Folk and Jazz: Binkies' Bavarian adventure

A FRAGMENT of Scots early music, gleaned from an early 17th-century music book and titled simply Ane Ground, becomes common ground when one of the Scottish folk revival's longest-standing instrumental groups forges a perhaps unlikely-sounding alliance with a German classical-contemporary guitarist and his trio, more normally heard playing Spanish or Latin American music.

The Whistlebinkies, whose distinctive sound includes Lowland pipes, fiddle, concertina, clarsach and drums, stage concerts this weekend in Edinburgh and Glasgow in partnership with the Stefan Grasse Trio, as part of celebrations marking 25 years of town-twinning between Glasgow and Nuremberg.

Both groups will perform their own material, but, explains Eddie McGuire, respected Scottish "art" composer and long-standing flautist with the Whistlebinkies, they will also join forces for some early music.

"There is a kind of meeting of minds when we get together for what we're calling The Nuremberg Suite. We'll be playing some 16th-century music from Nuremberg and we're also including a piece, Ane Ground, we found in a music book compiled in Glasgow by Duncan Burnett around 1610."

The 'Binkies have been performing Ane Ground since the early 1980s, twining pipes and fiddle lines round its hypnotically repetitive bass line.

After hearing it I was once moved to describe them in a review as "Scotland's only Gothic folk band" – a remark the group didn't let me forget in a hurry.

But the two groups' links run deeper than a shared interest in musical antiquity. Grasse's trio, with double-bassist Tobias Kalisch and percussionist and vibes player Radek Szarek, can generate infectiously rhythmic Latin-American sounds, sometimes with Parisian cafe overtones, as in their Erik Satie arrangements, but Grasse, who is musical director of the "Nuremberg Guitar Nights" festival, was a postgraduate guitar student at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and maintains an interest in contemporary Scottish music, playing and commissioning guitar works by the likes of John Maxwell Geddes, Janet Beat, the late John Wilson – and McGuire.

During the forthcoming visit, Grasse will play settings of Bavarian dances written for the occasion by Maxwell Davies (lederhosen and thigh-slapping are unlikely to figure), while McGuire has written for the trio a setting of the poem Nuremberg Nights by Glasgow poet Donnie O'Rourke, as well as a new arrangement of his Slip Jig Blues, in which the trio will be joined by the 'Binkies' drummer, Peter Anderson.

The Whistlebinkies' piper, Rab Wallace, makes frequent visits to Germany, wearing his other hat as principal of Glasgow's College of Piping, judging competitions and running courses, but the Scots group's German connections go back much further.

When they visited Nuremberg in August as part of the twinning celebrations, they played the Sudpunkt Concert Hall, to find that its director, Gottfried Rimmele, had hosted an early incarnation of the band some 35 years earlier when he ran a folk club in Eichstadt.

"We were really surprised and gratified that someone who had been working on the folk scene then was now running this big arts centre in Nuremberg," says McGuire.

The Whistlebinkies and Grasse's Trio play at St John's Church, Princes Street, Edinburgh on Friday night, and St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow, on Sunday (see whistlebinkies.co.uk and www.stefan-grasse.de), while Grasse also plays at the opening of a twinning-related photography exhibition at Glasgow's Goethe Institute on Saturday.

And there is further cultural collaboration with a Latin flavour at St James Church in Leith this Saturday when two well known Edinburgh-based Chilean musicians, singer-songwriter Carlos Arredondo, who has appeared with the Whistlebinkies in the past, and guitarist Galvarino Ceron Carrasco join Mexican classical guitarist Morgan Szymanski. The three caballeros de la msica will mark the 200th anniversary of Mexico and Chile's independence from Spain, as part of Edinburgh's ongoing Hispanic festival (see www.hispanicfestival.co.uk).