Aly Bain has taken Shetland fiddling around the world and made a style of music from a small, northerly group of islands into an internationally renowned and admired artform.

Born in Lerwick on May 15 1946, Aly grew up surrounded by fiddlers in a time and place where there were few distractions, other than fishing or playing cards, from playing fiddle. He began learning to play when he was eleven, studying with the great Shetland fiddle master Tom Anderson and listening to records which his uncle sent him by Paganini, Hector MacAndrew and Irish virtuoso Sean McGuire as well as the many local players.

By his teens Aly was garnering a reputation around Shetland as a special talent and when he emigrated to the Scottish mainland he quickly made an impression. Robin Morton, who would shortly join Aly in Boys of the Lough, memorably recalled the arrival of a wee Teddy Boy in winkle picker shoes whose exciting and masterly playing of reels and rich eloquence on slow airs made the feted fiddlers on the folk scene of the time blanche.

Forming a duo with guitarist Mike Whellans, Aly gave notice of the adaptability that would later endear him to television audiences by including blues and American folk tunes. And when the two duos of Aly and Mike and Robin Morton and Cathal McConnell combined to form Boys of the Lough a major force in Celtic music was born.

For thirty years Aly roamed the world with the Boys in a travelogue that included literally dozens of American tours and he made musical friends in every port of call, from the swamplands of Louisiana to the polka strongholds of Sweden. In the mid 1980s some of those friends were drafted in to create the first of many hugely popular television programmes which made Aly the most readily visible fiddler in Scottish music.

One of the cast of Aly Bain & Friends was accordionist Phil Cunningham of the Boys of the Lough’s popular colleagues Silly Wizard. The pair hit it off and in 1988 they undertook the first of their annual Scottish tours which, together with regular appearances on Hogmanay television programmes, have brought them into general public awareness as the inseparable – and at times incorrigible - Phil & Aly.

Aly has always believed that there is little difference between traditional and classical music and one of the best examples of the two styles’ compatibility was realised when, in 1995, Norwegian composer Henning Sommero conceived the gorgeously lyrical and expressive Follow the Moonstone for Aly and the Scottish Ensemble.

This recording forms part of a body of work that, alongside innumerable concerts and broadcasts, has rendered Aly Bain MBE without peer for clarity of tone and depth of expression and fully deserving of the honorary doctorates presented to him by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and St Andrews University.