Aros Centre, Portree, 4 September 2007

Kathryn Tickell (photo - Derek Maxwell).

IF ANYONE appreciates music with a sense of place, it’s the Gaels, which would be one reason for the warm reception earned here by Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell, appearing at Blas with her regular three-piece band.

Almost the entire set had its roots in her home turf in north-east England, from venerable clog-dance tunes she learned as a child from various musical uncles, to her own celebrated compositions, many of them – as with the traditional material – named for local landmarks and beauty-spots.

The descriptive powers of Tickell’s writing were brilliantly epitomised in three such descriptive pieces. Firstly ‘Hareshaw Burn’, an aptly capricious imitation of a river’s alternately placid and boisterous course as it wends towards the sea, captured via adroit switches of tempo, and featuring the pipes at their most winningly effervescent.

It was followed by the magnificent ‘Yeavering’, which saw Tickell partnering her brother Peter on fiddle, evoking the austere grandeur of Northumbria’s big hills and skies in a blend of almost classical stateliness and Nordic-hued lyricism, awash with rich, ringing harmonies.

‘Music for a New Crossing’, co-written with jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard, was part of a piece commissioned for the opening of Gateshead’s Millennium Bridge, and vividly conjured the ebulliently hectic bustle of a newly re-energised city – in adroit contrast to the opening waltz with which it was paired, the lovely pastoral paean ‘Rothbury Hills’.

Besides Tickell’s sublime prowess at the helm, the band’s ensemble work – also featuring Julian Sutton on melodeon, and Ian Stevenson on guitar and acoustic bass – was a model of close-knit empathy, simultaneously highlighting their consummate individual fluency amidst an array of subtly jazzy tonalities and inventive rhythmic twists. Sheer class, through and through.

With MC / Fear an Taigh Arthur Cormack having firstly warmed up the sellout crowd by instructing the non-initiated in a smattering of Gaelic, taken from the phrase-cards distributed around all Blas gigs – at which all announcements and introductions are also made bilingually – the show was opened by a trio of pupils from the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music at Plockton High School.

Accordionist Roya MacLean, fiddler Coralea Mackay and pianist Shona Masson delivered a short but impressively accomplished set, testing themselves to the max with some nifty arrangements of tunes by Gordon Duncan, Michael McGoldrick, Donald Shaw and Liz Carroll.

The odd wobble and waver betrayed an understandable degree of nerves, but in the main their performance offered yet more exhilarating proof that while youth – according to the adage – may be wasted on the young, traditional music nowadays certainly isn’t.

© Sue Wilson, 2007

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