Alistair Ogilvy
Album: Leaves Sae Green
Label: Greentrax
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.alistairogilvy.com

Finalist in BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician Of The Year two years running (2011 and 2012), Alistair was also awarded the title TMSA Young Traditional Singer Of Merit in 2011. He has a distinctively melodic and gently expressive singing voice with an attractive occasional vibrato, a voice which readily connects with its audience and which is nicely complemented on this his debut recording by the various contributions from his session musician friends Aly Macrae (piano, fiddle, mandolin, euphonium, pocket trumpet), Steven Polwart (guitars) and Inge Thomson (harmony vocals), and a deft production by Mattie Foulds.

The material he’s chosen is a well-balanced mix of the traditional with the contemporary, the latter category embracing a pleasingly different rendition of Dylan’s Girl From The North Country alongside a powerful take on Andy M. Stewart’s heart-rending song of unrequited love Where Are You Tonight, I Wonder? and a lovingly crafted account of Davy Steele’s beautiful The Rose O’ Summerlee. There’s also an imaginatively paired, animated brace of Burns songs (Crowdie and Wantonness). The well contrasted selection of traditional pieces includes a strong account (with a fairly florid, almost classical-style piano-accompaniment) of the ballad Willie’s Fatal Visit and an unusually restless-seeming take on Bonnie Ship The Diamond. The tale of Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship benefits from being done a cappella, but the quality and variety of the instrumental settings on the remainder of the disc merits a special mention, for Aly’s clearly got the measure of Alistair’s vision for these songs – and yet he refuses to allow Alistair’s special vocal character to get swamped by instrumentation.

The album closes with a song of Alistair’s own – The Kirkwall Light, which graphically depicts the sight of greylag geese in swirling flight in the winter light on Orkney – set to a conglomeration of tunes assembled by Aly. I greatly look forward to hearing a further collection from Alistair before too long.

David Kidman