Inverness Airport Restaurant, 10 September 2012

EVEN looking across its younger generational stratum, today’s folk scene often still appears a largely male-dominated realm, so the affirmative action embodied by the main touring double bill of this year’s Blas festival, joined here by young North Uist singer Linda Macleod, serves as a welcome counterweight.

ALL three acts – performing against the always enjoyable backdrop of evening flights taxi-ing into the arrivals terminal – had self-evidently been chosen first and foremost on the basis of outstanding musical merit, together with the complementary qualities of their music, factors which of course only strengthen the feminist subtext.

Vamm

Still in her early 20s, MacLeod is a justly rising star of Gaelic song, combining deep local and family roots in its traditions – especially through her late grandfather, Hugh Matheson, one of whose songs she included here – with extensive academic studies at Glasgow University, where she specialised in previously unpublished material from her home community of Baleshare, and now works for the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic. Not that there was anything remotely dry or scholarly about the two short sets with which she opened both halves of the show, just the natural assurance and expressive eloquence that comes from knowing and loving your stuff to bone-deep level, allied with a dulcet, delicate, yet subtly wiry voice and sure rhythmic instincts.

Vamm, meaning to bewitch or enchant in Shetland dialect, is the new trio partnership between those islands’ leading female fiddler, Catriona Macdonald (formerly of Blazin’ Fiddles), her Perthshire co-instrumentalist Patsy Reid (formerly of Breabach) and Marit Fält – from Norway, of Swedish parentage – on Låtmandola, an octave mandolin with an additional bass string and “various other extras”.

It’s barely a year since they launched the band, and their sound still resonates with the fresh delight of discovery, but in all other respects this is already richly-evolved, sumptuously sophisticated music, fuelled by a shared passion and exquisite discernment for beautiful tunes, drawn from across the full swathe of their collective heritage. Also capitalising fully on a formidable shared armoury of technical skills and individual approaches, they arrayed and reconfigured each piece this way and that, layering myriad harmonic, rhythmic and textural variations into radiantly protean sonic tapestries, encompassing moods and modes from lush classical elegance to funked-up high-speed dance medleys.

For another fiddle-fronted band, Kristan Harvey and the Sanna – the four-piece led by 2011’s Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year – could hardly have presented a more rewarding contrast. With the Orkney-born Harvey flanked by guitarist Tia Files, Megan Henderson on piano and the night’s token male, Adam Brown, on bodhran, their mostly uptempo set was resolutely anchored in chunky, springy rhythm work, enriched by Henderson’s melodic contributions and Files’s jazzy chord colours. This provided the perfect sparring-partner for Harvey’s brilliantly livewire playing – nimble yet muscular, effervescent yet exact – in a Scottish/Orcadian-centred tune selection vibrantly infused with bluegrass influences.

© Sue Wilson, 2012

Links

• Blas Festival