Gig review: Gillie Mackenzie, Leith Folk Club

ONE of three highly regarded Gaelic singing sisters, who sometimes perform together under their shared surname, Mod gold medal winner Gillie Mackenzie stepped out solo here with a selection of songs, some of them her own, drawn mainly from her recent album Griais, the local name for her native village of Gress on Lewis.
By Sue Wilson
Published 3rd Apr 2013, 03:16 BST

Gillie Mackenzie

Leith Folk Club

****

In place of her siblings, she was flanked by an excellent instrumental line-up comprising Mhairi Hall, on piano, whistle and flute, guitarist Ewan MacPherson and fiddler Rona Wilkie, with all three also chiming in on backing vocals.

Mackenzie’s set-list deftly varied the mood and pace from the outset, opening with the jaunty, lightsome Grinn Donn Sgiobalta, then following it with a tender, ardently expressed love song, Do M’ Chèile, penned by the late Iain MacArthur. Another departed creator of songs was even more movingly remembered during the second half, in Mackenzie’s own Bonnie Laddie, a lovingly observed elegy for Michael Marra, delivered unaccompanied.

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Other contrasting highlights included the waulking/wooing song O Mhàiri ‘s Tu Mo Mhàiri, with its airy yet beseeching melody, and a desolate lament, Laighinn Leat, exemplifying Mackenzie’s intense emotional involvement with her material, her delivery twinning fine-spun luminosity with throaty sensuality. A medley in which a dark, dramatic klezmer tune set the mood for two quickfire Gaelic numbers saw her in more trenchant voice, while her accompanists’ arrangements throughout matched sensitivity with imagination.