Celtic Connections 2010

Date: 23 January 2010 19:40:18

I've managed to get to a few Celtic Connections gigs this year - and I've been playing with my new camera at the same time. I think I need to pluck up the courage to try the zoom lens, as all these pictures were just taken with the standard lens which has a bit of a zoom but not much.

Anyway, the concerts I/we have been to so far are The Imagined Village at the Fruitmarket, which was the first night of their tour promoting their second CD. We've had the first CD on pretty much constant play in the car since HD's birthday last year (I did a random search on "folk" on Amazon when I was looking for a birthday present for my dad - when I looked at the playlist and artists involved I decided my dad would hate it but we'd love it, and I was right!). This 2nd CD is much more 'pared down', it doesn't have all the guest artists the first one did, but is more of the same reworkings of old folk songs (along with the odd surprise - folky cover of Cum on Feel the Noize anyone?!). The band features (amongst others) Martin and Eliza Carthy, Chris Wood, Simon Emmerson and Johnny Kalsi, plus a guy doing live electronica and theremin, a fabulous sitar player called Sheema Mukherjee, and various others. The show was fabulous, and definitely recommended if you get the chance to catch this tour (info on their Myspace page here. The support act (Jackie Oates) was brilliant as well, and she joined the Imagined Village for a song in their set too.

The next day we were back at the Fruitmarket for Balkanarama - a Balkan night (well obviously!) which was headlined by a band called Besh o droM from Hungary whom we'd wanted to see at WOMAD last year but didn't quite manage to. When we got there there were a couple of musicians and a dancer in the audience space, and then a group of musicians set themselves up, also in the audience space, and pretty much jammed for an hour. This sounded great, but unfortunately as they weren't on stage, unless you were right by them it was impossible to see anything at all so it was quite hard to get into. After this there was a group of 3 girls (I think from Serbia) singing a capella (sometimes joined by an amazing beatboxer), then a drumming group accompanying a belly dancer (we weren't so keen on this group). The penultimate band was called Black Cat whom we really liked - they were pretty loud and frenzied, but in a good way :)

Finally Besh o droM came on, they were also excellent - quite jazzy as well as Balkan in style, and likewise very very loud! They were still going strong at 1am when we eventually left.

A couple of nights ago I went up by myself (it was midweek so HD was still down south) to the Royal Concert Hall to see an evening called "Legendary Gypsy Queens and Kings". It was the most fabulous night - there were two house bands, one from France called Kaloome who sounded like the Gypsy Kings, and a Romanian band called Mahala Rai Banda who were absolutely brilliant - very like Fanfara Ciocarlia whom I'd seen before (at Celtic Connections and when I was in Sibiu a few years back), mainly brass but with a brilliant violin player too. They did a fair bit of their own stuff, but also accompanied a couple of dancers (Aurelia Sandu and Tantzica Ionita), Romanian singer Florentina Sandu (fantastic voice, and really beautiful - I'm not jealous), Bulgarian singer Jony Iliev (who made me think of Ozzy Osbourne, but who also had the most incredible voice) and the Macedonian singer whom I saw with Fanfara Ciocarlia in Sibiu, Esma Redzepova. She was the reason I really wanted to go to this show, and certainly didn't disappoint, but the rest of the show was also just extraordinary, I was absolutely buzzing when I came out.

We're off to another concert this week coming - I'll blog about that after the event.

We're so lucky living here. This festival is absolutely brilliant.

[Click on any of the thumbnails to see a bigger pic]