Bellevue Rendezvous, Edinburgh Folk Club
Rob Adams, The Herald
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The late Hamish Henderson is often cited as one of the greatest champions of Scottish traditional music but his perspective of music in particular and art in general was truly international. So he would have appreciated the music that kicked off the ninth Carrying Stream celebration of his life and legacy.
Bellevue Rendezvous are a group whose repertoire isn’t measured in notes so much as air miles. A typical medley might take in Brittany, Sweden, Wales and Ireland as tune sources and there are trips to Serbia, Finland, Galicia and St Kilda, both real and imagined, that have begun life being worked up round a kitchen table in Morningside, in a flat, it’s hurriedly pointed that out, that was rented.
The kitchen-session closeness remains at the heart of the trio’s playing as fiddler Gavin Marwick engages in unison phrases with Ruth Morris’s nyckelharpa and meshes with the rhythms and melodies of Cameron Robson’s cittern to create a sound that’s almost liquid in the way it changes shape to suit metre and mood.
Theirs is a genuine collective energy and can build sufficient momentum to turn a polska set into a thrash metal finale but they’re equally concerned with the spaces between the notes. The Herding Song featured what might be termed “pause and effect” as it used brief intermittent rests as a subtle but major part of its quietly keening charm. Robson’s occasional use of jaw harp was another source of energy and contrast over two sets during which you never knew where you might end up next geographically but you knew you were in the safe hands of three expert co-pilots.
