Edinburgh Fringe music reviews: Fiona Soe Paing | Ndlovu Youth Choir | Jazz Jamboree

Fiona Soe Paing: Sand, Silt, Flint ★★★★

Greenside @ George St (Venue 236) until 22 August

Singer and sound artist Fiona Soe Paing taps potently into ancestral voices, transferring her acclaimed album, Sand, Silt, Flint to an extraordinary live audio-visual show. In presenting ballads from her native Aberdeenshire, the atmospheric electronic effects and recorded instrumentation of the album are transferred to the live production, along with a video backdrop that shifts between an old map of the North-East’s ballad-rich topography and striking images of scenery – woodland, shoreline or setting sun.

To a background crackle of old recorded singing and speech, Paing, who is Scots-Burmese, makes her entry be-robed and crowned with an extravagant headgear of twigs, looking somewhere between Miss Havisham and an elfin queen. Amid the background crackle, there are field recording snatches of an elderly voice singing the Ballad of John Hosie. Paing takes up the song, her mournful tones echoed by a pre-recorded cello.

At times she chants more than sings, gesturing as if invoking the spirits of the landscape and its sanguinary history, and in a striking congruence across time, when she sings Bonnie Udny, she duets with the disembodied voice of the late John Strachan, a farmer and much recorded tradition bearer, to whom, she discovered, she is distantly related.

The roving map shifts to Fyvie for perhaps the most powerful sequence, a rendition of Mill o’ Tifty’s Annie (also known as The Trumpeter of Fyvie), which she intones as much as sings, instrumentation including, indeed, a distant trumpet but also a steady snare drum that ushers the song, inexorably, towards its fateful conclusion, Paing’s anguished tones passing indictment of the sheer cruelty of the tale.

At times captivating, at times downright weird, but you won’t see anything else likes it at the Fringe, as we become steeped in a not-quite-lost world of North-East balladry. Jim Gilchrist

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Ndlovu Youth Choir ★★★★★

Assembly Hall (Venue 35) until 30 August

If you ever doubted the power of music and dance to bring people together, then Ndlovu Youth Choir is here to set you right. Not only has it united the members of this South African group, taking them from an uncertain future, in an area rife with unemployment, and given them a professional career, but looking around the room, it’s as if every single person in Assembly Hall has been gripped by an infectious enthusiasm. To say these young people are party starters would be an understatement.

Based in Elandsdoorn, a township in Limpopo about 100 miles from Johannesburg, the choir started life in 2009 as a humble after-school project. Ten years later, they reached the finals of America’s Got Talent. So when one young man steps forward at the start and says, “We are not waiting to be saved. We are waiting to be heard”, it’s clear they have something to say. Not only is this a celebration of music, from traditional tunes to chart-topping pop hits, but an acknowledgement of youthful power. It’s notable that after delivering some of the most famous songs in the world, their closing number is a self-penned track called We Will Rise.

Dressed in vibrant costumes, the brightness of which is only outshone by their smiles, the choir never stops moving. Small wonder that Simon Cowell said if he could bottle their energy he’d drink it everyday. Popular songs such as Toto’s Africa and Steve Winwood’s Higher Love get the crowd clapping and tapping along. It’s two unexpected numbers, however, that bring down the house and get people jumping to their feet mid-show. Usually the domain of operatic tenors, Puccini's Nessun dorma is sung here by a young woman in full-throated voice.

Perhaps even more special, though, is a version of Bohemian Rhapsody sung in Zulu (save a few tricky words like ‘Scaramouche’ for which, unsurprisingly, there is no equivalent). To translate this iconic anthem needs special permission, which all three remaining members of Queen were more than happy to do. An endorsement worth its weight in gold, and well-deserved. Kelly Apter

READ MORE: 'I've paid a high price': Michelle Shocked talks notoriety, Spotify and her Fringe return

Jazz Jamboree ★★★★

Valvona & Crolla (Venue 67) until 29 August

They open with the languid strut of Billie Holiday’s Easy Living and end with a racy Count Basie excursion. In between, pianist Paul Harrison and clarinettist Dick Lee, amid Valvona’s intimate performance cavern, present characterful numbers of their own as well as such familiar favourites as a Brubeck/Desmond mash-up, not without some humorous sparring.

Right from the start, Easy Living establishes Lee’s rich clarinet tone as it twines around Harrison’s rangy keyboard work, Lee switching to the liquorice rumble of bass clarinet. Then it’s on to “plunder” the Fats Waller canon with Honeysuckle Rose, clarinet and piano responding vivaciously to each other with Harrison’s stride flourishes and clarinet chirping and whining.

Harrison, a devotee of Brazilian music, introduces the easeful serenade of a number by Antônio Carlos Jobim, prompting Lee to declare, “It takes quite a lot of breath to play quietly,” before removing his jacket, revealing snazzy rainbow braces, then going on to play his own composition, Heavier than Air, celebrating Scotland’s early aviation pioneer Percy Pilcher.

The music has a certain carousel feel to it, a fairground sensibility, which terminates abruptly (as, sadly, did Pilcher). Lee switches back to the dark tones of bass clarinet for a piece inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House, currently under restoration, after which the duo dispense with sheet music to engage in some short but sparky free improvisation, piano ringing and percussive, bass clarinet hooting and gurgling cheerfully.

In contrast, Harrison takes us back to Brazil for a gorgeous solo rendition of Palhaço – “the clown” – from his acclaimed album of music by Egberto Gismonti, while from the lesser known, they switch with ease to Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore – an old chestnut, perhaps, but here fondly polished. Jim Gilchrist

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