TMSA: 60th Anniversary Celebration, Celtic Connections, Glasgow review: ‘a palpable sense of legacy'
A host of performers dug deep into repertoires and memories for this celebration of the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland, writes Jim Gilchrist
TMSA 60th Anniversary Celebration, Candleriggs, Glasgow ★★★★
One singer one song was largely the maxim at this warm-hearted celebration of 60 years since the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland emerged from Blairgowrie Festival. Six decades on from that formative weekend, grey heads predominated in both performers and audience (the younger generation keeping their powder dry till the TMSA Young Trad Concert on 24 January).
Singers were mainly unaccompanied, tapping into that lodestone of tradition, and from the opening Bonnie Boy’s Young But Growing, from the association’s co-founder Pete Shepheard, to the closing ensemble rendition of the anthemic Freedom Come All Ye, a host of performers – too many to namecheck here – dug deep into repertoires and memories.
Among them, Janet Weatherston jogged along on The Soor Milk Cairt and another veteran, Jimmy Hutchison, delivered a Gaelic love song, A Pheigi A Ghràidh, from South Uist, followed, appropriately, by Helen Forbes’s whistle rendition of Leaving Lochboisdale.
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There was a palpable sense of the legacy of Blairgowrie’s fruit fields and the tradition bearers they attracted; not least in The Berryfields of Blair sung by Ian and Hamish MacGregor, heirs of the celebrated Traveller Stuarts.
Echoing across centuries were Iona Fyfe’s poised Bonny Udny – “Ye shine whaur ye staun” – and the stilling sadness of co-presenter Margaret Bennett’s Glenlyon Lament, Griogal Cridhe. Scott Gardiner’s Generations of Change combined rural elegy with wistful resignation, while Joss Cameron’s Burning of Auchindoun evoked dark Aberdeenshire history.
The keen triple harmonies of Choras – Barbara Dymock, Janice Reavell and Aileen Carr – included some unabashed bawdry in tribute to the legendary Traveller singer Jimmy McBeath. Much drollery, too, in Brian Miller and Dougie MacKenzie’s The Lion and the Glove, by the lately departed Adam McNaughtan, whose Yellow on the Broom, sung by Corrina Hewat’s Sangstream choir, further stirred fond memories of roads once taken.
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