Folk review: Aonghas Grant 80th Birthday

Aonghas Grant’s 80th Birthday

Glengarry Community Hall, Invergarry

HHHHH

The left-handed West Highland fiddler Aonghas Grant is a tradition-bearer in the truest and fullest sense, a role that was movingly embodied and memorably honoured by this Blas festival show (a ceilidh in the truest Gaelic sense), which drew a capacity crowd to his local village hall. In fact, he is so ‘local’ to the area that he can trace his family’s history all the way back to Culloden.

Having worked as a shepherd, forester and deerstalker, Grant has achieved international renown as an exponent of his home region’s strongly bagpipe-influenced fiddle style, characterised as it is by its smooth bowing, intricate ornamentation and depth of expression. It’s a style also vitally informed by his native Gaelic language, with slow song airs and puirt-a-beul melodies featuring here alongside marches, strathspeys and reels with the faster tunes’ spirited lift and rock-steady momentum serving to highlight Grant’s core experience of playing for dances.

Accompanied by longtime sideman Paul Connelly on guitar, concertina and accordion, he included a several of his own celebrated compositions, prefaced by stories of the characters and incidents they enshrine. His fabled reputation as a fiddle teacher was affirmed by the appearance of three former pupils, Ewen Henderson, Louise Mackenzie and Corrina Campbell, all sporting his trademark red tassel on their instruments – an emblem that also appeared on the birthday cake with which he was presented after we’d all sampled the hall committee’s delectable home baking at the interval. Meanwhile young Scottish/international quintet The Outside Track, reflected his broader legacy to subsequent generations.

SUE WILSON