brings a breath of fresh Borders air to the crowded record shelves with her first album

The accomplished fiddler (winner of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician 2006) brings a breath of fresh Borders air to the crowded record shelves with her first album.

Mooney reveals an intelligence and evolved creativity in her compositions that belie her youth. From solo fiddle to full band, including drums, the fiddle dances and sings through beds of flowers ('Heartsease' just one example) to end in an astonishing collaged séance with past Borders fiddle masters (and a snatch of the late Hamish Henderson) in a hymn to her homeland.

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Mooney brings an arranging and compositional vision as well as fiddling skill to her music

5 star review ...she is also a truly terrific player, marrying traditional fidelity and contemporary flair, a beautifully rounded tone with ultrasensitive phrasing.

The escalating standards of musicianship among young Scottish folk performers have been widely noted in recent years, not least in this column. Additionally impressive, however, is how frequently talent and technique are combined with artistic ambition, whether in the form of cross-genre exploration, or the configuring of material within a larger conceptual framework.
Fiddler Shona Mooney scores high on both counts, as well as displaying all the talent and technique you’d expect from the current Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year.

Besides its innate poetry, her debut album’s title carries a rich folkloric and symbolic history, “heartsease” being a wild pansy traditionally used to mend a broken heart, which in Victorian times betokened a lover’s constancy of thought.

Flowers form one thematic strand on the CD, the title track being named for the lovely Mooney original which rounds off a set of three jigs. There’s also the hauntingly sparse slow air Pale Winter Sunshine, inspired by an illustrated book about Scottish wildflowers, leading aptly into Brave Snowdrops, whose opening tune is yet another self-penned gem – a minuet this time – followed by a storming trio of reels.

The other main connective element within Heartsease is Mooney’s evident fascination with the landscape and lore of her native Borders. Having studied among the inaugural intake on Newcastle University’s Folk and Traditional Music degree course (graduating with first-class honours), she sources tunes from both the north and south of these debatable lands, meanwhile contributing to the tradition with such compositions as the brilliantly impressionistic Jethart Candlemas Hand Ba’, and the high-octane reel The Devil’s Beef Tub.

Mooney’s lively, informative liner notes demonstrate her magpie mind but she is also a truly terrific player, marrying traditional fidelity and contemporary flair, a beautifully rounded tone with ultrasensitive phrasing. In cahoots with four top-notch accompanists – Ian Stephenson on guitar, melodeon and harmonium, David de la Hay on bass, drummer James Mackintosh and Ali Vass on piano – the album’s arrangements cover the full spectrum from stripped-down simplicity to far-out electronic experimentalism, taking in several splendidly rocked-up workouts along the way.

With Heartsease, Shona has first of all given us a striking and superb fiddle album, and second, a fiddle album with a difference: one that, while retaining her instrument's necessary dominance, proves to be so much more

Winner of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician 2006 Award, Shona, who hails from the Scottish Borders, is nowadays perhaps becoming best known as the ace fiddle player in CrossCurrent (whose debut CD was reviewed here last year), but she's also appeared with Borders Young Fiddles and the "big band" The Unusual Suspects. Here, as part of the aforementioned Award prize, Shona's been able to achieve her dream of recording a solo CD, and it's turned out really well. Here Shona's playing dazzles with vibrancy, and delights with its combination of verve, technical expertise and soul, betraying a wholly infectious propensity for enjoying playing around with the tunes while always retaining their essence. Her sheer delight in playing and communicating the music beams directly out to the listener, and although the biggest slice of the credit for the album's success belongs to Shona herself a significant share of the associated plaudits should by rights be laid at the door of her accompanying coterie. This consists of four brilliant musicians: Ian Stephenson (guitar, melodeon, harmonium), Ali Vass (piano), David De La Haye (aka electronic experimentalist Anomaly) (electric bass) and the famous (if at times ubiquitous!) James MacKintosh (drumkit and percussion).

Heartsease is positively bursting with fascinating ideas – it's emphatically neither another tune-album for the session-addict, nor a collection of airy quasi-cinematic mood pieces loosely based on Celtic themes. Instead it's a brave and inspiring sequence of genuinely inventive arrangements of tunes both traditional and lately composed. The opening set The Haggis persuasively builds from a deceptively leisurely On Ettrick Banks (taken from Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany of 1724) through two tunes from the Northumbrian Minstrelsy into an original tune by Shona herself. The poise Shona brings to the following selection, the slow air The Tweedside Lassies, is quite miraculous, though there's no lack of poise either (though it's rather more of the tightrope variety!) on the delectably bow-contorting Twisted Tunes set (track 4), and, at the other end of the scale, the limpid, driftingly beautiful arabesques of Pale Winter Snowdrops. Shona plays two tracks as solos, albeit multitracked: the glittering Kaleidoscope, and the album's prime curiosity, The Ettrick Shepherd, which uses the intriguing, if controversial idea of "Electronic Voice Phenomenon" (the alleged communication of the deceased through the sound of detuned signal receivers) as a basis (conjured here through the mechanism of samples of Willie Renwick, Geordie Easton and Borders fiddler Bob Hobkirk), whereon "the overlaid fiddle parts give the impression of spectral figures playing the same melody throughout the Borders landscape".
Elsewhere, Shona's accompanists provide deft and spirited backdrops for her abundantly scintillating interpretations of the tunes; delicious syncopations creep in everywhere, especially courtesy of the percussion department (just you try to tak' the floor for the set of James Hill hornpipes Tide Comes In!), and the musicians play off each other most inventively, with gear-changes faultlessly managed yet with plenty of feeling of spontaneity in the responses. With Heartsease, Shona has first of all given us a striking and superb fiddle album, and second, a fiddle album with a difference: one that, while retaining her instrument's necessary dominance, proves to be so much more - and it's going to be a really hard act to follow when she gets round to making another CD! ..............David Kidman

..a striking debut from a rising star.

SHONA MOONEY - Heartsease
Foot Stompin' Records CDFSR1734
10 tracks, 50 minutes
Winner of the 2006 Scottish Young Tradition award, this Borders lass plays fiddle in a style which is still little known away from the Scotland-England divide. The tune titles are clearly local: Tweedside Lasses, On Ettrick Banks, The Grey Mare's Tail, The Devil's Beef Tub, and Braw Lads o' Jethart. My personal favourite is The Randy Wives of Greenlaw, a ranting wee reel and an essential ingredient of dances and parties. Kept alive through the playing of men like Bob Hobkirk, Tom Hughes and Jimmy Nagle, Borders fiddling is an intriguing and refreshing style which Shona and a few other youngsters have picked up and dusted off. Heartsease builds on Shona's recording with Borders Young Fiddlers, and also includes some more contemporary sounds of her own. The fiddle tone throughout is full and sweet, quite a change from the venerable scratchy recordings of older Borders fiddlers. Shona is joined by David de la Haye on guitars, Ian Stephenson on melodeon, Ali Vass on piano, and James MacKintosh on drums.

The opening medley includes a bit of everything, and it's all good, rather like The Haggis from which it takes its name. Tide Comes In is a smashing set of hornpipes at various speeds, with a charming and quirky intro. The title track, a trio of captivating jigs ending with one of Miss Mooney's, flows beautifully between box, piano and fiddle. Shona's own compositions include the silken slow airs Pale Winter Sunshine and Brave Snowdrops Minuet: Kaleidoscope is a law unto itself with an arrangement worthy of the Bowhouse Quintet, and Brambles has all the power and drive of a North American fiddle extravaganza. The final air The Ettrick Shepherd is another innovative piece, mixed with archive tapes and radio static: most memorable. In fact, there's nothing forgettable about Heartsease, a striking debut from a rising star.

Alex Monaghan...

Alex Monaghan reviews for Irish Music Magazine and The Living Tradition

The arrangements are lovely – subtle and deceptively simple-sounding; the choice of tracks showcases the breadth of this young woman’s talents admirably – the playing is never less than outstanding.

This CD is a breath of Border air, giving us an introduction to a musically mature, thoughtful and creative young player.

her shimmering fiddle responds to technical demands that go further than simply the ability to play fast

Remember the name. She might only just have turned 22, but this Borders violinist has the charisma and talent of a seasoned veteran twice her age.

SHONA MOONEY
THE VILLAGE, LEITH

SHONA Mooney. Remember the name. She might only just have turned 22, but this Borders violinist has the charisma and talent of a seasoned veteran twice her age. Offstage, she comes across as overly polite, candid, and has the demeanour of a young woman more accustomed to talking about the latest rock band on the cover of the NME than obscure early-20th-century fiddle players. She also has her feet firmly on the ground. Perhaps not what you'd expect from someone who was named the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2006.

So, how did she fare playing a small club on a chilly night in darkest Leith? Two encores should answer that question. Flanked by the subtle and imaginative bass playing of David de la Haye, and pianist/ flautist Mhairi Hall, the Shona Mooney show was everything modern folk ought to be: daring and progressive, with a willingness to step outside the genre while respecting its traditions.

In the first half, self-penned numbers such as Pale Winter Sunshine and Heartsease (the title track from her debut album) sat nicely alongside an array of haunting solos, not to mention face-offs with piano and eerie electronic ambient samplers. The more mature folk lovers in the audience voiced their approval. Swedish numbers, polkas and tunes from Quebec followed in the second half, Mooney just as comfortable engaging the audience with personal anecdotes as with her virtuosic fiddle playing.

She even got her viola out for a tune - presumably just to show the masters of said instrument that she could out-do them on that, as well. Like I said: Shona Mooney - remember the name.

Barry Gordon 12th January 2007..The Scotsman

Mooney is also a truly terrific player, marrying traditional fidelity with contemporary flair, and a beautifully rounded tone with ultra-sensitive phrasing.

. Whether in reflective mood or whooping it up in reel time, Shona lets her fiddle do the talking

Tracks

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