Good vibrations on a rewarding journey for fiddler Alasdair Fraser

Fraser, 56, is talking about his musical peregrination, from playing fiddle as a kilted youth in Mod competitions and on TV shows such as ’Se Ur Beatha to his present status as a renowned transatlantic ambassador for Scots fiddle music, a status to be acknowledged this Saturday when, as well as performing with Haas at the 2011 Scots Trad Music Awards at Perth Concert Hall, he’ll be inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame, a website dedicated to musicians and others who have made a significant contribution to the development of traditional music.

Fraser joins seven other inductees, including globe-trotting folk veterans the Tannahill Weavers and three posthumous recipients – John Watt, Bert Jansch and Bobby MacLeod. He and Haas will also share the “the folk Oscars” performance bill with Barbara Dickson, the Peatbog Faeries, Skerryvore and others.

Thirty years ago Fraser, who grew up in Clackmannan, in the foothills of the Ochils, and trained as a petrophysicist, was working for BP in Aberdeen when he was posted to Alaska, although based in San Francisco. His trusty fiddle went with him. He’d been playing since he was eight – his grandfather was a founder-member of the Stirling Strathspey and Reel Society. “I was an incredibly shy, introverted young Scot and, looking back on it, the fiddle became my voice, I suppose,” he recalls.

Not long after moving to San Francisco, he had what he calls a “penny-drop moment … when I realised that there’s not one person on this planet that can’t be affected by music, that music was a huge force in the human condition, and that was it: I quit my job the next day.”

So the shy fiddler from the Ochil Hillfits now lives in the hill foots of the Sierra Nevada in California, with his American wife and two sons. Apart from his solo work and notable playing partnerships with the likes of Haas, pianist Paul Machlis and guitarist Tony McManus, he has also established annual teaching initiatives in America, particularly his Valley of the Moon fiddle school in northern California, now established 18 years, and, more recently, his Sierra Fiddle camp outside Nevada City, as well as his summer school at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye and, most recently, another outside Burgos in Spain.

His last album with Haas, the well-received Highlander’s Farewell, saw the duo joined by guests including American old-time master Bruce Molsky and the celebrated Clare fiddler Martin Hayes. Already, he says, he and Haas – a Julliard school graduate who has embraced the tradition big time – are working on new material. “More and more,” says Fraser, “I want to create new pieces in a Scottish accent – while always going back to drink deeply from the well.”

So far as his Hall of Fame recognition is concerned, he greets the gesture “with humility”.

“I suppose I see it as recognition of the things I’ve witnessed over the past 25-30 years in terms of the changing music scene and the journey many of us have made.”

That journey again: “Me following my fiddle as I let it vibrate and lead me into the Scottish condition,” is how he likes to put it. “When I was sitting at the end of the bar at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig 25 years ago, I never envisaged the momentum and confidence we’re seeing now, particularly among the kids, and the peeling away of the Scots cultural cringe.”

• For further details of Saturday’s gala awards concert in Perth, see www.handsupfortrad.co.uk/tradmusicawards and www.horsecross.co.uk. See also www.tradmusichall.com and www.alasdairfraser.com