Solo players show their mastery of music and mood
Toumani Diabaté with RSNO Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Rob Adams ****
THE main event, billing-wise, sat between two sets of more conventional African music, a programming choice that might have emphasised the unlikely nature, the unsuitability even, of the first-ever venture in integrating the Malian and western classical traditions. Instead, it underlined just how lovingly the orchestrations had been crafted to create a natural partnership.
With Toumani Diabaté and his son Sidiki, both now, you’d have to say, absolute masters of the African harp, the kora, seated in front of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and members of Diabaté’s band, the Symmetric Orchestra, taking up position alongside their RSNO colleagues, there was an ease about the stage set-up that was matched by the use of orchestral sections as extensions of the African musical language.
Violas played gently jabbing riffs over a dancing cello undertow as the violins explored and developed a melody in sympathy with the Diabatés’ soulful improvising. It was beautiful, undulating, understated and quietly proud music with moments of humour – Sidiki quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as he would do again in the final set – as well as truly compelling emotional power.
Either side of this came Trio Da Kali, whose blending of balafon player, Lassana Diabaté’s amazing percussive virtuosity, Mamadou Kouyaté’s coolly energetic bass ngoni lines and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté’s gospel-like vocal style, quickly became infectious, and the Symmetric Orchestra in more familiar guise. This again featured Lassana Diabaté and his almost torrential creativity but it was the parting father-son duet, with Diabaté senior calling for humanitarian concerns to take priority over economic ones, that left the strongest impression of music’s ability to override words.
New Voices: Hamish Napier Strathclyde Suite, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Alan Morrison ****
HAMISH Napier is a busy man in January. He has at least nine dates in his diary for Celtic Connections appearances, ranging from shows with The Gathering Stream and trad big band Ceol Mor, to playing as part of his brother Findlay’s group The VIPs on the final Hazy Recollections bill.
The spotlight was his own, however, for this New Voices premiere of his first solo album, The River, even though he had assembled a band featuring seven other top-class musicians.
The instrumental set-up for The River – a musical portrait of the natural and human life that has evolved in and around the Spey, a constant watery presence in Grantown-born Napier’s childhood – was quite unusual.
Four whistles and flutes filled one side of the stage; two keyboard players, double bass and bodhran the other.
Folk music dominated the 11-section composition but with David Milligan on piano, there were always going to be jazzy undercurrents to this particular piece.
Indeed, it was the variety of styles that gave The River its vitality. Floating, with Tom Gibbs on keys, had a full-on funky electro jazz feel which provided a complete contrast to, say, the lively jig within Spey Cast or the swarming wind instruments of The Mayfly.
Napier’s compositional approach wasn’t exactly impressionistic but he did rather cleverly use musical modes – a round, for example, for a section entitled The Whirlpool – to capture the emotions and atmospheres of his Speyside inspirations.
Perhaps the most memorable pieces were the slower ones: the tender but dark melody for Lament For The Silver Brothers and the harmonium drone and Canntaireachd vocals of “warning Piobea-reachd” The Pearlfishers both brought history, myth and mood into the present.