that they’re not governed by any kind of rigid formal restraints, they just have this feeling of the musicians totally letting rip.

It felt quite important to show the world, especially the piping world, that what I was doing would work with existing repertoire, with tunes everybody plays, rather than it just being me cobbling together my own weird notions

SUE WILSON: The new album features some very distinguished US collaborators – Ron Block, of Alison Krauss’s Union Station, on banjo and guitar; Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Tim O’Brien, and top Nashville producer Gary Paczosa, who’s worked with Dolly Parton, the Dixie Chicks and Nickel Creek. What was the actual recording process like?

FRED MORRISON: The tunes of mine that are on the album were all written in the last few years, as this whole idea developed, and most of them had also been thoroughly gigged, which was a new thing for me – the other times I’d put a lot more of the music together in the studio.

Basically what happened was that I recorded my parts, then sent them over to Nashville for the guys to do their thing. I made a few suggestions about how I imagined the arrangements, but left it pretty much open: I wasn’t about to start telling these guys how to play bluegrass! Tim was a really good glue in the whole process: he’s very at home with the whole Celtic thing, through the Transatlantic Sessions and so on, and equally with the Nashville side, whereas Ron had never played Celtic music before, so he brought a whole new perspective to it.
I was totally amazed by his approach – the stuff I sent over had a lot of improvisation in it, because those were the best bits from the recordings, and I thought he’d just back up the tracks, but instead he learned every detail of what I’d played, every single improvised phrase, before working out his part: it’s just mind-blowing how accurate and painstaking these guys are. With one of the tracks, when I wanted to re-record my part, I had to learn what I’d done the first time myself, to tie it back in with him.

SUE WILSON: There’s a clear Celtic/US symmetry to the album, though, both in the material and with the presence of two Scottish accompanists, Martin O’Neill on bodhrán and guitarist Matheu Watson. Was this a balance you consciously struck?

FRED MORRISON: Yes, definitely. I guess my own tunes are the most overtly bluegrass ones, being written with this idea in mind, but I always heard the bodhrán in there with the banjo and mandolin, giving it that bit of a Celtic feel. I also knew from the start that I didn’t just want to write a whole load of bluegrass stuff on the pipes, and then take it to Nashville – I also wanted to show this connection I felt through some really good Scottish music.

So there’s an old Lewis strathspey in there, for instance, that we’ve turned into a reel, and a really well-known pipe tune, ‘The Train Journey North’ – just because they both blended in naturally with the other stuff. It felt quite important to show the world, especially the piping world, that what I was doing would work with existing repertoire, with tunes everybody plays, rather than it just being me cobbling together my own weird notions.
SUE WILSON: As regards the less experimental elements of the piping world, it’s often been noted that the pipe band format never really took root on South Uist, in whose traditions – via your father – you were primarily raised. Has missing out on that particular training affected your development as a musician?

FRED MORRISON: Having never played in a pipe band, I’ve never had to play the exact same thing over and over, down to every last grace-note, exactly the same as the guy standing next to me. I’d just find it impossible now – rhythmically as well, given how you have to play to the drums. I suppose by not having that experience, I’ve explored freedom rather than restriction, which I’d say is what I’m still doing.

But a lot of those kind of barriers are coming down, thankfully: back in the early 80s, people like myself and Gordon Duncan and Alan MacLeod of the Tannahill Weavers, who were trying out new things on the pipes – we were outcasts, totally beyond the pale, but now there’s loads more interaction between the pipe-band world and the folk scene.
SUE WILSON: Indeed, it’s increasingly being commented – as has previously been said about Scottish fiddle music – that the bagpipes are enjoying a bit of a golden age right now: would you agree?

FRED MORRISON: Oh, very much so – when I was growing up the pipes were still a rarity for most folk; you were a bit of an oddity if you played. No one at my school ever knew I did, even though I was going out and winning all these competitions every weekend – I kept it totally secret. Now there’s loads of young kids playing, the music’s just a much more integrated part of the culture – and as well as the quantity of players, the standard is so high these days, across all sorts of styles, and different kinds of bagpipes. It’s really that level of musicianship which has brought down the barriers, and opened up the pipe-band or competitive scene to different styles of playing.

SUE WILSON: That buoyant state of health was very much on display at last month’s Piping Live! festival in Glasgow, where you shared a bill and an encore duet with Paddy Keenan – mentioned earlier on as one of your original heroes. How does seeing him live today compare to when he first inspired you, and what’s it like to play with him?
FRED MORRISON: It’s always an eye-opener. I’ve been going to see Paddy play since I was a teenager, but once again my eyes were just popping out of my head. It’s just something really special he’s got, that amazing style and charisma, and such a deep connection with the music. And it’s always a joy to play with him – every time I have a tune with Paddy, it always leaves me with a great energy for my own music.

SUE WILSON: Hearing some of the material from Outlands at that gig, it came across simultaneously as a natural progression from your previous work and as an exciting new direction. Are you pleased with how you’ve realised your original ideas?

FRED MORRISON: It does feel like a culmination of all my influences and experiences to this point, all kind of broken down over time and then focused into this one small channel. And it’s the first time in my professional career that I’ve really felt happy and at ease with what I’m doing: in the past it’s almost been as if I’m trying to convince people of something, or I’d know where I wanted to go, but couldn’t seem to reach its potential. With this music, though, I do really feel it, and really mean it – and it feels great.

Outlands is due for release later this month

© Sue Wilson, 2009

Links

• Fred Morrison on MySpace