At the end of the Martin Green's set at Glasgow's ABC a middle-aged man with a French accent remarked to me, 'he is terrible, he hurts your ears,' when I pointed to the accordionist's work with Lau he replied, 'ah, but with Lau he could be held down, he should not be allowed to do things on his own.'

On some levels I had to agree. The 27 piece brass band produced a massive amount of volume, and Green's experimentation can delve into self-indulgent obscurity all too easily. Yet I found the overall experience quite thrilling, and the extraordinary force of the Kirkintilloch Brass Band (trust me on this one) created some beautiful- if loud – moments.

 

This concert marked one of the first outings of Green's collaboration with the community band and I found his efforts at fusing his frenzied compositions with these musicians to be a significant, if slightly misguided feat. Underlying this seemingly anarchic experience was clearly a great deal of effort and an apparent refusal to accept the dictates of genre.

On another level entirely an honourable service is being done as regards the tradition of the village brass-band which in my view is a very important one. Such groups should not be taken for granted, and it was a genuine pleasure to see them getting their teeth into the Pink-Floyd like escapades of these compositions, one only to be matched by watching Green himself dance about with glee on stage like a nerdy kid thrilled at the magic of his new chemistry set.

We left the surreal musical landscape of Kirkintilloch for the more predicable terrain of Quebec provided by Yves Lambert and the Berbet Orchestra. Fronted by the charismatic bulk of Lambert and supported by a group of fiery instrumentalists, this group went down extremely well. Their main weakness was an attempt to cram in as many influences in an attempt to take in the whole spectrum of French-American music. A key example of this was a rather terrible 'Voodoo' song, which sounded like a sub-par twelve bar blues, with the inexplicable inclusion of wah-wah mandolin. The real strength of Berbet Orchestra lay in the instrumental numbers. Their obvious versatility as musicians was put to the best use in this setting, yet they also showed a clear ability to do the same in their arrangements of traditional Quebecois songs. It is perhaps too tempting as a group with substantial talents to take demonstrations of dexterity too far at the expense of a cohesive set, expanding on traditional music should provide enough material for a band based on the remarkable skills of fiddlers Tommy Gautheir and Nicolas Pellerin.

Maybe I missed the point of the Berbet Orchestra. Yet this was a fitting close to a festival that attempts to see traditional music as the broad church it has always been.

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