Celtic Connections
Solas and Dallahan
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
THREE STARS
It’s a feature of Celtic Connections that musicians bump into old colleagues, be it at the airport, at hotel reception or in the bar, and decide to renew acquaintance onstage. So it was that banjo master Béla Fleck, who guested on their third album in 1998 and is in town for quite a big concert of his own, slotted into this celebration of Irish-American band Solas’ twentieth anniversary.
Fleck’s arrival was one of the highlights as co-founders, Seamus Egan, on guitar, banjo, whistles and flute, and fiddler Winifred Horan introduced a generous roll call of past and present group members including the able instrumental team of Eamon McElholm (guitar), Donald Clancy (guitar and bouzouki), Mick McAuley (accordion) and Trevor Hutchinson (bass).
The bright, accomplished Solas sound has exerted an influence on bands on this side of the pond, including Edinburgh-based Dallahan, whose opening set of Scots-Irish-Hungarian songs and tunes showed confidence and increasing flair and maturity as a band, and it has also accommodated a possibly even larger turnover of singers than the great vocalists’ production line, De Dannan.
All six singers were present here from the current incumbent, Moira Smiley, back to the original voice of Solas, Karan Casey, who shone with her typically impassioned and clear reading of Sixteen Come Next Sunday.
The nonchalant Fleck aside, there were strong instrumental contributions including Horan’s fine version of Niel [correct spelling] Gow’s Lament for his Second Wife, with McElholm switching to piano, and an accordion cameo from McAuley’s sometime deputy, Jonny Connolly before the singers, joined by Mrs Fleck, Abigail Washburn, convened en masse for a spirited finale of Bob Dylan’s Seven Curses.
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