Ian Hardie is one of Scottish traditional music’s most talented and prolific composers, a master of all tune styles from slow airs to strathspeys and reels and a fiddler and multi-instrumentalist who has made a major contribution to the preservation and evolution of traditional music though his playing with both folk groups and dance bands.
Ian was born in Edinburgh on November 11, 1952 and began taking classical violin lessons at the age of six. He continued studying classical music until the age of fourteen when he began to take a keen interest in traditional music, which was enjoying a revival through folk singing and was about to enjoy an equally pronounced, instrumental renaissance in which Ian played his part.
On leaving school Ian studied law at Edinburgh University and was soon involved in extracurricular studies in the seat of learning that was Sandy Bell’s bar. The nightly informal sessions there in the early 1970s forged friendships and folk groups and Ian was a prominent participant, going on to play with Chorda, featuring on the acclaimed Live at Sandy Bell’s album with the pub’s ceilidh band and towards the end of the decade, forming Jock Tamson’s Bairns with Norman Chalmers, John Croall, Tony Cuffe, Jack Evans, Adam Jack and Rod Paterson.
The Bairns released their first, eponymous album on Temple Records in 1980, presenting a modern interpretation of authentically traditional acoustic, exclusively Scottish music, and after a personnel change that saw Derek Hoy join Ian on fiddle and guitarist Tony Cuffe go off to join Ossian, they recorded their classic The Lasses Fashion, which is still regarded as one of the finest expressions of the great revival of traditional music that helped to shape and create the contemporary Scottish identity. The band retired shortly afterwards but returned in full vigour in 1995.
Meanwhile, having graduated and trained as a solicitor, Ian lived and worked for several years in the Borders where he wrote many of the dozens of his compositions that have now filled three tune books. In 1986 he recorded his first solo album, A Breath of Fresh Airs, which he followed with A Breath of Fresher Airs in 1992 and The Spider’s Web duo album with pianist Andy Thorburn in 1998. He also teamed up with accordionist Freeland Barbour in the long-running dance band The Occasionals, featured in the Ghillies and in 1994, having moved north to Nairn and joined Janice Clark and Dagger Gordon in Highland Connection, he featured on fiddle, viola, bass and smallpipes on the group’s Gaining Ground album.
Always a superb fiddler, Ian has guested on recordings by Isla St Clair, Margaret Stewart and Hamish Moore and joined Jock Tamson’s Bairns for their 1990s renaissance, appearing on their May Ye Never Lack a Scone and Rare albums, until 2006. The following year, having giving up his law practice to concentrate on music, Ian released what many consider to be his masterpiece, Westringing. Conceived following a trip to the Smithsonian Fiddle Festival in Washington DC with the Occasionals in 2003, the album explored the connections between Appalachian old-time fiddle music and the Scottish and Irish repertoire and featured Ian playing entirely solo, using altered fiddle and viola tunings and capturing the landscapes and sounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains as well as portraying in music the atmosphere and magnificence of the Highlands where he’d made his home.
Ian passed away in October 2012.