Lewis fiddler Ali White sees out the lockdown in the Big Apple

Swift Hibernian is a stalwart bar in the trad music scene in New York, and Ali’s is a familiar face in what is a wise, if raucous, choice of venue for those seeking a top-notch session and the best quality craic on that island.

That was two years ago and if on departing that night I’d said to Ali I’ll see you next on a skype call when you’re in lockdown in your place in the Bronx, and me the same at home on Lewis, and we’ll talk over the impacts of a global pandemic and the shutting down of daily life, and of incredulity in an already incredulous situation at the antics of the 45th President of the USA in the face of overwhelming deaths in that same city and across the country, he could be forgiven for thinking that I’d maybe stayed a little too long at the bar.

Now, the man who started life in the quieter neighbourhoods of Tong on Lewis, not a stone’s throw from the ancestral home of the current President’s mother, he is now living close to New York’s Pelham Bay Park and the normally bustling and diverse neighbourhood around Lydig Avenue with its rows of small shops and throng of people going about their daily lives.

But the lockdown changes everything.

“People are taking it seriously, people are keeping their distance,” he says, “and you have to really in a place like this.

“Everyone knew this was going to hit New York hard when this started, when federal and state governments started taking this seriously at the beginning of March.

“Everyone knew that New York was in for it just because we all kind of live on top of each other.

“There are essential elements of New York life that are unavoidable, like the subway, and they are going to be problematic during something like this. But we haven’t taken the subway in a month, which is very unusual.”

And what of the alarming antics of the 45th President, are New Yorkers seeing the image of their leader that is being portrayed on British media?

“He is incredibly unpopular in New York, that’s taken as read. I mean, the level of outrage you have to maintain to digest whatever is coming from him is exhausting, so I’ve taken to not quite ignoring him but just assuming that he will do the worst possible thing in any situation.

“So, I assume gross incompetence and, as they say, never attribute to malice that which can attributed to incompetence. I’m attributing it all to malice at the moment and I think a lot of people are as well.

“I don’t think anyone here is paying any attention or listening to the President, thankfully.

“The governor here, Andrew Cuomo, is coming out of this very well. A lot of people are feeling very reassured by his briefings and his response, he is taking it very seriously and he is also representing it in his briefings in a very straightforward, human and competent way, in direct contrast with anything coming on a Federal level with the exception of Dr Fauci [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director], who again is competent and dealing with it.”

On a day to day basis life carries on, as here, but as Ali states, “the numbers for New York are really bad, they’re really shocking, and everyone here is conscious of that, but for the most part, everyone I know here has been isolating for a month.

“We’ve been popping out getting provisions and we can still walk around the neighbourhood.

“We’ve been encouraged to wear masks, whether or not that is effective is up for debate, but the overall encouragement is that we are to act as if we have Covid.

“So, if we work on that assumption then hopefully – and it seems to be working, the number of hospitalisations have gone down for the first time, the net numbers, today, and it seems to be working.

“But it feels very strange, the neighbourhood is a lot quieter, there was a couple of days last week when it was eerily quiet, but people are still going about their business.

“Noticeably, there’s a few souped-up cars going about that normally might not be considered legal at other times, so you’re hearing a lot of very powerful exhausts wizzing about, that’s a noticeable change!”

One other notable change is that just days before our hooking up on skype, Ali had secured his permanent Green Card giving him the right to permanent residence in the United States and the right to work without limitation.

That would usually be a cause for celebration but in the current situation with the vast majority of his work for the next few months scrubbed from the diary, it is cause for ironic reflection.

In his familiar Lewis accent, unaltered by his time living in the States, Ali says:“Everyone’s in the same boat who is self-employed, everyone has seen their work dry up.

“I had a reasonably full year lined up, with the exception of April, which was open, but not as wide open as this, and this April was going to be me being around New York and doing more work in the city, which I’ve been doing more of.

“There’s a few regular gigs that I do when I’m here, and that was going to the case this month, three or four gigs a week, the regular ones.”

An understated way of saying how much this virtuoso fiddler has been absorbed into the city’s top flight music scene.

In a quiet way, the application process for the Green Card had unwittingly prepared him for some of the challenges of the lockdown. He couldn’t during that time travel outside of the States:

“I normally try and get home three or four times a year,” he says, “and I couldn’t do that for an extended period of time. That was a strange feeling.

“When the option of visiting home is taken away from you there’s a little mental thing that niggles at you a little bit, but that’s not possible now and won’t be for some time, so that’s something to contend with, the memories of the sounds and the smells of home, missing the small things like that.”

It brings to mind the real distance that so many families felt when Hebrideans were emigrating in much larger numbers across the Atlantic without the benefits of digital communication.

“I’ve been keeping in touch with the folks through video calls,” Ali says, “that’s an amazing thing and I couldn’t imagine being over here before the advent of that.

“I’d been on tour here before all of that and I’d phone home, but that was once a week! Back then, before all of that, you were gone, when you left like that, that was you, you were gone, and the mind boggles at that now with all of this stuff.”

The utility of digital communication has of course also meant that music has been accessible in one form or another for many in lockdown around thew world.

In the week before our chat Ali had taught a workshop over Zoom to some folks in Boston, and that had, he reports, worked well and some gigs through the Tune Supply app, where fans can order a set of tunes, or a gig to be played via video link.

“That’s good for a bit of pocket money,” Ali says, “but it is nowhere near what you would be earning if you were out playing.

“But, you know, I think everyone is dealing with it, trying to figure it out and what possible economy we are all dealing with now.

“I don’t think anyone has got it figured out at the moment, some people are able to work from home and continue their jobs, but if you are self-employed all bets are off.”

But that does not mean that Ali is sitting in his Bronx flat waiting for the world to call him. For those connected to his social media accounts (you should!) there is the daily treat of Ali’s tune for the day, a new composition played with his familiar style and presented with the right amount of accessible background explanation to enable a deeper dive into the music than this being just another jig or reel set, nice as that always is in such hands.

“The last time I had this little to do was in 2015 when we moved to Florida, temporarily,” Ali explains, “we’d stopped doing as many gigs with the Battlefield Band, and a couple of my regular gigs had evaporated.

“Luckily, the Heb Celtic festival commissioned me to write a thing for their 15th anniversary, which was great and which gave me something to do.

“I spent the whole of that April and May writing an hour’s worth of music, that’s a great thing to do because the tune writing thing is a muscle that gets better with use.

“I hadn’t really used that part of my brain since then. I hadn’t written very much since then, so I thought I’ll do that, I’ll try and do a tune a day, but I thought I’ve got to do this for myself.

“I am posting it on social media, but for me it is less about that than about writing a tune. The social media thing holds me to account, it gives me a deadline.”

Ali is not alone in feeling the benefits of music during the stresses of life in lockdown.

“I’m listening to more music than I have done for quite a while, not really intentionally, it’s just the way I’m naturally behaving”, he states.

“People say, the lockdown is life on pause, it’s New York on pause, which is a nice way of looking at it, it allows you to re-evaluate things.

“We’re all focussed on productivity and being busy and things like that, but that is not chief among your goals anymore, it’s now more to do with making sure your head is okay and dealing with whatever is going on, and I think any kind of art is essential to mental health.

“Physical and public health is of paramount importance at the moment, and that’s why we are all doing our wee bit here, but I think mental health, while everyone is seeking to mitigate the physical health effects of this, is a really serious thing and something that people are learning to pay attention to.

“So I think any kind of music or art or reading or any pursuit that enriches your life is going to be more important than ever just now. It brings peoples’ passion back into focus.”