Celtic Connections review: Martin Green and the Whitburn Band, Tramway, Glasgow

Lau accordionist Martin Green’s many-sided collaboration with the Whitburn Band has turned out to be a profoundly moving affair, writes Jim Gilchrist

Martin Green with the Whitburn Band: Split the Air, Tramway, Glasgow *****

The golden thunder of a championship-winning brass band like Whitburn is a sound like no other, and it’s one with which Martin Green has fallen love. At this Celtic Connections performance, Green, accordionist with folk trio Lau but also an award-winning composer and programme-maker, was launching his album with Whitburn, Split the Air, based on his acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series Love, Spit and Valve Oil and a subsequent drama, Keli.

It proved an often profoundly moving collaboration. Amid the sonic ebb and flow of the band, conducted by Bryan Allen, the accordionless Green recounted his Damascene encounter with brass band music in the former mining community in which he lives, playing clips from interviews with players about the importance of the music and its discipline to their lives, often amid post-industrial depression, domestic strife and the bitterness of the Miners’ Strike.

Through it all, the mighty Whitburn entity surged and simmered, at times a murmuring Greek chorus to the spoken word, elsewhere erupting with seismic force, while Sheona White, a former BBC Young Musician of the Year, provided the “voice of Keli”, notes belling elegantly from her tenor horn.

Finally the “real Keli”, played by actor Anna Russell Martin, took the stage with a passionate and pithily sweary closing defence of her community and its music, declaring that, ultimately, “We build huge f***ing” cathedrals of sound”. The band duly responded, playing us out with the magisterial might of Philip Wilby’s Astralis.

A short but rewarding supporting set saw renowned cornettist Laura Jurd play alongside the only non-brass instrument of the evening, bar percussion, James Kitchman’s spacily complementary electric guitar, sounding echoing twin pathways in numbers such as Bill Frisell’s Strange Meeting – in this instance a happily creative encounter.