NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
PAULINE CATO & TOM
McCONVILLE
Pauline Cato and Tom McConville at home in the
King's Head
Lay a marker down -- Tom McConville does the best rendition of 'Dance to your Daddy' in the world. And the combined effect of this version with the harmonies from the audience, last Friday night at the King's Head in Allendale, may have resulted in the best set piece ever heard in the intimate function room.
If you were after authentic music from the region of Northumberland stretching to its ancient port city of Newcastle upon Tyne, you found it in living abundance when Pauline Cato brought her superb Northumbrian pipes along to trill in a charming duet with Tom's fiddle and voice.
I wasn't quite sure which of their newest CDs had been the top choice of the 'Daily Telegraph' for folk album of the year, but it turns out they were both top! That is, 'By Land and Sea' in 1996, and 'The Surprise' for 1999. That's serious music, by anyone's reckoning.
And with titles like 'Hadrian's Wall', 'The Fisher's Farewell to The Coquet', or 'Catgut Jim the Fiddler', you knew this was living music from their home region.
This was delightful entertainment of the gentle sort that would be at home in your parlour, of a cold winter's evening, after some hot broth and a good supper, as the circle of friends and family closes in and each is called upon to participate.
Except that this was Pauline and Tom's chance to shine, and shine they did, sparkling through the firmament with magical melodies of crystalline dew drops. That's how the Northumbrian pipes sound to me, as if each note was gently dropped into place as softly and as sweetly as the burn burbles down the fell.
It was the dedication of the encore that provided the realisation that new events and circumstances unfolding in life's rich mosaic will need a new musical framework grown from the old, upon which to fasten our memories. Thus the dedication of 'The Locomotive', 'The Hawk', and 'The Quayside' to the emplacement of the new Gateshead footbridge, that gossamer of lightest wings arching through the sky, was an apt reminder that the living tradition of music will never die as long as there are hearts and minds open to listen.
