Gig review: Blas Festival

The size and geographical scope of the Blas festival – 35 concerts over ten days, scattered coast to coast from Strathy to Strontian, Portree to Portmahomack – together with the locally tailored character of each event, tends to confound any compact overview.

Even just a few shows taken together, though, clearly illuminate the breadth, imagination and ambition of Blas's programming, and the kind of highly distinctive festival experiences it creates, by rooting itself so thoroughly in the mores and culture – past and present – of the Highlands.

Last Thursday's evening of classic piping, for example, not only paraded the region's multi-generational wealth of talent in this field, but demonstrated how it's the development of an individual style or voice, within the exacting confines of piping tradition, that identifies the very best – a process astoundingly well advanced in the playing of 11-year-old Skye prodigy Brghde Chaimbeul, and displayed in full, masterly fruition by Oban legend Angus MacColl.

The presence in the audience of some very senior pipers, meanwhile, was memorably signalled by the murmurous accompanying sound of canntaireachd, the ancient vocables system for teaching the instrument, as they sang along with some of the tunes.

The small Lochaber village of Roy Bridge, near Fort William, probably doesn't experience many world premires, but such was the occasion on Friday, as a near-capacity crowd greeted the unveiling of this year's Blas commission, Saoghal Sona (Wonderful World), a suite of new Gaelic sings composed by Lewis-born Eilidh Mackenzie, based on happy, quirky or affirmative stories gleaned from the past year's news.

Expertly accompanied by a three-piece band, with Highland newsreaders Iain MacDonald and Eilidh MacLeod providing bilingual background to each song, the material ranged in theme from the Cape Wrath couple separated by snow last Christmas, to the recent fortunes of Ross County and Inverness Caley Thistle, and in style from jazz to calypso, blithely and beguilingly transcending the customary parameters of Gaelic song.

Fewer than a quarter of this year's Blas shows took place in Inverness, reflecting the organisers' determination both to cater for and to showcase the Gidhealtachd's rural heartlands.

Saturday night in Nairn also spotlighted the wider Gaelic diaspora, featuring three Cape Breton musicians alongside local fiddle star Duncan Chisholm and the Nairn Gaelic Choir. The living links as well as the evolutionary divergences among the music added a subtly resonant subtext to an excellent show, not least in Chisholm's observation that, had his own direct forebears shared most of their family's fate, he'd be visiting from Cape Breton himself.