Singer Kim Carnie opened a sold-out evening in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. Kim had been part of the 30th Anniversary opening concert and Trio Da Kali’s ‘richly rewarding’ collaboration with Scottish and Louisiana musicians. She was accompanied by the core band that played on her excellent debut album from last year, And So We Gather – Donald Shaw on piano, Innes White on guitar and vocals, James Lindsay on bass and James Mackintosh on drums – plus Megan Henderson on fiddle and vocals, a who’s who of Scottish folk strings led by Greg Lawson, and by Matt Carmichael on sax on three numbers. All but one of the songs Kim sang came from her album, most in Gaelic, together with the title track and the impressive She Moves Me, finishing up with the irresistible groove of Nighean Sin Thall, Kim’s breezy vocal abetted by a swampy sax line. Kim is an exceptional talent, her rich, nuanced singing commanding the audience’s attention; she looked comfortable, as though she belonged on a big stage.
Duncan Chisholm was premiering his new album Black Cuillin, which we described in our review as “an extraordinary achievement, a complete joy and a deeply immersive experience”. For the album, Duncan drew inspiration both from Sorley MacLean’s poem An Cuilithionn / The Cuillin, written in 1939, with the Cuillin mountain range on the Isle of Skye as a metaphor for the strength of opposition to the Nazis, and from the immense beauty of the same mountains. Duncan described the album as “the most ambitious and rewarding project of my creative life”. He said early on in the concert, after sharing that he had played at every one of the thirty Celtic Connections, that there had for him been “some special nights, but none more special than tonight”.
The shape of the set was in four parts, the Black Cuillin tunes (with only one left out) providing the bookends: the first five in the same order as on the album; a middle section of other tunes, a good number from Duncan’s previous album Sandwood; the later album tunes slightly re-ordered to end with the exhilarating The Razor’s Edge; and lastly, an encore of the final two Black Cuillin tunes, Before The Sun Comes and Phill Cunningham’s When The Snow Melts, separated by the reel Dizzy Blue from Sandwood. Hamish Napier (piano) and Ross Ainslie (low whistle) were on stage nearly all the time (Donald Shaw playing piano on his composition Constellation), others – Jarlath Henderson (uilleann pipes), Donald Hay (drums), Ross Hamilton (bass), Innes Watson (acoustic guitar), Sorren Maclean (electric guitar) – appeared as needed. The string section that had supported Kim Carnie returned to add, and I don’t use the word lightly, the perfect strings arrangements to over half the numbers, the majority of those arranged by Greg Lawson (fiddle), who was joined on fiddle by Megan Henderson, Patsy Reid (Megan and Patsy contributing separately to a couple of tunes), Catriona Price and Graham Mackenzie, with Alice Allen and Su-a Lee on cello, and Georgia Boyd on viola.
From the very start, the show had a sense of being a significant occasion. The opening number, the title track from the album, offered a broad soundscape, building on uncluttered fiddle, piano and strings, to a wider canvas to introduce the whole story. Beneath The Fortress was Duncan told us a tune written right at the start of the Black Cuillin project, inspired by the imposing, seemingly impregnable view of the Cuillin ridge as seen from the valley below. Duncan’s lovely plaintive fiddle initially evoked a first view of the peaks, and as the tune builds, offers an image of the full ridge coming into view. A Precious Place, one the tunes played from the Sandwood album, was a slow, contemplative tune, starting with Duncan’s peerless fiddle and acoustic guitar, then piano and cello and gentle strings – equally as evocative as the Black Cuillin tunes, simply about a different isolated, magnificent landscape.
A few numbers began with just Duncan playing fiddle, illuminated by a sole spotlight. One of those, a set of four tunes, was just one example of Duncan playing out of his skin, the clear sound of his playing enveloping you in such a way that, for a moment, you forget there were two thousand other people in the room. Three of the four tunes were Duncan’s, the other being Allan MacDonald’s We’re A Case The Bunch of Us – which Allan had played only the night before in the same building. Various combinations of Duncan, Innes, Hamish, Ross Ainslie and Jarlath played each tune, making for an intriguing ebb and flow, with Hamish playing a superb, at times percussive, piano solo in the middle, followed by a really delightful, conversational interplay between Hamish’s piano and Su-a Lee’s cello – made all the more charming if you knew that the two of them got married not long ago.
Duncan said from the stage that different art forms can transport you, and none more so than music. Whether you knew what Black Cuillin was about or not, you couldn’t fail but be absorbed by the shifting layers of impeccably played music and the pictures that it painted. After years of unassumingly making some of the very finest, evocative fiddle music, the night saw Duncan getting a deserved, higher level of appreciation and recognition on the biggest of Celtic Connections stages.