Celtic connections

Somebody obviously thought it a good idea that Emmylou Harris play her last ever Scottish show in a soulless sports hall in the east end of Glasgow. Built for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the feel of the Emirates Arena on a chilly January night was less Sweet Home Alabama, more Home Counties Ikea. As well as kicking off this year’s Celtic Connections, the city’s annual festival of roots music, Harris was also kickstarting her farewell tour of Europe. She plays her final UK shows in May, including one at the Royal Albert Hall, which seems a more fitting setting for a regal adieu than a pimped-up cycling track. Presumably, the

Is it possible to find a common thread running through the finest Scottish music? If pushed, one might identify a quality of ecstatic melancholy, a rapturous yet fateful romanticism, in everything from the Incredible String Band to the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile to Frightened Rabbit, Simple Minds to Mogwai. The Jesus & Mary Chain have a song called ‘Happy When It Rains’, which seems about right. There were moments during the launch event for Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual and much-valued winter celebration of roots music from Scotland and far beyond, when this bittersweet admixture of moods was thrillingly conjured up. At other times, it simply felt a little contained,

We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to witness a cresting wave. Vulture Prince, the third album by the Brooklyn-based Pakistani singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab, was one of the most accomplished and interesting records of last year. A keening song of loss, dedicated to her late brother, Vulture Prince is almost impossible to pin down. It’s a flood plain of merging musical streams, a genre-phobic blend of jazz, minimalism, Sufi devotional music, acoustic textures and torch song. Sung almost entirely in Urdu, its beauty and import are immediate, its emotional pull universal. Following two Grammy nominations