MUSIC preview
Wannabe a player in the music industry?
In The City the annual music biz‘ conference is coming to Glasgow. Marcus Russell, the manager of Oasis, will be
giving a Q&A session on aspects of band
management. If you are involved in managing a band or label and think you could gain from this Q&A session turn to page 5 for details of how to attend.
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FOLK
Capercaillie: Afro-celt synthesis
Capercaillie
Glasgow: Royal Concert Hall, Mon 15 Sep; Edinburgh: Festival Theatre, Sun 14 Sep. Capercaillie are back on the road promoting their new
CD Beautiful Wasteland. Manus Lunny, guitarist, bouzouki player and the band’s sole Irish person, describes an unusual studio experience. 'We recorded the new album way up in the Andalucian mountains, in this big old house, surrounded by stray dogs. You could hear them barking on some of the vocal backing tracks. Wildl'
The band had shipped the whole recording studio out of Glasgow, and stayed on to make the record there after a successful Spanish tour. Featured on the album are two singers they met ‘while we were doing promos for the last one, To The Moon. It was in a giant superstore in Barcelona . . . and there was the Carlos Nunez Band and these two amazing African girls, from Guinea, singing live. They’re called Sibeba. Fantastic voices and chanting. We were blown away by what they did, and we all realised how well it would work with Gaelic songs, and our own sort of music. So they
made it up to the house and onto tape. They're also going to be over here this month and will join us for part of the English leg of the tour.‘
Piper and whistle player Fred Morrison is no longer with Capercaillie, but award-winning Flookl flautist Michael McGoldrick is now a fixture in the band. The young virtuoso of the traditional (Irish) wooden flute also contributes his expertise on various whistles and the strident, seductive uillean pipes, to an album and live set that moves even further from a straight 'folk’ sensibility. Another Afro-Celt synthesis works its way through the layered textures, as a new, subtler, Capercaillie sound emerges.
Lunny is happy that audiences are going with them, if not immediately. ’We toured in the States early this year — the first time since 1991 — and we'll be going back in December. It's definitely looking up for us over there. And last weekend we were in Denmark, at the Tonder Festival, where you could see that they wanted, expected, I suppose, to hear something more traditional, more folksy. Some of the music seems initially to go over their head, but by the end they are all up on their feet.‘ (Norman Chalmers)
BLUES Catfish Keith
Glasgow: Bourbon Street, Sun 21 Sep. Edinburgh: Pleasance Cabaret Bar, Sat 20 Sep.
Catfish Keith: a fishy tail of the blues
Catfish Keith picked up his nickname while working as a lobster fisher in the Virgin Isles as a teenager, and although its bestower was making fun of his swrmming abilities, he liked it enough to adopt it on stage. It has an appropriate ring for a man whose musical fOCus is very much on the raw, earthy acoustic model of the Mississippi blues tradition, rather than the later electrified urban version which grew up in the clubs on Chicago's South Side.
'I sit in on electric gurtar With a band occaSIonally lust for fun, but my commitment is to aCOustic blues, because I love that warmth and intimacy, and all the dynamics and expressweness of it,' says Keith. 'I found a Son House record when l was about fifteen, and the emotional impact of the way he played and sang those blues really knocked me out '
The guitarist is equally at home in finger—picking and slide styles, and plays both a Vintage National steel
gUitar, and a small—bodied acoustic crafted by English guitar maker Tony
Revell, which replaced his old Gibson a
couple of years ago, Although born in S
Chicago, he grew up in Davenport, Iowa, the hometown of Jazz cornetist Biz Beiderbecke, and his slant on the blues incorporates elements drawn
from early Jazz, rhythm and blues as
well as Caribbean and Hawaiian
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'l'm still rooted in that down-home ‘ blues tradition, but I'm also a modern
guitar player, and I can incorporate things that have come along later,' he explains 'I usually like to make up some new words to the old songs as well.’
label, Fish Tail Records, in 1988, and the singer has JtlSl recorded his sixth albumfwrst It, Babel, which features him both solo and With acoustic bass player Marty Christensen He hopes to have a limited supply available for the tour (Kenny Mathieson)
He and his wrfe set up their own