Celtic Connections’ Guitar Night
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall - 24/01/23
Celtic Connections’ Guitar Night (or Frethead Convention as Anna Massie described it) fielded an ad hoc but strong team of Massie herself, Ian Carr, Tim Edey, and relative newcomer Calum McIlroy, playing a mix of wire and nylon-strung guitars with the occasional contribution from tenor guitar and mandolin. The evening kicked off with a slow, lilting piece by Edey that had something of the character of the theme tune for an 80’s soap opera set in the Costa del Sol, melodically pleasant but somewhat bland, an augury of what was to come.
The players had organised some solo pieces, duos, trios as well as recently arranged numbers for the whole ensemble which offered the possibility, duly accepted, of single line harmonies as well as chordal backing. There was space too for impromptu solos, with Tim Edey tearing into a particularly impressive one at one point. Edey is an extraordinary musician. He moves around the fretboard with an unerring sense of harmony and is consistently inventive as demonstrated on his heartfelt tribute to a close friend, the late accordionist Seamus Begley, and on the beautiful chord melody treatment of the Carolan classic, ‘Si Beag Si Mor’.
Calum McIlroy abandoned his intended song and kept the mood downbeat with a gentle ‘Eileen’s Waltz’, a mood that prevailed through much of the first half until a set of reels, including the challenging ‘Reel Beatrice’, provided the kind of fireworks one suspects the audience had come for.
The second half was leavened with plenty of amusing banter between Carr and Massie. The former gave us a glimpse of his home life in Sweden with the polska Big Horse, while the latter continued the domestic theme with a tune for her parents, ‘The Pioneers’ Waltz’. A long second half reinforced the view that, despite the undoubted skill and musicality of the players, the selection of material, much of it unfamiliar, didn’t do enough to face up to the challenge of the lack of variety in the sound of the instruments themselves, the short sonic decay of the acoustic guitar tending to a sameness and a blandness that was only occasionally lifted when the players upped the tempo. We could have done with that song that Calum McIlroy had been on the verge of singing.