Folk review: Jaadu & At First Light - Glasgow City Halls

By Jim Gilchrist
Published on Thursday 26 January 2012 00:00

JAADU, which translates from Hindi as “magic”, is an inspired collaboration between French guitarist and cultural nomad Thierry “Titi” Robin and Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz, a leading exponent of qawwali, Sufi devotional song, and a successor to his famous mentor, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

They filled the stage, Robin accompanied by accordion, kit percussion and, by way of bass, a modified Moroccan gimri, Faiz with his white-robed entourage of singers and tabla player.

The only elucidation was when Robin explained at the close that these were contemporary settings of traditional Sufi poetry. Each lengthy song began with a delicately chiming prelude by Robin, mainly on a Kurdish-tuned bouzouki, but also resorting to conventional guitar and lute-like rubab, before Faiz’s muscular voice started undulating through intense microtonal cadences. As compelling rhythms drove increasingly impassioned torrents of song or wordless vocables, sometimes over trance-like group intoning, it was hard to know whether they were declaiming ultimate truths or singing their own way to transcendence, yet it was an immensely powerful performance.

There was no ambiguity from At First Light, the energetic Irish septet led by pipers John McSherry and Francis McIlduff, and fiddler Donal O’Connor, with vocalist-fiddler Ciara McCrickard. When in full exuberant flight, pipes and fiddles underpinned by punchy chording, they could be reminiscent of Moving Hearts, and generated a weird, almost Gaelic-psalm-like heterophony when the twin pipes keened an air together.

Rating: ****

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