SUE WILSON discovers that airports can be fun

APPEARING here with her own band, Tread, The Chieftains’ harpist Triona Marshall surely spoke for everyone present when she described this Blas concert as the most fun she’d ever had in an airport.

The first fruit of a new partnership between the festival and Highlands & Islands Airports, it took place in the terminal’s café-bar area, which turned out to be an excellent space for a gig, with a glass wall offering a fine view over towards the runway as the sun went down, and an enjoyably surreal one of several planes taxiing past in the course of the show.

Tread

Double Mod medallist Kirsteen MacDonald – also a regular presenter on BBC Alba – was the first of the night’s performers, delivering a lovely set of unaccompanied Gaelic songs. Her clear, bright, sweet-yet-tart voice, subtly adorned with fluttery vibrato, lent an arresting freshness and immediacy to a selection mainly comprised of traditional love lyrics, although a little more explanation of their content would have helped non-Gaelic speakers tune in further.

A ballad by the great Moidart bard Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair particularly highlighted this shortcoming – although, paradoxically, it was the expressive vitality and evident narrative dynamism of her singing that left one wanting to know more.

The young Morayshire musician Calum Stewart, a former finalist in the Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year contest, had been billed as appearing with his trio, but in fact the group was extended to a five-piece – which also extended the evening’s titular Celtic cousinship between Scotland and Ireland to take in players from Denmark, Sweden and Brittany.

Alongside Stewart’s wooden flute and smallpipes, the full ensemble featured fiddle/viola, piano/glockenspiel, soprano saxophone and guitar, collectively operating under the name One Fine Day, and here performing their first full gig together after sundry previous collaborations among the membership.

Working largely with their own original compositions, plus a few traditional tunes, the quintet artfully interwove both their diverse instrumental textures and disparate native traditions with wider influences, including jazz and minimalist music, creating a vibrantly melodious, intriguingly cosmopolitan sound catalysed by a wealth of imaginative ideas and fine musicianship.

Their delivery was a little diffident at times, but this is easily forgivable in a debut performance: once the band’s had a chance to gel and bed-in, they’ve the makings of a real force to be reckoned with.

The aforementioned Tread were at Blas as a direct spin-off from The Chieftains’ headline visit last year. Along with Marshall, the Canadian brothers Jon and Nathan Pilatzke – the former on fiddle, the latter a champion stepdancer in the high-energy Ottawa Valley style – and US Irish dancer Cara Butler (sister of original Riverdance star Jean), are all regular members of the Irish veterans’ current entourage, with their own line-up completed by Toronto singer-songwriter/guitarist Jef McLarnon.

It does come across more as an assemblage of individual talents than a fully-fledged band, but those talents are of a uniformly exceptional calibre, and they certainly put on a great show, replete with such contrasting highlights as Marshall’s limpidly beautiful articulation of a venerable slow air, ‘The Lamentations of Limerick’, Jon Pilatzke’s fiery, hyperactive set of Cape Breton-style strathspeys and reels, and McLarnon’s arrestingly edgy, idiosyncratic songcraft.

And that’s even aside from the dancing, which featured every couple of numbers or so, and was simply dazzling, with Butler’s tautly focused elegance brilliantly matched and complemented by the other Pilatzke’s showier, looser-limbed, but no less virtuosic display.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

Links

• Blas Festival