Another New Age for Fiddler : Pop music: After forays into folk, country, rock and soul, Scotsman Johnny Cunningham celebrates Celtic roots and the winter solstice tonight at the Cerritos Center.

Johnny Cunningham’s multifaceted career could give new meaning to the term “fiddling around.”

This masterful Scottish fiddler made his first impression in the 1970s as a back-to-roots folkie, helping to spearhead a musical movement that revived interest in his homeland’s Celtic tradition.

Lately, Cunningham has set aside rollicking jigs and reels to play in Nightnoise, an elegant ensemble that reflects its four members’ Celtic roots yet plays in a moderate, refined style that places it somewhere under the vague “New Age” heading.

In between his folk and New Age periods, Cunningham blew out an eardrum as a member of the Raindogs, a highly amplified rock band from Boston that played in the aggressive but roots-conscious tradition of the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and “Highway 61”-era Bob Dylan.

“A monitor just went haywire, and a huge blast of feedback (came out), then next thing I knew my right ear was bleeding and I couldn’t hear,” Cunningham said, recalling the 1988 club gig that brought on the most frightening moment in his five-year run as a rocker. “I never wanted that to happen again, so toward the end of the Raindogs, I always wore earplugs.”

Cunningham’s long-since mended eardrum won’t be in jeopardy tonight as Nightnoise appears at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Winter Solstice Tour, a New Age package that also includes guitarist Alex de Grassi and pianist Liz Story. The three Windham Hill acts play individual sets during the show and combine talents for ensemble segments.

In Nightnoise, which he joined a year and a half ago, Cunningham can’t indulge the free-booting tendencies of the folk virtuoso or the rock ‘n’ roll soloist. The emphasis is on discipline and precision, he said, as the band seeks to re-create on stage the original compositions and newly-arranged traditional songs that make up its repertoire.

“This band is almost like a chamber orchestra, where all parts have to fit together to make the piece work,” Cunningham, 36, said over the phone Thursday from a tour stop in Tampa, Fla. “With this band, I can’t slide around like I’m used to doing. I have to be much tighter in my playing. It’s a great learning experience for me, forcing me to think in a different way.”

Whether playing traditional music or rock ‘n’ roll, Cunningham’s fiddling has been defined by a sublime lyricism and an arresting sweetness and fullness of tone. When appropriate, he can grab a melody and send it swirling forward at gale force. But there isn’t much call for torrential fiddle-bowing in Nightnoise. The band’s current album, “Shadow of Time,” (its fifth overall, but the first for Cunningham since he replaced co-founder Billy Oskay) is mainly occupied with weaving pretty reveries.

Cunningham says he doesn’t deeply miss the rollicking side of things that informs his traditional Celtic performances. “I can go and do that anyway,” he said, referring to another of his projects, an occasional touring partnership with fellow fiddlers Kevin Burke and Christian Lemaitre. The folk-oriented Green Linnet label recently issued “The Celtic Fiddle Festival,” an album of traditional Celtic performances recorded on their 1992 concert tour.

Along with the discipline of playing in Nightnoise, Cunningham says he likes the company. While Cunningham and his younger brother, Phil, were leading a Celtic revival in Scotland during the 1970s as members of Silly Wizard, the brother-and-sister team of Micheal O Domhnaill and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill (the names, in Gaelic, are pronounced Meehal and Treena O’Donnell) were following a parallel path with the Bothy Band, a traditional Irish folk group. Those paths intersected in the mid-1980s, when the Irish siblings and the Cunningham brothers united for two albums under the band name Relativity.

Now Cunningham is reunited with Micheal and Triona in Nightnoise--Micheal having founded the group in 1982. The fourth member of Nightnoise, flute player Brian Dunning, is also Irish. His background is in jazz and classical music.

“It’s nice because I’m working with three other Celts,” Cunningham said. “It’s a definite cultural thing. Working with the Raindogs, I’d wind up hanging with Jimmy (Riley, the band’s drummer, who was from Belfast, Northern Ireland).

“(In Nightnoise) we all come from the same backgrounds. There’s a lot of parallels in our lives. It’s easy to sit down and say a lot without saying a lot. You can get a lot done quite silently.”

Silence between songs isn’t what an audience would want from Cunningham. He can charm a listener with his humorous stories and wry quips. One of his dreams is to do “a one-man thing, a mixture of humor and playing and a kind of slide show.” As he tells his life story, you can see that the seeds of a funny, disarming routine are already there.

Cunningham says his first public gig came when he was 5 and his brother was 3, and they were enlisted in an ensemble called the Greenlea Old Age Pensioners’ Harmonica Band, based at a retirement home in their hometown of Portobello.

“The next youngest guy was like 68, and the oldest guy was like 95. The band was a novelty, and Phil and I were even more of a novelty.”

Cunningham’s mother worked as a grocery check-out clerk and liked to play the piano. His father, a fireman and taxi driver, loved to sing.

“But he was a terrible singer,” said Cunningham, who confesses to having inherited his dad’s voice box. “So my mother banned him from singing in the house.” Eventually, Cunningham said, a neighbor reported to his mother that her husband must be having an affair: He had been seen repeatedly leaving home and heading downtown in his good clothes.

“My mother took off from work and followed him one day. He was actually going down to a local cemetery and singing (in the congregation) at funerals.” There, at least, no one would throw him out for imperfect pitch.

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The Cunningham boys both received accordions when they were little. Phil took to his immediately and developed into an ace on the instrument. Johnny showed no aptitude. “So they tried me on guitar, and I was useless at that.” Piano was next, and again he washed out. “Then my grandmother gave me a fiddle, and I was able to scrape a few tunes together, so I stuck with that.”

Cunningham left school at 14 and soon joined Silly Wizard, an Edinburgh band that was delving into traditional Scottish music. “My father said to me, ‘If you’re going to do this, go out and do it properly.’ And we did. We didn’t treat it as a game and a few laughs. Between the Bothy Band and Silly Wizard in the early ‘70s, we pretty much started the Celtic revival,” Cunningham said. He cited Planxty as another Irish band deserving credit for introducing Celtic music to young listeners who had been raised on rock ‘n’ roll.

“They were ignoring their own culture, because they thought it wasn’t good enough in the eyes of the world. It’s ‘the grass is always greener’ syndrome. The older people were all still playing; it was the younger people who couldn’t seem to find a place in their own music and culture.”

With the success of Silly Wizard and kindred bands, “it became a cool thing again to be young, and you didn’t need to play an electric guitar. The life was back in it again.”

Cunningham, who has lived in the United States since 1980, said he has been gratified on recent trips home to find traditional music still popular with Scottish kids who flock to “power ceilis,” traditional dances featuring centuries-old steps and tunes, except that the music is bolstered with bass and drums to suit youthful dancers who want extra volume and high energy.

“I played one in Glasgow last year. It was great. There’s kids 9, 10, 11 . . . they’re being taught traditional music in the school system. (When Cunningham was a boy) it was looked on as very working class, almost gutter music. The attitude was, ‘We have to drag you kicking into this century.’ But it doesn’t matter how many faxes and modems and videos you have. If you run out of electricity, where are you going to go after that? What we have as a people is humor and resilience and a way we can laugh at the worst things. That’s an important thing to take hold of. People are turning back to the things that are more basic.”

Cunningham became part of the Celtic music scene in the United States after his arrival here, but he also jumped into American music. The short-lived “Urban Cowboy” country boom was on when he first settled near Philadelphia, so he joined a local bar-band that played the country nightclubs.

“We played everything. ‘Tulsa Time,’ Hank Williams, some Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys tunes, even some Allman Brothers stuff. It was good grounding for me in my first year in the States, a blast of American culture. It stood me in good stead.”

By 1986, Cunningham had moved to Boston. Darren Hill (now the bassist in Paul Westerberg’s band) and another member of the then-forming Raindogs happened upon the fiddler as he was sitting alone in an Irish bar, simply playing to himself in a corner. Hill and the other Raindogs didn’t know of Cunningham and his reputation, but they knew from listening to him that his talents would fit perfectly with their vision of a full-on rock band with Celtic and Cajun shadings. For his part, Cunningham was eager to rock.

“I grew up with traditional music, but I also grew up at a time when the airwaves weren’t exactly overflowing with traditional music. It was the Stones and the Beatles,” he said. “I was in Edinburgh during the ‘70s, when the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello and the Stranglers came to play. I was always at the gigs. I look upon myself as a musician, and I’m looking for things to explore. I didn’t want to play in a Waterboys setup,” in which folk strains would be prominent. “I wanted to play in a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

The Raindogs landed a deal with the now-defunct Atco label. In 1990 they released an excellent debut album, “Lost Souls,” and followed it with a lesser but still credible effort, “Border Drive-in Theater.” The band toured as an opening act for Warren Zevon, Don Henley and Bob Dylan, but airplay and sales didn’t match the albums’ critical acclaim.

“It got to the stage where Atco was going down, and we were going down with it,” Cunningham said. “We were spending more time in law offices than we were on stage, trying to deal with record companies and management, trying to get somebody behind the band and do something with it. We were all sorry to see it end, but there was also a sense of relief to be out of the situation.”

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Cunningham, a veteran of the independent-label folk scene, didn’t especially like the on-the-road regimen of a major-label rock act.

“Touring with the Raindogs, I found it very restricting in terms of personal freedom. There was always management looking over your shoulder, telling you where to be at certain times. It was as though the band were completely mindless and had to be steered through every part of the day. I’d run away, and it would drive everybody crazy. I’d be two doors down from the hotel, having a quiet drink and a game of pool. Working in the New Age scene is a more adult lifestyle, where you’re given responsibility. We’re not surrounded by people doing things for us that we could do for ourselves. There are no minders, none of that huge pizazz of having people around you so you look good.”

Cunningham says his rock career got a mixed response in the traditional folk circles where he had made his reputation.

“Some people really liked it, and some people absolutely hated it. They’d come see the band and expect it to be a folk-rock band, and it wasn’t. It was a rock ‘n’ roll band. You’d get certain magazines that deal specifically with folk music, and they’d trash the Raindogs. But they weren’t reviewing a rock ‘n’ roll band. They were reviewing me in a rock ‘n’ roll band. The point of reference wasn’t the present; it was what I had done before.”

Cunningham says he is still game to rock again if the right situation comes up. Last summer, out of the blue, he got a call asking him to join Hall & Oates’ backup band for a series of dates in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe casino showrooms.

“I was about to go on vacation. The next thing I knew, they faxed me 30 pages of charts and told me to get on a plane. Twodays later, I was on stage with Hall & Oates, without a rehearsal. They just kind of trusted me.”

Cunningham was a novice when it came to the soul music sound that dominates Hall & Oates’ repertoire. But he took to it quickly. “It was great. I’m always up for something different. It was never a part of my life, soul music. (After the Hall & Oates gig had ended) I went out and bought a lot of Marvin Gaye stuff and a couple of soul compilations, because I suddenly realized I was really enjoying being in the middle of this, and I wanted to hear some more and take it away with me.”

Those albums were about all Cunningham took away from his high-paying resort gigs.

“I ended up spending all the money I made in the casino. After the gig I became a sort of poor man’s James Bond and lost everything I had playing blackjack. But I had a great time doing it. I like a game where I can sit down and people will bring me drink. It’s more satisfying than bowling, because in bowling you actually have to stand up.”

Cunningham’s agenda remains full and varied. Nightnoise has booked tours of Spain and Japan, and the band has already begun planning its next record. Cunningham says there is talk of working with an orchestra, rather than employing the synthesizers used in the past. And Nightnoise may lean toward more songs featuring the lovely harmonies of Micheal and Triona, because the band’s vocal numbers have been getting an especially strong response in concert.

On the pop side, Cunningham continues to get calls for session work: He has played on the last three albums by Bill Morrissey, a fine singer-songwriter from New England, and he recently played a recording date with veteran Boston rocker Robin Lane.

He remains active in the traditional Celtic scene, including an upcoming tour in April with Kevin Burke and Christian Lemaitre, his partners on “The Celtic Fiddle Festival” album.

Cunningham has also branched into record production, shepherding sessions by American folkie Brooks Williams and Celtic acts Robbie O’Connell and Cherish the Ladies.

As for his New Year’s Eve plans, they are exactly what a good Scottish musician’s ought to be.

At the tolling of midnight, Cunningham will be playing “Auld Lange Syne” in a Glasgow television studio, performing live on the BBC with his brother, Phil (who lives in Scotland and is musical director of the BBC’s Gaelic department). It will be the Cunningham brothers’ fifth annual New Year’s Eve special. Among their guests this time will be that bonny Raitt lass, who recruited Phil to play on her most recent album.

As much as he likes to experiment, Cunningham says he doesn’t fiddle around with “Auld Lange Syne.” Some things are sacred.

“Robert Burns wrote the words. Nobody knows who wrote the melody, but that same melody is used in France as a tune for funerals,” Cunningham noted.

“The song’s the song. There’s very little you can do to mess it up.” When it’s played at midnight, “everyone bursts into tears. New Year’s is so emotional in Scotland, because we’re a nation of people who are never truly happy unless we’re clinically depressed.”

* Nightnoise, Alex de Grassi and Liz Story perform in “The Winter Solstice Concert,” tonight at 8 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. $20-$27. (310) 916-8500.