A return to Scotland’s 'golden age' of fiddle music for Savage & Allen

Alice Allen and Alastair Savage | Contributed

Fiddle music from two centuries ago and new compositions informed by place, history and personal loss are given rich expression on a new double album, the debut collaboration between fiddler Alastair Savage and cellist Alice Allen.

Where The Good Ship Lands (Woodland Records) is Savage’s seventh recording but his first with Allen, although the pair have been playing together on an occasional basis for the past seven years. Both artists straddle the folk and classical worlds with apparent ease: Savage is a longstanding violinist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, while Allen, as a freelance musician, has also played with the BBC SSO, as well as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble and many other groups.

Between them, they give eloquent string voice to classics such as Niel Gow’s Major Graham of Inchbrakie, Nathaniel Gow’s Coilsfield House and William Marshall’s Craigellachie Lasses, while a James Scott Skinner medley opens with his beautiful Flower o’ the Quern (a tune Savage says was the first he learned on fiddle while in primary school in his home town of Ardrossan).

There are Irish and American excursions, while Savage’s own compositions include the eponymous Where the Good Ship Lands, inspired by emigration and his native Ardrossan’s industrial past – his accordionist father worked in the Shell oil refinery, his grandfather on freight trains. Another fine air, Lend You My Tears, is dedicated to those who lost loved ones to Covid, while Capital Nights evokes a contemplative libation in Ryrie’s bar, waiting for the westbound train after his busy Fringe concert season.

Savage has long been known for his championing of music from Scotland’s 18th century “golden age” of fiddle music – the deathless repertoire of the likes of Niel and Nathaniel Gow and William Marshall as well as that later iconoclast, Scott Skinner. Broader non-classical work includes playing with the Grit Orchestra and The Whistlebinkies.

In fact it was playing music by composer and Whistlebinkies member Eddie McGuire for a dance project that first brought Savage and Allen together. Several years, a pandemic and a trilogy of his own albums on, he says, it was Allen’s encouragement that got the present album underway.

“We’ve been playing together for seven years now,” he says, “and there’s a heck of a lot of repertoire we’ve built up in that time. So it was not so much planned as a natural progression, and we recorded an incredible 80 minutes’ worth of music over three or four days. It was very live, very spontaneous.”

Allen, from the Scott Skinner heartland of Banchory, also performs with numerous folk artists – not least Perthshire fiddler Patsy Reid in their Strathspey Queens partnership. A cellist was the common accompanist for Scots fiddle during that “golden age”, but how historically “authentic” or otherwise are her arrangements with Savage?

Allen, in fact, is currently engaged in her “grand passion”, researching cello bass lines and the instrument’s history in Scots music for a PhD: “The more I find out about these bass lines, the more they just feel like home,” she says. “Something fundamentally Scottish in flavour, something designed with the functionality of dance at its core, something that elegantly allows the tune to shine.”

Occasionally on the album, she says, she sticks more or less to traditional bass lines. For most of it, however, she devised her own parts, albeit influenced by “the old style”, as in her pizzicato accompaniment to the duo’s easeful unfolding of Kenmure’s On and Awa’.

Allen states in her sleeve notes that playing with Savage “has been one of the great privileges of my musical career”; Savage, for his part, finds the cellist “a very inspiring person to work with. “Our backgrounds are very similar in terms of being brought up in the strathspey and reel societies.”

Also, fundamentally, they share a love of that classic fiddle repertoire. As Savage puts it, “I increasingly describe Niel Gow as the JS Bach of the trad music world.”

See www.alastairsavage.co.uk and www.aliceallencello.com