Rough Guide to Scottish Music

Too many inebriated versions of Auld Lang Syne or vague memories of half-hearted piper parades may have left a stale taste in the mouth of the uninitiated as far as Scottish music is concerned.Yet Scotland is home to a varied, fresh and exciting traditional music scene that while respecting the tradition reinterprets it for today,not by overtly fusing it with other world musics or jazz or rock or whatever (although there certainly are sublime examples of this) but more by recasting the elements which often existed in the past as isolated islands scattered in every part of the country and bringing them together to invest them with soul, vigour and personality.
You need look no further than the Rough Guide To Scottish Music, a superbly recorded 18 track selection of thoughtfully chosen entries that span a broad range of styles of folk, pipe, flute, fiddle, lament and ballad music that fairly bristle with lovely harmonies, intelligent arrangements, remarkable musicianship and most importantly of all emotional depth...MORE

In this connection I could probably point out the brief beautiful Niel Gow's Lament For His Second Wife, a 1973 performance by the late border fiddler Bob Hobkirk or the incandescence of highland piper Finlay MacDonald's Cowden Hall that blurs the imaginary line between the folk and pipe traditions. But then it seems unfair to omit mention of some of the great performers featured here…Battlefield Band, Emily Smith, Deaf Shepherd, Jennifer & Hazel Wrigley, Jack Beck, Pete Clark, Christine Primrose, Boys Of The Lough, Heather Heywood, Cliar (a sort of Gaelic a-capella with a delicacy that could even bring to mind Madagascari music, if you could imagine it), Donald Black & Malcolm Jones, Blazin' Fiddles, Pipe Sergeant Gordon J. Walker and Alison McMorland & Geordie McIntyre. With the bevy of steel pans that pulse merrily around piper Robert Mathieson you could be forgiven for thinking that calypso sprang from frostier climes. RJ July 2003