Folk: Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach on reworking rarely played gems

Charlie Grey on fiddle and Joseph Peach on Piano PIC: Peter Dibdin

The title of the new album from Highland fiddle-piano duo Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach is Spiorachas, an old Gaelic term translated as “a high place”, although it goes further than the merely topographical, suggesting venturing into the realms of the precipitous. Fiddler Grey agrees that it could be more a state of mind than a physical location: “This album is the furthest we’ve pushed ourselves, playing in this very improvised way. That’s also the most precarious place because it could fall apart at any moment.”

Not that their playing takes any tumbles on the album, issued on Peach’s Braw Sailin’ imprint. From the beautiful, lingering strains of the opening Kintail, Grey and Peach have their improvisatory but deeply empathetic instrumental way with a series of Gaelic song airs, interspersed with occasional up-tempo breaks.

Tracks such as Ghruamach, based on a song by an emigrant Gael in Nova Scotia, or Peach’s composition Gathan-grèin, inspired by fleeting coastal sunlight, sob and soar emotively, while Griogal is a movingly spare solo piano distillation of the lament Griogal cridhe.

Speaking in Glasgow, while rehearsing for an album recording with another band, Westward the Light, they explain how, for Spiorachas, they’ve aimed for contemporary-sounding improvisations on mainly traditional Gaelic song airs. “We tried to pick tunes that hadn’t been done for a long while, says Grey, “and I guess the School of Scottish Studies was a great starting place, as well as [the online archive] Tobar an Dualchais and the old tune books.”

“There was a thing about working with the melodies of songs, as opposed to just instrumental tunes,” says Peach. Neither are Gaelic speakers, but they researched the stories behind the songs. “We needed to pick up an impression of what the song was about,” continues Peach. “A good example would be Ghruamach, an emigration song from Nova Scotia, with [John MacLean, Am Bàrd MacGilleathain] writing about the bleakness and desolation he felt when he got there. I think there’s a sense of that in how we play it.”

Salient in their sound is Grey’s use throughout the album of a modern variant of the traditional Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, the Hardanger d’amore, its five melody strings plus five sympathetic strings giving a distinctively grainy, slightly phased sound. They’re made in Norway by Salve Håkedal, and Grey was first given a shot of one a few years ago by Caoimhín Ò Raghallaigh of The Gloaming. He was an immediate convert: “I knew instantly that I would want one of my own. I was always aware that its sound would work well for our duo material, but I didn’t realise the degree to which I would be using it.”

Peach, too, felt the Hardanger effect: “Because you have a lot more sounds and frequencies going on, it made me play with a bit more space.”

Beyond the Hardanger, the duo’s way of introducing a tune quite tentatively before gathering pace is also reminiscent of the revered Irish-American band. The pair admit their admiration, not so much in terms of wanting to copy their sound, but in writing and arranging. “That first album of theirs opened a door to almost a completely new way of approaching traditional music,” says Peach.

Early next year, they launch their own podcast series, Take Note, which offers a fly-on-the-wall experience of the rehearsal process through conversations with guest musicians, each podcast ending with a finished track. With 12 episodes recorded, guests include Duncan Chisholm, Josie Duncan, Annie Grace and Mairi Campbell.

In the meantime, precipitous or not, Spiorachas suggests that years of playing together have made the pair securely tuned into each other, although, says Grey, “it’s a question we have to resolve all the time as to how we actually do it.”

Grey and Peach appear at Celtic Connections as part of Josie Duncan’s band on 28 January and in Hamish Napier and Adam Sutherland’s Nae Plans Extravaganza on 5 February. See www.cgjpmusic.com

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