Malinky & Friends, Celtic Connections Glasgow review: 'peerless curators of tradition'

Malinky were in celebratory mode, having launched their first album at Celtic Connections 25 years ago. Peerless curators of tradition, Fiona Hunter, Steve Byrne. Mark Dunlop and Mike Vass have also added their own freshly composed material in traditional style and with an authentic ring to it.

Thus they opened with the convivial jig-time of Pad the Road Wi Me, followed by Byrne’s song dedicated to his ancestral turf, Sands o St Cyrus. They were joined by a succession of previous associates, firstly Jim Malcolm , leading The Bonny Lass of Fyvie – an old chestnut, but burnished nicely and spliced with the reel Silver Spear from Vass’s fiddle.

Subsequent guests in fine voice included Lucy Pringle with another sprightly excursion, Strathmartine Mains, and County Antrim’s Mairead Walls with The Maid of Doneysheil. Any tendency towards light-hearted repertoire was well tempered as singer-cellist Hunter tapped into the dark side with her powerful unfolding of the sanguinary dialogue of My Son David.

And while the first number from the band’s early vocalist Karine Polwart (with two guest spots in the absence of storm-bound Eliza Carthy) was the saucy Light Dragoon, she stilled the audience with the sheer heartbreak of her song Whaur Dae Ye Lie, inspired by the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Polwart suggesting in her introduction that nothing seems to have changed.

A brief but enjoyable set from Session A9 saw the septet’s four lead fiddles in exhilarating form and rarely letting up, except for two feisty song treatments from singer-guitarist Marc Clement, particularly Tom Waits’s Heart of Saturday Night.

Those fiddles fairly flew in numbers such as Gordon Duncan’s Jig O’ Beer and Adam Sutherland’s skittish Magic Roundabout – inspired by “the UK’s scariest junction”.