Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 15 January 2009

The Barra MacNeils

In keeping with this year’s Homecoming Scotland promotion, Celtic Connections 2009 kicked off with an extensive line-up of artists from Cape Breton island in Nova Scotia, where the musical traditions carried by thousands of mostly Gaelic-speaking Scottish emigrants during the 18th and 19th centuries have continued to flourish on Canadian soil.

The concert also celebrated the close ties between Celtic Connections and Cape Breton’s own annual festival, Celtic Colours, with performances by some of the many Scottish musicians who have played the latter event during its 12-year history.

Joint compère for the evening, along with Scottish singer/harpist Corrina Hewat, was Cape Breton Gaelic singer Mary Jane Lamond, who opened proceedings with a sensuous, sinewy rendering of “O, Is Àlainn an t-Àilte” (“O, Fair Is the Place”), the first song known to have been written on the island, by South Uist fisherman and poet Michael Mór MacDonald, who was caught out by encroaching ice and forced to overwinter there in 1775.

She followed with a sweetly wistful love-song recently learned from the nonagenarian Barra singer Peter MacLean, before closing her set with the sturdy rhythms of a sailors’ rowing song, her voice nowadays displaying far greater richness, depth and power than when she first came to attention in the mid-1990s, guesting with fiddler Ashley MacIsaac.

MacIsaac himself, the one-time wild-child prodigy whose provocatively punkish approach and cross-genre fusions helped put Cape Breton music on the contemporary folk map, also put in an appearance later on, complete with extravagant Mohawk hairdo and blackout sunglasses.

He’s recently reinvented himself as a rock-oriented singer-songwriter, apparently, and it seemed clear enough that he hadn’t been practising his fiddle much. You couldn’t fault his ambition, opening his set with James Scott Skinner’s famously demanding “The President”, but you could fault pretty much everything else about his playing, apart from volume and attack, while his closing quasi-vaudeville caricature of “Loch Lomond”, self-accompanied on piano, certainly won’t have this listener rushing to seek out more of his singing.

If MacIsaac vividly exemplified the stridency and excessive rhythmic aggression that can mar Cape Breton fiddling, the performances by Jerry Holland, the veteran Boston-born player who was pivotal in reviving the island’s traditions during the 1970s, and multi-talented youngster Kimberley Fraser – who featured elsewhere in the show both playing piano and stepdancing – did much to redeem the picture.

Holland’s set included two lovely self-penned slow airs, highlighting his careful attention to tone and expression, while Fraser’s long, adroitly chosen medley of strathspeys and reels – with a Texan swing number thrown in for good measure – furnished plenty of melodic and dynamic variety, meanwhile displaying her nimble bowing and fluent ornamentation to full advantage.

Among other standouts of the three-hour show were some fine country-folk ballads and dazzling guitar picking from J.P. Cormier – who, like Fraser, appeared at last year’s Blas festival – and a terrific trio of Gaelic duets from the new Scottish pairing of Norrie MacIver and Sineag MacIntyre, including a splendidly spirited, tight-knit rendition of ‘Oran ne Cloiche’, the South Uist poet Dòmhnall Mac an t-Saoir’s intricately rhythmic account of the Stone of Destiny affair.
Rounding things off in suitably rousing style was veteran family band the Barra MacNeils, who have expanded from a quartet to a six-piece over the years with the addition of younger siblings, and whose line-up of fiddle, pipes, flute, accordion, piano, guitar, bodhrán and vocals was supplemented here by bassist Jamie Gatti. Rollicking instrumentals were interwoven with some fine ensemble singing, before all the night’s performers were invited back on for the customary massed finale.

Taken in context with the rest of the festival programme to come, the show did seem somewhat lacking in the special-occasion elements that usually characterise Celtic Connections’ opening concerts. It also seemed strange that more wasn’t made of such Cape Breton specialities as the island’s marvellously vivacious, ragtime-influenced piano style, or the Scottish stepdancing whose preservation there directly enabled its recent rescue from extinction on these shores.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

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• Celtic Connections