Fifteen years on from his passing, Jimmy McHugh's status as a legend of Irish music in his adopted home of Glasgow and in the wider Irish music community continues to grow.
There were children here who weren't born when Jimmy died and who will grow up with these annual memorial concerts as memories of music and good cheer. And the rhythm of informality for which these occasions have become known was broken only temporarily by the arrival of two representatives from Comhaltas, which promotes traditional Irish music, song and dance worldwide, to present a special posthumous award in honour of Jimmy's contribution to an organisation whose first branch outside Ireland was the Glasgow one that Jimmy founded in 1957.
Some of Jimmy's many tunes featured at various points, as did his widow Ann's dance school pupils and his sons Benny and Martin in the Four Provinces Ceili Band, and a further McHugh generation with musical propensities was marked by the arrival of young Sean McHugh with a lovely, clear and heartfelt "telling" of the transport ballad The Lonely Banna Strand.
If the music was sometimes weighted towards enthusiasm rather than polish, that hardly matters. The guests here were all musicians for whom music is like the air they breathe rather than a commodity.
Jimmy O'Sullivan's romping accordion dance tunes and Neillidh Mulligan's uilleann piping had rough-hewn vibrancy and charm. Paddy Berry's songs had an old world authenticity and though formed in situ, the trio of technically and emotionally assured flautist Marcas O Murchu, characterful fiddler Antoin MacGabhann and resourceful pianist-mandocellist Garry O Briain, latterly joined by MacGabhann's fiddler daughter Bernadette, added rich, stylish tune-spinning.
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