Review: Music

Glasgow Art Club

Rob Adams

Four stars

The benefits of touring, in which Scottish jazz bands and the Scottish jazz scene itself have been relatively undernourished in recent years, were brought to light quite clearly by bassist Euan Burton's group on this latest instalment of Bridge Music's Jazz Thursdays series.

Almost nightly gigging over a period, and even these four am rises to make not entirely attractive journeys that Burton mentioned, can have a positive impact on a group's collective character and the strength of the musical bonds that foster onstage trust and assurance.

Burton did rather start from a strong position. His latest album, Too Much Love, which features this same personnel, is a well-conceived and confidently delivered work but the now greater familiarity with its compositions resulted in much superior playing, not least from pianist Tom Gibbs whose resources seem to be further enriched every time he sits down to play.

Gibbs benefits from having a rhythm team, in Burton holding a firm line and drummer Alyn Cosker variously driving the band forward and providing colour and detail, who inspire him to develop strong ideas with their own definite groove and impetus and introduce an added dimension to the leader's compositions. His solo on Occurrence Two, from Burton's previous album, fed off Burton's momentum, creating just one of many bright, purposeful and cohesive narratives he contributed overall.

A new piece, It's Never Eighty-Five, threw down more of a challenge with its restless meter but it was one all four players, especially saxophonist Adam Jackson who was generally a little more circumspect here than on the album, responded to with spirit and an appealing sense of inquiry.

Casey Driessen/McCusker-McGoldrick-Watson

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

Four stars

The inclusive and involving nature of Edinburgh's annual Scots Fiddle Festival weekend extends from workshops to the main concert stage where on Saturday a quintet of young fiddlers from the festival's outreach project made their public debut, just five weeks after getting together. They acquitted themselves well on a repertoire including Iain Fraser's lovely air for his late mother, Buchanan Birch, showing well integrated arrangements and in a nice touch, making sure all five took a turn at addressing the audience, a skill that's just as valuable as musicianship.

At the other end of the experience spectrum, fiddler John McCusker, flautist Michael McGoldrick and guitarist Matheu Watson, three musicians with considerable road miles on the clock, were also making their debut as a group. These are accomplished players on several instruments each, although Watson concentrated on expertly manicured guitar accompaniments here, and they know how to vary a set of tunes' attack and how to back-up a singer - McCusker's wife, Heidi Talbot, joined them for two songs - to best effect. Highlights included McGoldrick's affecting reading on uilleann pipes of the traditional air I'm Asleep and Don't Awaken Me.

Taking the fiddle on all sorts of musical adventures, Minnesotan Casey Driessen created a funk band and even a whole string section in situ with his pedal board. Building from a chip-and-drag bow rhythm he layered multiple parts and variously sang, as on Stevie Wonder's Living for the City, or improvised melodic lines on top, somehow keeping the whole orchestra-in-a-box under control but at the same time making great music with real heart (his Chinese-influenced waltz was a delight) that went beyond mere gimmickry

Jackson Browne

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Russell Leadbetter

Five stars

AN enthralling show, this, even if its running-time left those fans facing a dash to Queen Street wondering whether they'd be not so much Late for the Sky as late for the train.

Over three hours (minus a 20-minute interval) Browne and his band - with guitarists Greg Leisz and Val McCallum in muscular form - raided his peerless catalogue of songs, from the late sixties to the present day. Browne, as engaging as ever, spoke about the background to many of his songs, and good-naturedly conceded that the subtleties of the native accent, bellowed in requests from the audience, were quite beyond him.

He opened with a strong Barricades of Heaven then had to redo the intro to Looking Into You. Later, he fluffed a line from These Days but laughed it off - "It's an old verse." I'm Alive, and two 70s classics, Fountain of Sorrow and For a Dancer, were particularly fine.

There were several astute political songs from his latest album, Standing in the Breach. Then we had Your Bright Baby Blues, Rock Me on the Water, Warren Zevon's Carmelita, Looking East, In the Shape of a Heart, The Birds of St Marks and a pulsating Doctor My Eyes.

Browne returned to the piano for The Pretender before launching into a gripping version of Running on Empty. Happy to continue for as long as he could, he encored with Take It Easy, which segued, as it did all these years ago on his second album, into Our Lady of the Well. Taking his bow at 11.10pm, he seemed touched by the warmth of the standing ovation, but it was no more than he deserved. This was Browne in vintage form.

Seventh National Showcase of Excellence Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

Four stars

I confess I had not appreciated that it was, for financial reasons, four years since the last concert bringing together the young people enjoying specialist music training in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Plockton. But this could hardly have been better timed, coming immediately after news of youth arts funding that has left many who work in the sector confused.

Of course, the young folk themselves provide irrefutable evidence of the value of any investment, and this event, a step up from the schools themselves hosting the showcases and presented by Douglas Academy FP Jamie MacDougall, was as wide a display of talent as any investor might wish.

As that school's first vocal student, MacDougall could hear his own trailblazing succeeded by a soprano singing Haydn, a wonderful folk trio performing their own acapella arrangement and a theatrical Gaelic ballad. From the excellent opening pipe duo by Cameron Sharp and Robyn MacKay, traditional music was conspicuously well represented, and not always from the Highland school - one of the joys of these events is that only a close examination of the logos on their shirts gives away which school the performers attend.

While Mozart and Bach were also played, there was also much more modern music, notably the Frank Bridge trio played by the Ruuskanen sisters, the youngest of whom, violinist Lucy, is still at primary school.

For the culmination of the concert, a scratch orchestra of over 70 of the youngsters played a new version of Mhairi Hall's Contours of Cairngorm, reorchestrated from its 2011 Celtic Connections incarnation and conducted by Patsy Reid. The people making those confusing funding decisions should have been there to hear it.