Fiddle festival finds a champion in folk musician with more than one string to his bow

Published on Tuesday 3 November 2009 18:03

"THE violin is a schizophrenic instrument," Greg Lawson muses. "It's called a fiddle and it's called a violin, which is just the posh version of the fiddle.

It's the class system embedded in one instrument, and I happen to play both."

Lawson gets around, having played with outfits as diverse as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its adventurous offshoot, McFall's Chamber, plus the Dougie MacLean Band, Salsa Celtica, the string section he assembled for David Byrne's soundtrack of the film Young Adam and he is the fiddler with those fast-travelling exponents of klezmer and Balkan fire, Moishe's Bagel. He also crops up in a duo, with fellow Bagelist Phil Alexander (on keyboards and accordion) at the Assembly Rooms later this month as part of Fiddle 2009, Edinburgh's annual bowing frenzy.

Lawson, whose lineage is part German-Jewish and part Durham mining stock, started off playing the Northumbrian pipes. He wasn't very good, he admits, though he would love to try them again (it would, he agrees, add an interesting "textural change" to the Bagel sound), and the fiddle took over – and he stresses fiddle. "I'd be 13 or 14, and I played in the youth orchestra and was good at the classical stuff, but identity wise, I just wanted to play folk music.

"Basically, I got streamed into the Royal Northern College of Music, and I got caught up in the whole classical slipstream, and I've been trying to get out of it, in a way," he laughs.

What Lawson's eclectic experience has done is to give him "a feeling that all music's related. I get depressed by this constant division and categorisation of music".

Twenty years ago, he adds, he felt very isolated in dividing his time between classical, folk and rock. "But things have changed a lot, classical music has woken up to other forms, and other areas are also less afraid of classical music.

"It's an interesting time now, with people letting go of their preconceptions."

Amid this crumbling of musical barriers, Moishe's Bagel, the exuberant purveyors of klezmer and Balkan music, with much else stirred into the mix, are hard enough to classify, tending to be labelled as "world folk". Audiences can judge for themselves when the band play the Classic Grand in Glasgow on 26 November and Edinburgh's Bongo Club on 28 November. In between, they head up the A9 to Dunkeld and Dougie MacLean's studio to record their third album.

In the meantime, however, Lawson and Alexander perform in "mini-Moishe" duo format on Saturday, 14 November, at Fiddle 2009.

Conscious of Scotland's strong box-and-fiddle traditions, Lawson says that while they'll venture into Scottish repertoire, we can also expect "klezmer, tangos, French musettes, the whole European fiddle and accordion thing".

In doing so, they join a packed weekend of concerts, ceilidhs, talks and workshops amid the Georgian opulence of the Assembly Rooms. Numerous other recitals include the fine north-east stylist Paul Anderson, the father and son Lochaber fiddle duo of Aonghas and Angus (of Shooglenifty) Grant, and Dubliner Caoimhn Raghallaigh.

Of the two headlining concerts, Friday night has the Scottish fiddle, pipes and step-dance outfit Dannsa join forces with their Cape Breton counterparts Belach in what should be an energetic session, as well as the powerful triple-fiddle Highland outfit, Session A9, while Saturday night welcomes the Shetland duo of Maggie Adamson and Brian Nicholson, the potent Highland grouping of Iain MacFarlane and the Henderson Family, and the peerless Nordic partnership of Shetland fiddler Aly Bain with Swedish multi-instrumentalist Ale Mller. Events also include the Youth Gaitherin, already nurturing the next generation of aspiring fiddle tyros.

&#149 Fiddle 2009 is at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 13-15 November. See www.scotsfiddlefestival.com