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John McSherry Stewart Hardy & Frank McLaughlin Paul Brady Fred Morrison Iain MacInnes Tony McManus Fiddlers' Bid Wrigley Sisters Lauren MacColl Julie Fowlis Mairtin O Connor Paul Brock Richard Thompson MacGregor, Brechin & O hEadhra John Martyn Christy Moore Chris Wood Duncan Chisholm Ian Hardie Nick Harper Junction Pool
Catriona McKay & Chris Stout, White Nights (McKay Stout Music) The “Scottish harp” and “Shetland fiddle” descriptions below Catriona McKay and Chris Stout’s names on the cover of the duo’s first album since 2005’s exceptional Laebrack seem like quaint understatements alongside the music they play. McKay frequently sounds as if she’s playing not just the harp but a whole rhythm section of string and fretted instruments and while Stout undoubtedly has the Shetland fiddling tradition in his soul, the restless quest for adventure that has seen him experimenting and collaborating with Brazilian, Scandinavian and even Singaporean musicians brings an immense richness of tone and expression to his playing. White Nights itself may be a slight understatement. It doesn’t quite capture the sheer vigour and excitement of their live performances but from the spare soulful impressionism of opening track Missing You through superbly atmospheric reel, jig and hymn tune to the bracing exuberance of Edges & High Water, this is still fantastic music played by musicians at the top of their game.
From The Sunday Herald, July 11, 2010.
Stewart Hardy & Frank McLaughlin, Root2 (Claytara) The instrumental pairing of Stewart Hardy and Frank McLaughlin is one of traditional music’s great examples of cross-border cooperation. Hardy is based in the North-East of From The Sunday Herald, May 23, 2010.
Paul Brady, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh It was like old times: Paul Brady bouncing on his toes, barking out every hamlet in the county worth a name sign and the deep, satisfying rumble as the drums cue in The Homes of Donegal’s chorus one more time. Close your eyes and it could have been the Half Moon in the mid 1980s. But while his current tour finds Brady working with the core of the band that made those nights in Putney worth the crush and the Young’s ale hangover, the music is moving on as well as looking back. Brady has a new album to promote, Hooba Dooba, that’s justly being hailed as the rightful heir to his opening declaration of his songwriting talents, Hard Station, and its songs dominate the set. They’re superbly crafted and stylistically varied: The Winner’s Ball wraps its seize-the-opportunity message in a close-to-Memphis funk groove; Rainbow is more of a calypso; and Money to Burn is terse and rockin’ evidence that the angry wee bastard inside Brady can get just as agitated by the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse as by Londoners’ attitude to Irishmen seeking work during the Troubles. This is Brady at his best and with the marvellous Liam Genockey’s drumming driving the music with economical assurance and guitarist Bill Shanley adding bluesy concision, the old songs, including an animated Nothing but the Same Old Story, sound great, too. The (A version of this review, subbed to within a column millimetre of its life, appeared in The Herald on April 19, 2010.)
Iain MacInnes, Sealbh (Macmeanmna)CD liner notes don’t do negativity. Even so, there’s nothing fawning or hagiographical in Macmeanmna’s Cailean Maclean describing Iain MacInnes as a consummate musician. As the piper and whistle player in the latter day edition of Scottish tradition upholders Ossian, MacInnes continued the group’s quiet passion for true phrasing and rich but never over-demonstrative expression and as producer of BBC Radio Scotland’s Pipeline he brings a musician’s understanding and appreciation of the programme’s content.
All of which informs this beautifully realised CD. Utilising a pool of musicians comprising fiddlers Mairi Campbell and John Martin, Ross Kennedy and Iain MacLeod (various frets), David McGuinness (harmonium) and Simon Thoumire (concertina), MacInness reinforces the point that, in traditional music, elation comes not from fast tempos but from the melodies themselves. The arrangements of jigs, quicksteps, lowland airs, marches and hornpipes, including a cheeky but apt take on Handel’s Water Music, are clean, unforced, warm and not above some interesting concertina harmonies, and MacInnes’s pithy background notes provide an entertaining accompaniment.
From The Sunday Herald, February 14, 2010.
Fred Morrison, Outlands (Ridge)Despite the Scottish tradition’s significant presence in Appalachian music generally and bluegrass particularly, bagpipes don’t feature much in these American folk forms. But if they did, the results would probably sound a lot like this. Recorded in Nashville and Glasgow with top bluegrass and Scots pickers, Outlands captures piping ace Fred Morrison in his free-flowing, expressive pomp on Highland pipes and their Irish and lowland cousins, as well as magnificently soulful low whistle. Great playing all round, with the title track and Kansas City Hornpipe especially giving tacit permission, just this once, to yell yee-haw at a piper. From The Herald, December 5, 2009.
Tony McManus, The Maker’s Mark (Greentrax)Canada-based Paisley guitar guru Tony McManus believes that now is the golden age of acoustic guitar making, and it’s hard to argue with the case he sets out in these fifteen tracks featuring fifteen different instruments supplied by North Carolinan high-end guitar dealership Dream Guitars. McManus’s mastery in orchestrating strathspeys, pipe jigs, African and Asturian songs, madrigals and Bulgarian dance tunes for the guitar will leave players wondering how to do this with only ten fingers while less obsessive souls can simply marvel at the sheer effervescent musicality, craftsmanship, sound quality and heartfelt communication involved.
From The Herald, February 7, 2009.
Fiddlers’ Bid, All Dressed in Yellow (Hairst Blinks Music)Eighteen years playing together has given the four fiddlers at the forefront of Fiddlers’ Bid a harmonious understanding that would make calling them the Beach Boys of Shetland fiddling entirely reasonable. It isn’t just Shetland fiddling either. Tunes from Quebec, Sweden, Estonia and mainland Scotland, bluegrass guitar licks and flamenco-like harp attack are gathered seamlessly here into six medleys, some of them epics, that variously shimmer with trick of light atmospheres and dance with joie de vivre as fiddles and rhythm section marry the carefree spirit of a pub session with concert hall performance polish and brilliantly orchestrated arrangements. The result is an album rich in tradition and yet belonging emphatically in the here and now, a magnificent, joyous achievement.
From The Sunday Herald, October 4, 2009.
The Wrigley Sisters, Pleasance Cabaret Bar, EdinburghIf ever Garrison Keillor decided to relocate his Prairie Home Companion to Orkney, he’d have ready-made franchise holders in Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley. Trade Lake Woebegone for Deerness and you’d have a similarly characterful litany of worthies, weather warnings and daft goings on set to fiddle and guitar music, some of which wouldn’t be unfamiliar to the folks back in Keillor’s Minnesota locale.
These days the Wrigleys are back living among and passing on their music to their fellow Orcadians but hearing them play and introduce reels, airs, polkas, strathspeys and the occasional bluegrass standard, it’s as if time has stood still since they colonised Edinburgh somewhere around the early 1990s.
They don’t look appreciably different and while their playing has matured – Hazel’s guitar accompaniments, although a mite undersold by the sound system, have grown even closer in subtlety, invention and colour to the gypsy jazz style of Manouche – it still has a youthful freshness and vigour allied to a feeling of complete spontaneity.
Of course there’s no such thing as a programme. It’s all decided on the hoof, often mid medley, but even with the most technically demanding tunes, Jennifer appears to be both utterly relaxed and receiving the notes in situ from some unseen source. The tunes portray flora and fauna, incorporating whale songs in one gorgeous descending pattern, and a particularly epic transatlantic session found them incorporating Scott Skinner, ragtime and train rhythms. Few tunes escape without graphically entertaining explanations but to share them would spoil the fun for audiences on their current tour. Suffice to say, if the Wrigleys turned up without instruments, they wouldn’t be stuck.
From The Herald, October 16, 2009.
 Lauren MacColl, Strewn with Ribbons (Make Believe Records)Fiddler Lauren MacColl’s first album, When Leaves Fall, showcased the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award 2005 winner’s ability to play slow airs with stop you in your tracks gorgeousness and reels and strathspeys with gutsy vigour. The evidence is even stronger on this follow-up but equally impressive is the way in which MacColl’s own compositions and the venerable tunes from the Highland Collection featured alongside them become almost interchangeable. The rugged Poolachrie dates from Victorian times but like everything MacColl and her creative musicians play, it sounds completely of the moment.
From The Herald, April 11, 2009.
Doorley, Fowlis, Martin, Nic Amhlaoibh, Dual (Machair)Scots Gaelic singing star Julie Fowlis and Muireann Nic Amblaoibh, of leading Irish band Danu, share similar backgrounds, being from islands off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland with strong musical heritages. Their voices complement each other beautifully, Fowlis’s light and sweet and Nic Amhlaoibh’s rich and weighty, as their traditions intertwine on this lovely collection of songs and tunes, aided by stout, simply supportive arrangements using guitar, bouzouki, whistles, pipes and keys. Nic Amhlaoibh’s magnificent Pe in Eirinn I is worth the entry fee alone but this cultural project could easily beget the next great folk band.
From The Herald, November 15, 2008
Mairtin O Connor Band with Karan Casey, ABC, GlasgowRecent re-runs of old Irish television folk music programmes have left Mairtin O Connor feeling, he says, like a fossil. If so, the sometime De Dannan accordionist is a pretty agile-fingered fossil. His current group, with its central partnership of O Connor and fiddler Cathal Hayden, allies richness of tradition with a vibrancy and mobility that exercise an almost magnetic pull.
Their tunes, even at pace and invariably involving some tale of inspirational characters, landmarks or bumpy roads, have a descriptive detail as well as an exciting lift that had the audience roaring as jig careered into reel or polkas picked up momentum, and their slow airs and waltzes are always beautifully shaped and graceful.
They also look beyond the Irish tradition profitably, embracing hot club-style swing, complete with fiddle and accordion improvisations, suitably propellant guitar and brushed snare drum, as unlikely participants in a Milan fashion show, and resurrecting De Dannan’s Galwayfication of Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba with equal parts mirth and exacting skill. Individual features allowed Hayden to showcase his banjo brilliance, singer-guitarist Seamie O’Dowd to eulogise Rory Gallagher, and percussionist Jimmy Higgins to turn on the bodhran invention. But it was the group’s impact as a whole that created a genuine feeling of elation.
Singer Karan Casey’s opening set may have been slightly downbeat by comparison but it was no less adventurous or imaginative, with one song suite strikingly combining historical darkness with a sparse, modern arrangement, and a voice and cello rendering of Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum showing a singer utterly in control of her material and fully aware of its contemporary resonance.
From The Herald, January 20, 2009.
Brock McGuire Band & the Mulcahey Family, St Andrew’s in the Square, GlasgowThis Sunday sees the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year final. On Tuesday we heard someone well capable of capturing the Irish equivalent – and you don’t have to take my word for it. Google Michelle Mulcahey on YouTube and you can hear her playing with the excitingly vigorous rhythmic-melodic momentum and dampened strings detail that she brought to her harp feature here.
What’s even more impressive is that the harp is only one of the instruments she plays to this high standard. In the Mulcahey Family, alongside her sister Louise, who plays flute and uilleann pipes (and who knows what else), and her accordionist father, Mick, her main role is as concertinist, although she also slipped some mighty fiddling into tunes sets that carry the weight of tradition while brimming with immediacy and brio. Deeply impressive stuff.
Accordion master Paul Brock and fiddler Manus McGuire draw on similarly deep roots in their group with Enda Scahill (banjo and mandolin) and Denis Carey (keyboards). All the Irish greats of yore were referenced as the music moved expertly from home soil to Cape Breton, French Canada and Scotland through Vaudeville and old timey America and highlighted particularly Brock’s fascination with migrating tunes.
A great example was the emphatically French-accented polka that turned out to be none other than I’ll Tell Me Ma. Bluegrass favourite Turkey in the Straw was also reclaimed for Ulster in a performance featuring plentiful contrasts, superb individuality and, above all, the collective energy and musicality that makes this one of the real heavyweight bands of the current Irish scene.
Richard Thompson, Royal Concert Hall, GlasgowRichard Thompson has always had a touch of the hands-on musical historian about him, from his propensity for dressing up in Lincoln green and acting like Robin Hood while the rest of Fairport Convention slept off their hangovers to distilling centuries of folk tradition into cutting edge rock guitar solos.
So there will be few musicians more capable of travelling from the put-upon minstrelsy of Richard the Lionheart – the John Denver of his day, quoth our host – through to Nelly Furtado’s brash pop of the Noughties and fewer still likely to carry it off with such skill and entertainment as Thompson brings to his 1000 Years of Popular Music presentation.
There are times, particularly around the 1600s as madrigal and early opera sustain the chronological effort, when a certain contractual obligation element creeps in. But any dryness of content is more than matched by the dryness of Thompson’s wit and the enthusiasm of his accomplices, Judith Owen and Debra Dobkin on vocals, keyboards and percussion, for playing the part. As well as resembling ye olde Jennifer Saunders doing Stevie Nicks, Owen is no small asset in the music hall segment and a formidable torch song talent, allowing Thompson to enhance Cry Me a River with typically high tensile guitar creativity.
Much of what’s included is or has been Thompson’s home territory anyway, including the bleak Three Ravens and a proto folk-rock Blackleg Miner. More instructive perhaps, not to mention sheer fun, were the brilliantly adapted romps through the Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind and Abba’s Money Money Money and the priceless donation of a Latin chorus to Nelly Furtado’s Maneater.
From The Herald, January 23, 2009.
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| All written work copyright Rob Adams. | ||
