Scottish multi-instrumentalist Fraser Fifield this month releases a new album, Secret Path, which showcases his skills on one of traditional music’s simplest and most portable instruments, the low D whistle.
Schooled in both the Highland bagpipe tradition and the soprano saxophone, Fifield has developed a technique on the whistle that borrows from those and other instruments but is all his own style.
“I see the whistle as a blank canvas,” says Fifield, who has worked across the world with leading musicians from India, Eastern Europe, Spain and South America. “It has its associations but to me it’s a universal instrument. I think all musicians ultimately want to play the music they would like to hear, and it’s been my goal to be able to play music on the whistle that isn’t constrained by its essentially quite limited structure.”
Over the past ten years Fifield has worked on achieving this aim, helped by his domestic situation. Before moving to Cupar, he lived in a flat in Edinburgh and he felt sure his neighbours would be unimpressed by the sound of the pipes or a saxophone intruding into their day or night.
The low D whistle, as well as requiring little physical work, unlike the pipes and saxophone, is an instrument that can be picked up at any time and played quietly so that ideas can be explored into unsociable hours if the muse strikes.
On Secret Path he is joined by two musicians whose approaches mirror Fifield’s own sense of adventure. Paul Harrison, on Wurlitzer piano, is most often associated with jazz but is equally at home in Brazilian and electronic music. Similarly, drummer Tom Bancroft, also from the jazz world, has wider experience in African and Indian music and with the massive Grit Orchestra, which was formed to celebrate the work of Scottish folk-dance music pioneer Martyn Bennett.
“Paul and Tom are both fantastic musicians,” says Fifield. “I knew that they would respond and make the music come alive. I wrote arrangements that gave them enough detail without providing too much information. So there was space for the three of us to express ourselves and I’m pleased with the way the eight tracks turned out.”
Fraser Fifield (photo by Douglas Robertson)