Stewart Hardy & Frank McLaughlin

The Gift

Claytara

FIDDLE and guitar partnerships don’t get much more mutually responsive than the Northumberland-Edinburgh axis of Stewart Hardy and Frank McLaughlin. Both players draw on a range of techniques and a great variety of touch and attack to deliver their shared passion for a good melody, more often than not with a story attached.

There’s a lovely richness of expression in Hardy’s fiddling and he uses this to superb effect whether the tune is essentially joyful, wild or written in sadness. On Something for Gordon, for example, he plays Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson’s tribute to the great piper and tunesmith Gordon Duncan with a respectfulness of someone who has really got into the thoughts of the composers.

He can be cheeky, too, though and he and McLaughlin take the Scottish-born fiddle master of Gateshead, James Hill’s Factory Smoke into the swinging realms of Minnie the Moocher before delivering Hill’s XYZ in more typical, robust, rollicking style.

Day for Giggles features joined at the hip flat-picked guitar and nimble fiddle assurance on a twisting melody and elsewhere McLaughlin’s sympathetic finger-picking and hammering on underlines their commitment to fashioning arrangements as equals. Great stuff.

Rob Adams