FOLLOWING in the wake of last month’s Tartan Heart Festival at Belladrum and the Nairn International Jazz Festival comes the second full-scale running of Blas, a Highland-wide celebration of Gaelic music, language and culture.

The initial Blas Festival was a weekend pilot project two years ago, which was rolled out last year as a regional festival in five different areas of the Highlands. The festival has added Nairn and Badenoch & Strathspey this year (with Blazin’ Fiddles and Capercaillie upping the star name quota), and will complete the process of covering the whole of Highland Region next year, when the festival will be extended to Inverness itself.

The move into the city next year will have symbolic as much as practical significance, since audiences in Inverness already have fairly ready access to concerts in the surrounding areas, taking in not only Nairn and Strathspey, but also the Black Isle and Ross-shire. It will signal the full coming-of-age for Blas, however, and will allow them to play a full part in the Highland Year of Culture.

It is to be hoped that we will be able to say the same for the refurbished Eden Court Theatre, where work goes on apace. The theatre planned to allow the public to have a look at how work was progressing as part of the Europe-wide Open Doors day on 2 September.

Staying with venues, the opening of Ironworks in Inverness has added a significant new presence to the pop and rock circuit in the city and in the Highlands, with scope for folk and jazz thrown in. Initial reactions seem positive, and we wish them well with the venture.

More established venues in the city will have to look to their laurels, and several of them – including Hootananny, the Market Bar, Mad Hatters, The Room and The Foundry – will play host to this year’s goHI (7-9 September).

Still in Inverness, Evi Westmore tells us all about Imagining The City, a day of public art in Church Street on 9 September. It is part of a wider arts project within the even wider old town regeneration scheme for the city, and it will be fascinating to see how Invernessians respond to the cutting-edge visual arts planned for the occasion.

Over on the west coast, our regular ArtsFolk feature looks at a new artists’ residency scheme based in the artistic retreat of Cove Park in Argyll & Bute, while writer and broadcaster Brian Morton weighs up Dunoon’s uneasy relationship with Gaelic ahead of the annual Mod, which will be held in the town in October.

Strathspey-based group Dannsa are the subject of our HITN profile this month. As usual, we will be adding more news, reviews and features throughout the month, so keep checking back.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor, Northings

Kenny Mathieson lives and works in Boat of Garten, Strathspey. He studied American and English Literature at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a BA (First Class) in 1978, and a PhD in 1983. He has been a freelance writer on various arts-related subjects since 1982, and contributes to the Inverness Courier, The Scotsman, The Herald, The List, Times Educational Supplement Scotland, and other publications. He has contributed to numerous reference books, and has written books on jazz and Celtic music.