Tom McConville, Claire Mann and Aaron Jones are the perfect folk trio, and their concert on Wednesday night was one of the best offerings I have seen at Edinburgh Folk Club.
'All the Tunes in the World' was a slightly odd opening song given its lilting chorus and closing time based subject matter, but given the trio's connections with grassroots folk music in Edinburgh and Newcastle it came across as an apt expression of their collective musical past.
What made this group so special was the combination of three highly distinctive talents, Claire Mann's polished musicianship, McConville's spontaneity, and Aaron Jones's well-nigh angelic accompaniment and arrangements.
McConville's irrepressible stage presence made the evening highly entertaining, lending the concert a level of accessibility and laid back candour that (in my opinion) can often be lacking in contemporary folk performances, especially when musical excellence is on the cards. The fiddler's belligerent insistence on audience participation may not have added much to the music itself, but it demonstrated the man's remarkable ability to get an entire room involved in the performance.
Perhaps audience participation is a key aspect to any folk club, but I have always found that unless the song is specifically designed for singing en masse it can often take away from my own enjoyment of the music. Of course the folk tradition is brilliantly communal and all the better for it, but at points I found myself yearning for a moments silence during the chorus of several songs in order to better appreciate what was happening on stage. There is a danger that some songs may end up sounding like a mumbled Presbyterian hymn on a driech Sunday morning.
However the sheer quality and variety of songs and tunes, combined with some razor sharp Geordie wit, made any sense of sitting in a congregation disappear. This was apparent from McConville's tour de force 'Patrick Pearce' to Mann and Jones's sparkling material from their album 'Secret Orders' such as 'Saints and Sinners' and 'Across the Western Ocean' (both songs are available to download on this very website).
Tom McConville has a highly distinctive style of fiddle playing, adding vast amounts of energy to the performances. While my knowledge of the instrument is by no means authoritative there were moments in his playing that went straight for the spine.
The trio will be playing throughout the country over the next few months- providing a chance to see that often rare combination that only folk can offer- excellent musicianship and a feeling that as a member of the audience you are as much a part of the music as the performers themselves.
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The irrepressible Paddy Bort treated Wee Folk Club loyals to a wonderfully entertaining evening of songs and banter from Royal Oak stalwarts Martin Boland and Alan Hunter on Sunday the 1st March.
The two individual talents have collaborated with an album ("10 B&H") as well as teaming up to deliver the most powerful sessions the Oak has on offer to unsuspecting tourists, passers-by and Royal Oak faithfuls.
As a duo rarely heard in the respectful atmosphere of a concert setting, the audience were able to aoppreciate the more finessed elements of the pairs' musicianship which is often lost in the raucous cut-and-thrust of the session environment.
Moving through a number of original numbers and traditional songs, we were treated to Boland's delicate finger picking and emotionally-charged self-penned numbers such as "Beneath the Flood" along with the gutsy offerings of Hunter in his trademark "peaty" voice which seems to be cut from the very rock of Scotland itself.
Together the pair have a unique ability to harmonise two quite different vocals and blend the mature melodies of Boland's guitar with the percussive force of Hunter's Citern. Throw in a hilarious and refreshingly unrehearsed repetoire of banter which, like the very best of dark comdey, does not shy from the controversial and the obscure, and you have a fantastic representation of what the very best of Edinburgh's session leaders can deliver when unfettered from morons demanding Jonny Cash and Oasis numbers.
Grab any chance you get to se this pair perform and I throughly recommend buying "10 B&H" to own a unique slice of Scottish folk culture.
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The name on everybody's lips at the end of Chris Stout's concert last Sunday was Ryan Young. This 17 year-old opened the concert with a remarkable unaccompanied set that held the audience entirely enthralled. The sight of this shy, awkward schoolboy-come fiddler in front of a room full of 800 people, was perhaps one of the best illustrations of the importance of Scotland's relatively new found ability to train its young people in the traditional arts. Young's overall mastery of his instrument was as consummate as any I have heard, young or old. Thankfully he is just about old enough to escape the albatross of 'child-prodigy' and will no doubt be in the ranks of Scotland's fiddle playing elite by the time he reaches 20.
Emily Smith was not really to my taste. It was a case of all the right boxes being ticked but the overall experience lacking. Essentially I found that despite good musicianship, a good voice, and a good choice of tunes there was something that I look for in folk that was missing. It was angst. The songs, and this was particularly obvious with the self-penned songs she played, were all a bit too shiny and nice. 'Go to town' and another one about a 'room full of love' were too polished and had an overdose of the feel good and not enough of the spontaneity that I associate with a direct emotive performance.
However her interpretation of the traditional 'Caledonia' demonstrated how the Emily Smith approach can work, but at the same time there was not enough grit and rawness in her performance to make it worthwhile.
Chris Stout was as ever resplendent, and despite the numerous projects the man has been involved in his quintet is one of the most interesting and undoubtedly the best showcase of his musicianship. With Fraser Fifefield on saxophone Stout had an ideal partner to take off on brilliant improvisational flights with. At the same time the two instruments managed to amalgamate to a degree I had hardly thought possible, this combined sound provided an ideal vehicle for the re-interpretation of traditional tunes.
Stout's ability to start off with a relatively simple reel and lightly lift it into the realms of experimentation and back again is seamless. It creates a musical experience that is both a thorough and unique take on the traditional, and at one with the contemporary. At several points the quintet are like a bunch of jazz musicians after hours, with all the enjoyment, spontaneity, and freedom of expression this suggests. However their music is fundamentally grounded in the traditional and therefore the archaic problems associated with improvisation is cancelled out. The Chris Stout Quintet is the most groundbreaking group working in Scotland today.
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