Chamber-folk fiddlestravaganza from RANT that bursts wide from genre typecasting.

Release Date: 9th February 2024

Label: Make Believe Records

Format: CD/digital

Familiar with the words multi-tasking and with serial monogamy, have you yet met serial mono-tasking? This will allow you to better get a handle on Anna Massie, especially, if, like me, you had felt her merely (merely!) to be the doyenne of Scottish guitar play in the folk and trad traditions. She is the one on stage, maybe out the main glare of the spotlight, at all those Blazin’ Fiddles gigs, to any number of showcase performances, alongside those requiring her strict tempered metronome of accompaniment. A wonderful sight to see and hear.

So how come I didn’t realise she the same Anna Massie, who is a fiddler in RANT, and a damn fine one at that? I guess the clue is in the name. A swift glance of the bio shows she is furthermore adept also on mandolin and banjo, giving some of the extent her sickening prodigiousness. Plus, there is a third Anna Massie, to boot, the bubbly presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s flagship traditional music programme Travelling Folk. And a much in-demand producer and arranger, damn her eyes, a winner of the Producer of the Year at the 2022 Scots Trad Music Awards. So, quite good then.

But, neither leader nor the main focus of RANT, this quartet of female fiddlers have been treading the boards a fair while, this being their 3rd release, since their 2016 eponymous debut. The original other three were sisters, Bethany and Jenna Reid, with a slew of duet recordings behind them, hailing from Shetland, and Lauren MacColl, herself, like Massie, from the Black Isle. MacColl we know well, if best from Salt House and from Heal & Harrow, with Jenna Reid being also a bandmate of Massie’s in Blazin’ Fiddles. Unavailable this time around, she is replaced by Arran islander, Gillian Frame, so often a foil with/for Findlay Napier and Mike Vass.

This is a covers album. However, rather than hoary old ’60s pop staples, hung out to dry in a tenement yard, these are all tunes, and it is all tunes, derived from the repertoire and writing of their peers. None of your straight trad. arr., these are versions of original arrangements, if re-interpreted and re-calibrated for the four players here. This is exemplified by the opener, Dr MacPhail’s Reel, fondly remembered from Capercaillie’s Delirium, their first full overt overture into a cross-over audience, back in, shhh, 1991. A bonny piece, the four women give it a little more float than I recall in the original, having a light and airy breeziness, that can only augur well for the project. The delightfully named Hale-Popp, after the comet, follows, coming from JPP (Järvelän Pikkupelimannit). This required a quick google from me, they seeming a Finnish folk band, founded in 1982 in Kaustinen, Finland. Starting with some pizzicato, it is as close to orchestral as this album gets, and is a brisk and angular construction, with enough notes, and side-turns, to intrigue both the grey and the white matter. It could double also as a courtly 17th c. gavotte.

Timo Alakotila is another Finn, a pianist, and the next piece comes from a duet album he made with Karen Tweed, the Scots accordionist, whereon the melody is almost solely provided by a lonely plaintive flugelhorn. Here, with the tune and arrangement near identical, what sounded there as pure ECM frosty jazz, becomes a lilting slow air. I am uncertain who provides the solo fiddle at each stage, but it wonderful, building gradually into an ensemble glacier. This then leads into a couple of tunes from, broadly, the Irish style, with, first, Big Reel of Ballynacally. A traditional reel, the version giving legs to this was from the playing of Solas, the Irish-American supergroup. Whilst their version has banjo and accordion ‘verses’, here it is just fiddles and a neat little touch or two of syncopation. Given that the producer of Solas, at this time, 1997, was no less than the late great Johnny Cunningham, brother of Phil and the master fiddler of Silly Wizard, I would not be surprised if that carried some weight with the choice. To follow is Máirtín O’Connor’s The Road West, which, in a mix of ensemble and fiery solo gymnastics, keeps the swing of the original, matching it with orchestral grandeur.

New York Jig is a spritely dance over a pizzicato intro, with an arrangement that soundly smacks of a ladies’ excuse-me. From the playing of Cape Breton fiddler, Natalie McMaster, this demonstrates the ease with which the quartet can switch between styles. Finally back to Scotland for two tunes chosen from the repertoire of Alasdair Fraser and Tony McManus, fiddle master and guitarist respectively. Here the four fiddles weave and wend sinuously between each other, providing that golden moment where folk actually becomes chamber. A lovely, lovely piece, my favourite, thus far, and the longest.

Michael McGoldrick’s James Brown’s March makes me always think of the Godfather of Soul. But it is another old tune and another James Brown, but put to such polish on McGoldrick’s rightly acclaimed folk fusion masterclass, Fused. All choppy bowstrings, cradling the jaunty march, the sense of repetition imagines a cautious incursion, perhaps over a hill, before the pell mell descent. Grand. More Scandi next, from Swedes, Vasen, for Hasse A’s. I’ve already commented on how much variety is getting teased out the same instrumenation. I’ll say it again.

Instrumental fiddle albums, sessions or shows rarely fail to include something by Liz McCarroll, this no exception, a buzzy version of her slow air, The Didda, paired with the brisker Fly And Dodger. It has all four players swapping between pizzicato and bowing, with all four playing, simultaneously variations around the main theme. Whilst you marvel at that, it is the familiar sound of Aly Bain’s Hangman’s Reel to close, with such a burst of tight fiddle orchestration as to challenges the reputation of Massie’s ‘other band’.

This album, launched at Celtic Connection on 24/1/23, represents everything that is so vibrant across this festival, this land and all the Celts, honorary and otherwise concerned. (My only problem was it was in the week before I arrived!)

Catch a short hit of The Road West:

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