Reviews
Artist:The Jenna Reid Band and The Chair
Venue:Scots Fiddle Festival The Assembly Rooms
Town:Edinburgh
Date:21/11/08
Website:http://www.myspace.com/jennareidfilskadochas
The annual Scots Fiddle Festival and Youth Gaitherin’ is a very special event, drawing players of all ages to the Georgian grandeur of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms for a weekend orgy of music. Tutors from Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ireland and closer to home come, eager to pass on skills, techniques and styles particular to their own local traditions.
Few would argue that Scotland’s northernmost outliers, the islands of Orkney and Shetland, lie at the very centre of the fiddling world. Surely nowhere on earth produces so many fine, fine players. The opening concert of this year’s festival, billed Heat the Hoose, offered a chance to compare, side by side, two the best line ups that those archipelagos have to offer. Was this a battle of the bands? Well no, the occasion was far too gentile for that, but it could have been as Jenna Reid, the undisputed Queen of Shetland fiddle, exemplifying beauty, poise and precision lined up against The Chair, upstarts from Orkney, exemplifying the wild abandon of night-long dances in draughty village halls.
Jenna and her band opening the evening, her sparkling playing reflecting the enormous sparkling chandelier that has hung for generations over the great Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms. A glorious set comprising a Papa Stour Bridal March, Princess Beatrice hornpipe and The Cape Breton’s Return to Shetland showed Jenna’s molten-fingered playing at its very best. The last of these was written by her late teacher Willie Hunter. He must be a proud man.
Jenna and her band moved effortlessly from flying reels to sumptuous airs such as William and Eileen Reid, penned by Jenna herself and showing her to be developing into a very capable composer. Jenna’s sister Bethany was always alongside on fiddle and piano, demonstrating that near telepathic musical empathy that only siblings seem to have: think of the Wrigley Sisters, Lori and Innes Watson, Mike and Ali Vass.
The inclusion of James Thomson on flute in the line up added depth and colour to an already rich mix, and his assault on The Hurricane was perhaps the highlight of the set. The ever faithful Kevin Mackenzie was always there in the mix too, his jazzy guitar accompaniment reminding us of that link long ago between Tommy Anderson, Peerie Willie, and the crystal radios that brought the sounds of the big bands drifting into the homes of Shetlanders.
And so The Chair took to the stage, decrying pinkies-in-the-air music and declaring themselves to be a band with hairs on their crotchets. Well, let’s hope the fiddle bows are strung with the conventional material. And then they played - reels and jigs cannoning out in a fusillade in the manner of those other great musico-anarchists, the Peatbog Faeries, but as distinctly Orcadian as the Peatbogs are Hebridean.
The music was almost non-stop: the Biscuit Set, Et Dodium, Beef merging into one as the band powered forward and evermore of the reserved audience ventured to their feet in front of the stage. Douglas Montgomery’s fiddle was always centre-stage and centre-sound, with his use of a wah-wah pedal adding a new dimension. A sixteen year old espoire turned to me and said ‘woah that’s so cool’. And so it was.
In a room designed for balls, long before amplification had been dreamed of, the quality of the sound was mixed, especially during The Chair’s set, but nobody seemed to mind too much, such was the standard of the music.
And who won this battle of the bands? You don’t really expect me to answer that do you? This evening we witnessed two very different outfits that showed us just how high the standard of playing, composing and arranging is in Scotland. The winners were the dozens of youngsters who came away with eyes wide and ears wider, to spend the next two days in the company of many of these same musicians.
Martin Finnigan
Pictures are illustrative not taken at the gig.