Badenoch Centre, Kingussie, 5 September 2006

Troy MacGillivray

CAPE BRETON COUSINS celebrated the well-established musical and historical connections between the Highlands and Islands and the Cape Breton and Nova Scotia regions of eastern Canada.

The Blas Festival’s policy of including Highland artists even in a themed programme of this kind meant that the Canadian contingent – fiddler Troy MacGillivray and the five-strong Beòlach – would be joined by a changing roster of guests as they made their way around the region.

It was the turn of singer and piper Calum Alex MacMillan to fill that role here, albeit at some distance from his native Lewis. He is regarded as one of the leading young Gaelic singers currently around, and his short set prior to the interval confirmed that judgement.

A love song from Ullapool and a jauntier outing from Lewis about a Sabbath-breaking fishing boat was followed with a slow air and set of jigs on the small pipes. He wrapped up the set with a poignant lament written by his great, great uncle to mark the tragic early death of his wife.

Fiddler Troy MacGillivray has his own origins just across the boundary in Nova Scotia rather than Cape Breton itself, but his music clearly drew on the largely Scottish-derived style of the area.

Accompanied by Beòlach’s Mac Morin on piano, he played a crisp set of reels, jigs and Strathspeys, infused with melodic grace and rhythmic vitality, and proved himself to be almost as resourceful when he switched to piano for a fine reading of Niel Gow’s famous ‘Lament for his Second Wife’.

Morin re-appeared after the interval in his customary role on piano with Beòlach. Wendy MacIsaac and Mairi Rankin’s fiddles and Ryan J. MacNeil’s small pipes (a set, as he told us, made by Hamish and Finn Moore in Birnam) and low whistle (which he makes himself) were supported by piano and the driving guitar work of Patrick Gillis.

Their energised set took in jigs, reels and Strathspeys from Cape Breton, Scotland and Ireland, with all three canonical forms sometimes squeezed into the same set, as in the boisterous ‘Three Mile Bridge Set’. A version of the Irish reel ‘The Holly Bush’ taken at a slower tempo proved very effective, and both Mac Morin and the two women contributed some very nifty step dance to proceedings.

The dancing was repeated in the finale, when MacMillan and MacGillivray joined the band for a set of tunes, launched by MacMillan singing mouth music. MacGillivray and then Dannsa’s Sandra Robertson and Caroline Reagh stepped up to take a turn at the nimble footwork.

© George MacKay, 2006

Link

• Blas Festival