ABC, Glasgow, 31 January 2008

Tim O'Brien

TIM O’BRIEN, supporting the Duhks (pronouned “Ducks”, in case you were wondering), is a mild-mannered, diffident, unassuming check-shirted sort of guy, originally from Virginia but now based in Nashville with a big reputation as a bluegrass/country producer and performer (and a regular at Celtic Connections – Ed.).

A ringer for Clark Kent, when he picks up the mandolin, fiddle or guitar and sings with his clear, open voice, there’s a hint of Superman. At the ABC on Thursday night in a Glasgow being scoured by cold Arctic winds, he produced some clean, pure but very tasty music. Songs like ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ sounded as though they were being channelled from way back in time. As if he didn’t have enough strings to his bow, he even dabbled in standup with some surprisingly risque jokes delivered so innocently even a minister could not have taken offence.

Towards the end of his set, the Duhks casually shuffled on stage a few at a time and joined in, explaining that Tim had produced their last album. Evidently that experience has developed a warm friendship between him and band founder members Tania Elizabeth (fiddle), Jordan McConnell (guitar), Leonard Podolak (banjo) and Scott Senior (percussion), plus new girl, vocalist Sarah Dugas, and their rendering together of ‘Where’s love come from, where’s love go?’ was a bit of a spine-tingler.

After the interval, the Duhks returned for their full folk/fusion set. Think Peatbog Faeries or Shooglenifty but with a French-Canadian accent and girls, sweeping all over the musical spectrum from French Canada to Brasil, from their own compositions to covers of Tracy Chapman and Led Zeppelin.

They explained they were trying to recreate the atmosphere of a French-Canadian kitchen party, where as dawn breaks the curtains are closed to avoid breaking the spell, and the music and dancing go on and on. In this they were partly successful, though there was a tendency for the whole thing to feel a bit disjointed. A set of jigs and reels which had the audience on its feet was followed by a slow ballad and the momentum was lost. But the Duhks are young yet, “tattoed twenty-somethings” in the words of their website, and they have a bit to learn about the arcane art of pacing.

Tania Elizabeth’s dark curls have wild blonde streaks, like Rogue in X Men, but her fiddle playing was a constant joy, dexterous, spirited, virtuoso stuff, veering from rock accented scraping to classically precise ornamentation. Her energy was matched by Sarah Dugas’ belter of a voice, Joplinesque on the big tunes, throatily soft on the quiet numbers such as her own ‘Toujours Vouloir’, a love ballad in her native French, which began with just the fiddle and some bells.

Like Gogol Bordello and the Luminescent Orchestrii the Duhks are also exploring the Eastern European/Gypsy/cabaret side of life, and it was those tunes with their hint of the mediaeval shared heritage which got the audience up on its feet again, dancing wildly in the aisles, even in ‘The Fox and the Bee’ where the time signatures were, to say the least, a challenge to all but the most deranged interpretative dancers. Tim O’Brien had joined them by the time they finished the set with a trip down south to Louisiana for some richly flavoured Cajun/zydeco and an exhilarating slide sideways into ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

Next to me couples from England and Wales who had flown up specially for the gig were enchanted, but it is sad to say that the ABC was not full, and though the audience was younger than what I’ve seen of the typical Celtic Connections crew, it was a shame that more of the untold thousands of the students attending Glasgow’s myriad institutions of higher education had not taken a break from their studies (or the pub) to come and make the most of the city’s first festival of the year.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008