The Scotsman Festival Sessions: Donald Shaw, Charlie McKerron & Michael McGoldrick play Camhanaich Air Machair
Welcome to the Scotsman Sessions, a series of short video performances from artists all around the country introduced by our critics. Here, ahead of his Up Late concert at the Edinburgh International Festival, Donald Shaw performs Camhanaich Air Machair (“Dawn on the Machair”) with his Capercaillie bandmates Charlie McKerron and Michael McGoldrick
Donald Shaw, accordionist and pianist, producer, composer and artistic director of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, is speaking from Normandy, where Capercaillie, the renowned Highland folk band he co-founded over four decades ago, have been performing at a novel island festival.
Having played at festivals in Switzerland and then at Brittany’s mammoth Festival Interceltique de Lorient, they had arrived at Les Traversées de Tatihou, on the little tidal island of Tatihou, just off the fishing port of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, where audiences walk from mainland to island at low tide and stay until the tide recedes once more.
“So you go on stage at 5pm and you’re under strict instructions not to play for more than an hour so the audience can get back across to the mainland,” says Shaw.
Truly a captive audience; however, we’re primarily discussing Shaw’s appearance at another, perhaps more familiar festival of the Edinburgh International kind, where he is due to host a closing night Up Late show as part of the festival’s intimate and eclectic concert series at The Hub. By way of anticipating this gig, Shaw and fellow long-time Capercaillie members, fiddler Charlie McKerron and flautist Michael McGoldrick, have recorded a Scotsman Session while still on Tatihou. Their tune of choice is the lovely Camhanaich Air Machair – “Dawn on the Machair” – which Shaw composed as part of the score for the acclaimed 2002 Gaelic television drama Gruth Is Uachdar – “Crowdie and Cream”, an adaptation of the popular memoir of island life by Finlay J Macdonald. They follow it up with another Shaw composition, Corrievreckan.
“In many ways,” he recalls, “Gruth Is Uachdar was the first real TV project we got our teeth into, back in the days when the BBC would stick you in a studio for three weeks or so and you’d come up with ideas. So myself and Charlie had to explore all these scenes which were right up our street anyway, being of island life.
“Halfway through the project the BBC said, ‘Do you want to orchestrate any of this?’ and we said why not, so the late Kevin McCrae orchestrated some pieces with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
“I chose the Machair at Dawn for the Session as a piece I might play at the Up Late gig.”
The EIF organisers are keeping quiet about the special guests who might feature at the Hub, the programme promising “an elite troupe of folk musicians”. Shaw says simply that he’s “pulled a few guests together from the traditional world”, but adds: “When I get asked to play something at the Edinburgh International Festival my inclination is to try and include some crossover to the orchestral world, as that’s such a bit part of the festival itself. I love when you get an opportunity to do what you’d maybe call trad-chamber folk or something like that.”
Whatever he assembles on the night, it is likely to make for eminently satisfying listening. And tide charts should not be required.
Up Late with Donald Shaw is at The Hub, Edinburgh, tonight as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, see www.eif.co.uk
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