Three stars. Tradfest's future looks bright if the largely youthful demographic of Saturday's audience is any guide.
Tapping into a younger market - or applying Grecian 2000 to the current one, as one wag put it - has become a holy grail for promoters across the roots music spectrum. Dallahan are doing it, not just because of their own, also largely youthful profile, but also through the personable communications of frontman and singer, Jack Badcock, a former BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year finalist, and the general air of energy around the band.
They've undergone some personnel changes since they released their first album, When the Day is on the Turn, and their bassist here was so new that Badcock, abashed, had to ask his surname. Their biggest asset transfer, though, has been the addition of button accordionist Paddy Callaghan, who won the Young Traditional Musician of the Year title in 2013 and returned the following year to give one of the competition's outstanding returning champion performances.
Callaghan brings musicality, personality, texture and drive to a repertoire drawn from the Scottish and Irish traditions, Eastern European sources, Americana songs and in the case of their mirthful encore, the West Indies. Some of Saturday's material is being road tested for their projected second album and will benefit from some more stage work. The gig as a whole was enjoyable all the same, though, with pan-European tune sets showing nicely varied dynamics and good interplay between fiddle, banjo, mandolin and accordion and Badcock's clearly stated and well-paced singing drawing the audience into tales of hearts variously broken and punctured and the lighter mystery of Trinidadian family entanglement.
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