Folk and Jazz Reviews: A festival of fun

Published on Tuesday 24 March 2009 18:26

WHEN the Sharon Shannon Big Band takes the stage in characteristically dynamic form at The Picture House in Edinburgh on 17 April, it will be joined by two forceful, not to say unpredictable, guest personalities, the shambolically charismatic Shane MacGowan and the slinkily seductive French-Irish chanteuse, Camille O'Sullivan.

Not that Shannon, the diminutive and hugely popular Irish accordionist, fresh from last week's Meteor Awards – Ireland's equivalent of the Brits – where she collected a Lifetime Achievement Award, is in any need of reinforcements. Her current big-band format combines her fiercely dexterous button-accordion playing with a very contemporary line-up combining established traditional players, such as banjo and fiddle master Gerry O'Connor and fiddler Dezi Donnelly, with the likes of saxophonist Richie Buckley and electric guitarist Jack Maher.

She is characteristically enthusiastic about the Edinburgh gig, part of the capital's Ceilidh Culture traditional arts festival (the band also plays Inverness's Ironworks on 16 April), with the dentally-challenged and famously bibulous MacGowan and the sultry O'Sullivan.

"It's just brilliant having them," she says from her home in Galway. "I've toured with Shane loads of times and I find him great to work with. And Camille's a good friend but I haven't toured with her before – she sings a great Shane MacGowan song called Mama Lou that we'll be doing together." In fact, she says the first time she saw O'Sullivan perform was on that Irish TV institution, The Late, Late Show (to which she's no stranger herself as a guest), when O'Sullivan was duetting with none other than MacGowan.

She describes herself as "absolutely thrilled" at the lifetime achievement award, for which she is reportedly the youngest-ever winner. "So they're saying," she laughs, while neither denying it nor revealing her age. Suffice to say that, having first made her name with The Waterboys, she brought out her bestselling first album 18 years ago. Her current "best of" compilation, The Galway Girl, has attained triple-platinum status in Ireland, a country perhaps less given to musical pigeonholing than here, and where folk musicians can sometimes be fted as national institutions.

Undoubtedly, she agrees, the album's popularity was boosted by the title track, a Steve Earle song she recorded with the Irish signer-songwriter Mundy, gaining wide exposure through a Bulmers Cider advert.

The plaudits, however, follow a grim period for Shannon, whose long-term partner, Leo Healy, died suddenly of a heart attack last May. Basically she has thrown herself into her work since. "The music has been a massive help," she says, "although my life is something completely different now."

While the accordionist has dabbled energetically in such diverse genres as Cajun, reggae and hip-hop, and collaborated with celebrities ranging from U2's Adam Clayton and Bono to the RTE Concert Orchestra, from Mark Knopfler to The Chieftains, she remains steeped in the traditional music with which she grew up near Corofin, County Clare. "That's my favourite music of all time," she says decisively.

She was strongly influenced early on by the music of the then Clare-based Donegal fiddle maestro Tommy Peoples – who in turn, like most Donegal players, had absorbed the Scottish music that travelled over there. So Shannon, who also totes a mean fiddle herself, has a drop of the Scotch in her own music, she reckons.

Shannon and company are the highest-profile names billed in Edinburgh's three-week Ceilidh Culture festival of traditional arts, which encourages grassroots activity in areas such as storytelling and ceilidh dancing, while acting as an opportunistic umbrella for other events such as the Edinburgh International Harp Festival.

Kicking off this Friday with storyteller Marie Louise Napier and singer-songwriter Lee Patterson at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Ceilidh Culture this year features a "Northern Streams" Scandinavian connection with guests including Ante Mikkel Gaup and his daughter Inger-Biret Gaup, exponents of the distinctive Sami joik style of singing, the duo of Scots fiddler Kirstine Sand and Danish pianist Marie Snderby Larsen, and the Scots-Norwegian band Samling.

Hailing from more familiar territory are celebrations of the songs of Robert Burns and his lesser-known contemporary Robert Tannahill from such established interpreters as Wendy Weatherby and John Morran, and the Edinburgh duo The Cast – Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis, whose immaculate song settings beguiled Hollywood by way of the Sex and the City film soundtrack (the "folk choir" Sangstream, led by Campbell, also performs during the festival).

Meanwhile Edinburgh Folk Club features two notable pairings, Irish singer-songwriter Kieran Halpin and Jimmy Smith and veteran English duo Mike Silver and Johnny Coppin, as well as the Sarah-Jane Summers Trio. Also in the singer-songwriting stakes, locals Kim Edgar, Yvonne Lyon and David Ferrard perform from their latest albums at The Lot, which also provides the venue for the harp-cello duo Cheyenne Brown and Seylan Baxter, while halls across the town erupt with dancing, driven by outfits such as the expansively titled Cosmic Ceilidh Band.

Then there's a characteristically eclectic six-day programme from 28 April, the Edinburgh International Harp Festival (of which more next week).

The elemental art of storytelling also plays its part, including seasoned exponent and former BBC broadcaster David Campbell launching his new book, Out of the Mouth of the Morning at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. If the songs, as they say, go ever on, so do the tales.

&#149 For full programme and information, see www.ceilidhculture.co.uk