KENNY MATHIESON catches the final New Voices commission at this year’s Celtic Connections festival.

CANADIAN CELLIST Christine Hanson has become a familiar figure on the Scottish music scene since moving here in the late 1990s. Her New Voices commission from Celtic Connections pulled together strands from both her home territory and her adopted land.
  
She put together a nine-piece band for the occasion, including Bruce MacGregor and Gillian Frame on fiddles, Brian McAlpine (keyboard), Kevin Murray (guitar and mandolin), Rick Taylor (trombone), Kevin McGuire (bass) and James Mackintosh (drums).
  
The final member of the ensemble was singer-songwriter Michael Marra, employed on this occasion in narrating one of Robert Service’s poems about life on the Alaskan frontier, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGhee’. Hanson’s musical settings responded closely to the poem, and having Marra read it made those connections plain.
  
The poem tells the story of a gold miner who is charged with the heavy responsibility of carrying out his fellow-miner’s wishes and cremating McGhee’s dead body. Hanson made effective use of individual voices within the band to emphasise aspects of the story, including her own cello in the death scene, Rick Taylor’s trombone, and an atmospheric jazzy walking bass line from Kevin McGuire for the great cremation scene. The jazz influence carried on throughout that section, not only in the music, but also in the syncopated line of Marra’s reading.
  
Most of the music drew more directly on Scottish sources. The close linkage to the poem was both a strength and a limitation, allowing Hanson to write thoughtful and imaginative music for the ensemble, but sacrificing a little in the sense of freedom and excitement evident in the closing set of tunes that formed an encore for the concert.
  
The music was accompanied by a series of paintings projected onto a screen behind the players – unfortunately, I didn’t catch the name of the artist when the cellist did her verbal thanks prior to that encore.
 

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005