SUE WILSON checks out the next generation alongside one of Scottish music’s enduring personalities.

Dougie MacLean

AS WITH The Chieftains’ appearance at Blas last year, the festival’s organisers once again capitalised on their most bankable headliner by deploying local youth music projects as support acts, thereby giving a host of budding singers and musicians the experience of performing to a big crowd on the main Eden Court stage – an occasion that must surely have incentivised countless hours of practice beforehand.

The 22-strong, all-female teenage choir Canntaireachd filed on first, presenting sweetly synchronised and harmonised versions of traditional Gaelic songs alongside a striking new composition from the group themselves, in simple but alluring arrangements by musical director Eilidh Mackenzie, with their close-knit unison in a set of puirt-a-beul underlining their impressive ensemble discipline.

The stage was then filled by nearly 40 youngsters from two Invernessian Gaelic arts tuition projects, Fèis na h-òige and Fèis a Bhaile, aged all the way from six to their mid-teens, playing fiddles, harps, pianos, accordions, guitars, bagpipes, whistles, snare-drum and djembes as well as singing and stepdancing.

With Canntaireachd coming back on to join them halfway through their set, the next generation of Highland musical talent looked set to blossom even more copiously than the current crop of fËis alumni now forging professional careers.

This inspiring display of youthful involvement in traditional culture represented a vastly different musical landscape from when the 20-year-old Dougie MacLean first joined the Tannahill Weavers, back in 1974, at the outset of what would become one of the most durable careers in Scottish music.

Regardless of the folk scene’s radical transformation and expansion over the ensuing decades, he remains a consistently popular draw, as demonstrated here by a near-capacity crowd. For much of that time, he’s seen little need to tamper with a winning formula, a perhaps less admirable form of consistency exemplified early in his set by a brand-new song, ‘Time Will Turn’, a gently downtempo, soulfully bittersweet ballad that could have come off pretty much any of his albums from at least the last 15 years.

Despite the samey melodic emollience of his material, and the generically evocative triteness of his lyrics – littered with references to standing tall, holding fast, teaching truths and the beauties/wonders/elemental forces of nature – his set was greatly enhanced by the relaxed, upbeat warmth with which he engaged the audience, along with an abundance of self-deprecating humour.

An exception to the latter was the decidedly cringeworthy false modesty of his lengthy introduction to the inevitable ‘Caledonia’, although his actual rendition of the official Homecoming 2009 anthem exhibited a mitigating degree of judicious understatement.

There’s no denying, either, that his voice’s resonant grainy timbre and soft nasal twang enrich even his most anodyne numbers, memorably framed here by sonorous, richly-hued accompaniment from his excellent five-piece band.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

Links

• Blas Festival