HIGHLAND fiddler Duncan Chisholm has been a prominent figure on the Scottish folk scene for more than 20 years. He co-founded Wolfstone, still one of the world’s leading folk-rock outfits, in 1988, and continues with them to this day.

IN the interim, he’s also featured in both Blazin’ Fiddles and Session A9, before joining Gaelic singing star Julie Fowlis’s regular backing line-up in 2007.

IN addition to his band work, Chisholm, now 42, is the award-winning author of four solo albums, dating back to 1997’s Redpoint, after which came The Door of Saints in 2001. Farrar (2008) and last year’s Canaich comprise two-thirds of his projected Strathglass trilogy, mapping a musical journey through the diverse Ross-shire landscapes that were home to his forebears: the final instalment is currently in its early stages of gestation.

These releases have won mounting critical and popular acclaim – Farrar was voted Album of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards – and yet prior to his forthcoming ten Scottish dates (including an already sold-out show at Eden Court), Chisholm has never toured his solo material.

Duncan Chisholm

“I suppose I’ve just reached a point now where I’ve enough of a body of work to draw from, and I really feel comfortable playing it,” he says, having tested the water with a few festival appearances in recent years. “When I take a bow at the end of the night now, I feel what I’ve given the audience is 100 percent me, exactly myself and the way I’m feeling – and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to share that. Doing this tour is like stepping into a new era, a new part of my creative life.”

Chisholm’s sense of fresh horizons, though, follows a long, gradual journey of musical and self-discovery, on which he embarked aged 16, sent on his way by the great Highland fiddle master who’d schooled him for the past eight years. “He just said to me one night, ‘I’ve taught you all I can about playing like Donald Riddell. Now you have to go away and figure out how Duncan Chisholm plays.’”

It was seeing Riddell play with the Highland Strathspey and Reel Society, in the nearby hall to Chisholm’s home village of Kirkhill, just west of Inverness, that inspired him to pick up the fiddle in the first place – and inspired certainly seems to have been the word, despite his previous musical inclinations being limited to “banging on my mother’s pots and pans.”

“I still remember it really vividly,” Chisholm says of that night, back in 1976. “As soon as I heard the fiddle, I wanted to play it. I remember where I was sitting in the hall, the effect this sound had on me: I was just spellbound. I’d been aware of fiddle music from an early age – my father was very much into Scottish dance bands, there were lots of accordion and fiddle records in the house, but actually seeing and hearing someone play made a huge impression on me. I begged my parents for lessons, and fortunately Donald only lived three or four miles from us, so when I turned eight he took me on. He thought that was the right age to start, because by then you’d mostly have got to grips with reading and writing, so your brain would have space for learning an instrument.”

Riddell’s tutelage, at his South Clunes farmstead, was to leave plenty more vivid memories. “It was a traditional croft house – there weren’t many airs and graces about it,” Chisholm recalls. “They were farming pigs at that time, and had loads of dogs and cats about the place, and then there were all these fiddles in the midst of it, lying about next to shotguns. Donald would have been in his 70s then, and teaching eight or nine people a day, 50 or 60 each week – adults in the daytime, children after school. He charged a pound for an hour’s lesson, and basically all the money he made went on cigarettes. He was never much of a drinker, but he smoked all the time, morning till night.”

While Riddell’s teaching was primarily anchored in the fiddle’s kindred Highland tradition of bagpipe music – he’d served as a Pipe Major during World War II – it also reflected his own early mentoring by Alexander Grant Battan, James Scott Skinner’s closest friend. This combined grounding in west and east coast styles, Chisholm says, allied to the ex-military strictness with which Riddell drilled his pupils, “meant you ended up very technically proficient at a fairly young age. Because it was so regimented, though, when he stopped the lessons I felt a bit like a bird getting thrown out the nest, but what he did was give you the skills to develop your own particular voice.”

Have fiddle, will travel

Chisholm’s choice of analogy for this individuality of expression proves anything but coincidental, and extends much deeper than any general allusion to the fiddle’s vocal qualities. “It’s taken me quite a while to get there,” he says. “I’ve had so many different influences over the years that my style was continually changing until this last handful of years – and that’s probably a never-ending process, as your life experience changes you. But one key thing I’ve realised, whenever I approach a new tune, is how important it is to sing it first. I don’t have much of a singing voice, but that’s how I work out all the phrasing, all the wee ornamental touches, before I even pick up the fiddle, and then I put that into my fingers. Always when I’m performing, I feel as if I’m singing: I’m never thinking about the notes I’m playing, I’m just trying to get what’s inside of me out, from the heart rather than the hands.”

The Strathglass albums have likewise emerged from a slow, introspective conception, as Chisholm spends up to a year in imaginative communion with his source-material. This comprises both the particular locales he seeks to evoke, together with his route between them, and the actual music embodying the journey, which on Farrar and Canaich combined traditional and original tunes with contemporary compositions by the likes of Michael McGoldrick, Phil Cunningham, Niall Vallely and Allan MacDonald.

“I aim to have a pretty complete picture in my mind of what the album is going to sound like – arrangements, running order, everything – before a note is actually played and recorded,” he says. “Then when I come to perform them live, I’m in the places the tunes are about – I’m up a hill in Glen Affric, or on a boat in Loch Shiel – and hopefully that takes the audience on their own journey, to their own special places.”

With Chisholm joined on this month’s tour by fellow Highland luminary Allan Henderson, on fiddle and piano, and top Irish guitarist Tony Byrne, it promises to be quite a trip.

Duncan Chisholm is on tour in May (see his website for dates). Farrar and Canaich are out on Copperfish Records.

© Sue Wilson, 2011

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