Folk, jazz etc: Kevin Henderson’s back home… then off out again with his packed musical diary

SWITCHING from the unbridled high energy of the folk superbands Fiddlers’ Bid or Session A9 to a wistful island air learned from archive recordings suggests not just a change of pace, if temporary, but an evolving outlook for Shetland fiddler Kevin Henderson, a front rank player with both the aforementioned bands, as well as the Boys of the Lough. Henderson has just released a fine album under his own name, devoted to purely traditional Shetland repertoire.

He spends most of his non-touring time in Norway but, as the title of the new album suggests, this is him touching base. It’s called Fin da Laand Ageen (Sungaet Records), an old Shetland expression that roughly translates as “to arrive back home”, which is precisely what he has done.

“I’ve wanted for some time now to do an album of purely traditional Shetland music, which hasn’t really been done in a while,” Henderson says. “The late Gibby Hutchison, the Whalsay fiddler, recorded one in his seventies.”

Henderson, 34, heads off later this month on what promises to be a barnstorming 20th-anniversary tour by Fiddlers’ Bid, the formidable Shetland band he co-founded with Chris Stout and Maurice Henderson back in their early teens. But his “solo” album, on which he’s accompanied solely and peerlessly by Swedish musician Mattias Pérez on guitar and mandola (plus second fiddle from Nina Pérez on one track) takes a rather different tack. “Because in Fiddlers’ Bid and Session A9 we tend to… well, let go a bit more,” he says, with some understatement, “I just fancied a more laid-back approach.”

Fin da Laand Ageen gathers tunes of great character and often great beauty – delicately poised “listening tunes” and wedding tunes such as Christmas Day i’da Mornin and Da Bride’s a Boanie Ting, as well as more robust but distinctly personable melodies such as Da Farder Ben da Welcomer and Da Fields of Foula, which skims along sweetly indeed.

There’s a fine stillness in some of the slower airs, and Henderson says that, as he grows older, he is drawn increasingly to them and to listening to the old island players on archive recordings. “It’s music I find myself going back to more and more now.”

Some of these older tunes bear a distinctly Nordic stamp, echoing Shetland’s Norse heritage, and if he’s tapping into the music of his fiddling forebears, Henderson is also revelling in the Scandinavian sounds with which he’s surrounded at the moment. He’s speaking from Kragerø in Norway’s southern Telemark fjord country, home of his girlfriend, Hardanger fiddler and singer Annika Westgård.

With its drifting strains, Hardanger fiddle music is a very different entity from up-tempo jigs and reels – although these also go down well in Norway, says Henderson. But his embracing of Scandinavian music now sees him in a new trio, The Nordic Fiddlers’ Bloc, with Norwegian Hardanger player Olav Luksengård Mjelva and Swedish fiddler Anders Hall, and with a debut album just out.

“I really enjoy mixing Shetland, Norwegian and Swedish stuff with them,” he says. “We swap instruments a bit but the sound we really like is Olav on the Hardanger, Anders on the viola and me on the normal fiddle. It’s such a range of tones, from the deep viola sound to the Hardanger, which is quite high-pitched.”

Henderson fits in a brief Scandinavian tour with the Bloc to promote their new album, then after the Bid’s anniversary tour he’s off on a “Celtic Christmas” tour in England with the indefatigable Boys of the Lough.

It seems that keeping an efficient diary is as necessary for today’s folk troubadours as tapping into the tradition.

• For further details, see www.kevinhenderson.co.uk and www.thenordicfiddlersbloc.com. The Scottish leg of Fiddlers’ Bid’s 20th anniversary tour starts at the Eden Court, Inverness, on 17 October.