root salad f22 Freeland Barbour


It’s big – like really big. Bob Walton is staggered by and staggering with an amazing tune book.


back with some remarkable pictures. Not your usual ‘holiday postcard from Scotland/ Skegness’ stuff, but pictures that really do convey the landscape and atmosphere of the area concerned.


Obviously the chapters vary in length: unsurprisingly Freeland’s native Perthshire gets a lot more coverage than England (even though Northumberland and Cum- bria get a chapter), and inevitably there are some tunes that don’t fall into any obvious location. The Sea contains a number of well- known shanties to which Freeland has added an extra part or three to make a use- able dance setting, and there’s an old-time dancing chapter too.


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fRoots mail-out that won’t go through the letterbox usually gets a cheery smile from the postie. The arrival of The Music


And The Land got a dark look and mutter- ings about his hernia… weighing in at over 5kg it’s certainly the heaviest review item ever to come this way.


Freeland Barbour has a long and distin-


guished CV. Highly regarded as a multi- instrumentalist, band-leader, composer, record producer, radio producer and teach- er, in the early 1970s he preceded Phil Cun- ningham as the accordeon player in the seminal Scottish band Silly Wizard, before going on to found The Wallachmoor Ceilidh Band and The Occasionals (two of the “Best Scottish Dance Bands Evva” as Mike Harding would likely say). He’s played in The Ghillies and has been a ‘country member’ of the splendid Faroese folk band Spælimenninir too. He also owns – and until recently man- aged – one of the largest and best indepen- dent recording studios in Scotland.


Brought up in rural highland


Perthshire, and subsequently living in urban Edinburgh, Freeland has toured widely throughout the UK and further afield, shar- ing his music with many others.


Indigenous music and culture is heavily influenced by the local environment, weather, living standards and so on, and a major part of that influence derives from the landscape itself. From this realisation emerged a plan to present his music in an illustrated geographical setting. Encouraged by the publishers Birlinn and others, the project grew legs, and the end result is more


or less ‘the complete works’, presented in two sumptuous coffee-table type volumes in a proper-job slip-case running to some 700 pages with seriously high quality printing and binding, and containing sheet music interspersed with beautiful colour pictures and commentary. Not just books of tunes or books of nice pictures, but a superb musical travelogue about the places, people and tra - ditions that have inspired Freeland’s music.


Arranged geographically, each chapter of tunes relating to that area or to people living there starts with a short introduction by someone locally significant – musician, broadcaster, journalist – and sometimes additional commentary from Freeland as well. The introductory roster gives an indi- cation of the esteem in which Freeland is held, as it includes Phil Cunningham, Mag- nus Linklater, Archie Fisher, Alistair Ander- son, Robbie Shepherd, Mairéad Ni Mhaon- aigh and Martin Carthy, to name but a few. The music is complemented with notes about the tunes’ origins along with full- colour photographs of the local landscape and sometimes the people the tunes are named after.


Most of the pictures were taken by Skye-based Cailean Maclean, who is no stranger to the music himself: as well as being a superb landscape photographer he was instrumental in establishing the highly regarded Gaelic music label Macmeanmna with Arthur Cormack and Mary Ann Kennedy. Many of the other photos were taken by Edinburgh’s Robin Gillanders. Free- land remarked that Cailean immediately ‘got’ the project, and – dispatched with a list of possible places and people – came


ith somewhere in the region of 450 great tunes, musically alone this is a amazing body of work, from the jaunty


opening The Ornithologist (The Bobby Tul- loch Two Step) – a long time personal favourite – right through to the dreamier Winter’s Journey sequence at the end. Pre- senting the tunes in this manner elevates things to an entirely different level. Person- ally, as a singer rather than an instrumen- talist, a normal tune book rarely inspires, but on several occasions I found myself avoiding putting fingers to computer key- board, heaving one of the books onto the piano and picking out a tune on that key- board instead. If the wonderful 1903 archive picture of a penguin in the Antarc- tic totally ignoring a piper in full dress kit doesn’t prompt you to see what Hugh Cheape’s Salute To The Lone Penguin sounds like, you’ve no soul!


The books come complete with a sam- pler CD containing a short selection of the music (including The Ornithologist) – it’s available separately but makes rather more sense in the context of the rest of the pro- ject. And finally, as many of Freeland’s tunes have been adopted by the piping communi- ty, there’s a paperback The Piping Section in which Ross Ainslie has valiantly transposed 65 of the tunes into pipe settings, complete with all those fancy/twiddly grace notes.


A long time in the making and a real labour of love from all concerned (publish- er, transcribers and photographers as well as Freeland himself), this really is an aston- ishing publication, a celebration of tradi- tional music and landscapes, and – I reckon – destined to become a real collector’s item. All you need is a serious coffee table and/or an industrial strength music stand.


The Music And The Land by Freeland Barbour is published by Birlinn Books: ISBN 978-1-78027-300-6 bonskeidmusic.com F


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