Music review: Paddy Callaghan Trio at Edinburgh Folk Club

Rob Adams, Four stars

Edinburgh Folk Club’s Carrying Stream festival got underway with a trio of musicians who might look as if they had yet to engage with traditional music when the festival’s inspiration, folklorist Hamish Henderson died in 2012 but who, in fact, were already sowing the seeds of this splendid young group even then.

Accordionist Paddy Callaghan and his whistle and flute-playing confrere, Danny Boyle, are products of Glasgow’s admirably productive St Roch’s music academy, where the apprenticeship starts soon after students reach the height of their chosen instruments. They’ve been playing together, if not necessarily in close partnership, since primary school, and it shows. There’s a great sense of teamwork in their unison playing and a natural understanding of when to back off and let the other player do the heavy lifting and when to come back in and make the greatest impact.

Callaghan, in his endearingly offhand way, rather undersold the trio’s capabilities by promising tunes that were dead fast, even faster and faster still. They have more gears and a sight more substance than that implies and in guitarist Adam Brown they have an asset who can add a great variety of colour, shape and propulsion as well as an occasional song delivered with quiet assurance, warmth and sincerity.

What impresses especially about the group is that, even in top gear, there’s an attention to phrasing and expression. Their reels, jigs and slides are exciting and Brown’s brief switch to bodhran, while bringing out a certain showmanship, not to mention impudence, for sure, had the same depth of musicality that the trio brought to their hymn-as-slow-air reading of Be Thou My Vision.