Laura Cortese
The Village, Leith ***
Leith Folk Club regularly punches above its weight, often presenting artists whose itineraries would otherwise bypass venues such as The Village's modestly apportioned music room-cum-art gallery and even hosting a weekly programme on local radio. The club's latest endeavour is an eight-night run of multinational roots music, which began on Tuesday with the return of American singer, songwriter and fiddler Laura Cortese.
Cortese's talents extend to several lines of work she forsook here - she's the sometime touring double bass player for top bluegrass band Uncle Earl and an accomplished folk dancer - but she still had more than enough in her fiddle case to fill two energetic and diverse sets with guitarist Jefferson Hamer.
In Cortese's hands the fiddle becomes predominantly a rhythm instrument, played with a chopping strum like a mandolin or with the bow chipping the strings percussively, and with New Yorker Hamer's resourceful playing, from spare metallic picking to kerranging Telecaster chords, you have the recipe for a power duo. They certainly can rock, as the aptly named Rowdy and Cortese's early insistence that the audience clap on the offbeat confirmed.
An awareness of traditions from either side of the Atlantic is rarely far away, even in Cortese's twanging appropriation of the Magnetic Fields' synth-pop song All My Little Words. The Appalachian fiddle standard Greasy Coat, with its risqué lyrics and fine readings of songs of both wooing - Skippin' Barfit Through the Heather - and parting - a dark indeed Blackest Crow - were more overtly rootsy but arranged and performed in a way that retains the tradition's integrity while adding a convincing current edge.
