THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Imagine the finest roots musicians from Scotland, Ireland and North America - folk, country and Gaelic, blues, traditional and contemporary - getting together for a house party, playing each other’s music and adding their own traditions’ unique stamp to it. Sounds fun? It is.
That’s the premise of Transatlantic Sessions, the TV program established in 1995 by New York City and Shetland fiddle maestros Jay Ungar and Aly Bain. In that first series they were joined by a constellation of acoustic music stars including North Americans Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Iris DeMent, Kathy Mattea, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle (plus Kate’s son Rufus Wainwright!). Over the years six astonishing series have been made, co-directed by Bain and Ohio-born/Nashville-based Dobro wizard (and winner of 14 Grammys) Jerry Douglas.
Now try to imagine that you’re invited to that house party and the music’s being played for you. That’s what happens with the Transatlantic Sessions Tour.
Some new faces joined TS alumni at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank for the final gig on their 2023 tour. Amythyst Kiah was the first up. Proving that traditional acoustic music can accommodate new ideas, she sang her songs with the band, with deep emotion, and played a white SG guitar like Sister Rosetta’s. Was it Blues? Folk? Soul? Who cares, it was great. Her second song, ‘Darling Cory’, is an old Appalachian folk tune about “a woman who plays banjo, shoots guns and makes moonshine” and in Kiah’s hands sounds like Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ played on a plantation. Glorious.
Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves showed that old-time music can be revitalised by two young women who are respectively masters of the clawhammer banjo and fiddle.
The marvellous Martha Wainwright, daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, sang ‘Goin' Back to Harlan’ (written by her aunt Anna and sung by Kate and Anna on that first TS program), her own intense ‘Love Will Be Reborn’ and Tom Waits’ ‘Take It With Me’.
A friend joined the band after the interval – Eric Clapton played George Harrison’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, which he famously played at the memorial Concert for George, but this time dedicated to recently departed friends Jeff Beck and David Crosby. ‘Slowhand’ stayed center stage to sing an old English folk song, ‘Sam Hall’.
TS stalwarts John McCusker, Phil Cunningham and John Doyle also contributed fine tunes, as did former Capercaillie vocalist Karen Matheson and Liam Ó Maonlai, the Hothouse Flowers frontman introduced by Jerry Douglas as “our shaman”. Notably the singers and musicians who weren’t active in a particular song didn’t wander off, staying to enjoy the show from the comfy sofas at the back of the stage.
Every one of these artists would be worth the price of admission on their own. To see them together is truly special. What variety, what quality, and what proof that roots and acoustic music is in fine fettle for now and the future.
