Celtic music has lost a great musician with the recent passing of celebrated Lochaber fiddler Angus R. Grant, front man for the groundbreaking Celtic fusion group Shooglenifty. Grant passed away on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016 following a short illness at the age of 49.

As a founding member of Scottish “acid-croft” fusion group Shooglenifty, which celebrated its 25^th anniversary last year, Grant will be sadly missed not just for the incandescence of his fiddle playing and for the puckish energy of his live performances, but because he was a man who lived life according to his own rules.  

Son of Aonghas Grant, a renowned left-handed fiddler and teacher, Grant first picked up the fiddle at the age of five. After a teenage sojourn into punk rock and electric guitar, he went back to the violin, playing in the band Pennycroft in and around his home area of Glenfinnan, Glenuig and Loch Ailort with school friend Kaela Rowan (Mouth Music, The Kaela Rowan Band) and Iain Macfarlane.

In 1985, after taking his music out on the wider road busking the streets of Europe, Grant became a regular visitor to the city of Edinburgh at a time when the folk music scene in Edinburgh was vibrant with change, embracing jazz and many other genres into the tradition. It was from this exciting background that Shooglenifty, as a band, would eventually take form with a lineup of young innovative musicians that included, as well as the wild-haired Grant, Orcadian banjo player Garry Finlayson, bassist Conrad Molleson, percussionist James Mackintosh, guitarist Malcom Crosbie, and mandolin player Ian Macleod.

Since its early years as the resident band at the Edinburgh Cowgate music club, La Belle Angele, to its current incarnation as one of Scotland’s premium folk music bands, Shooglenifty has shattered musical boundaries around the world.

 Described as a “rock band. With a fiddle player as a front man” by Shooglenifty manager Jane-Ann Purdy, it was Grant’s soaring fiddle that called the tunes that brought Celtic music into undiscovered lands and brought joy to audiences old and new all over the world -  not least of these tunes being the ones that Grant himself wrote such as Venus In Tweeds, Two Fifty To Vigo, She’s In The Attic, Nordal Rhumba, Glenfinnan Dawn, and Fitzroy Crossing.

“With Venus in Tweeds, Shooglenifty’s first album, the band took the folk world by the scruff of the neck, and they’ve kept on shaking ever since,”’ said Jane-Ann Purdy in statement released by the band.

 “Through seven studio albums, gigs to a few hundred in small Highland village halls, playing to tens of thousands in festival fields across the globe… Angus was there, center stage.”

“He lived on the breeze, loving to disappear on walkabout in the Highlands, to pop up in far flung bars, and drop by for random visits with a legion of much loved friends. He eschewed modern technology, never owning a mobile phone, and remaining a stranger to social media. He lived without ties or responsibility, but was devoted to his music, his family, and his fellow musicians.”

Angus Roderick Grant: Feb. 14, 1967 – Oct. 9, 2016.

More information about Shooglenifty is available at http://www.shooglenifty.com/

Full statement about Angus R. Grant is available at http://www.shooglenifty.com/2016/10/angus/