39 f It’s Vamm Ma’am
Hot northern instrumental brilliance all the way with the brand new Shetland / Scotland/ Norway super trio. Colin Irwinwaxes lyrical where lyrics there are not.
O
h, the stories I could tell you about interviews. The rock star out of his tree on the roof of a hotel in Dallas; the spliffed-up reggae god riding around his hotel suite on a unicycle; the wholesome teen idol with a face full of suspicious white powder; the metal guru who sudden ly throws up over the floor mid-sen- tence; the various self-important tosspots who have you chasing round the universe in pursuit before deciding they don’t like the cut of your jib and dismiss you in an avalanche of insolent indifference…
A million blessings and a serious doff of the cap, then, to anyone who makes a detour all the way out to my office – or to be more precise, my local pub - to engage in meaningful dialogue with my dicta- phone. Previously only one artist – Cara
Dillon – had taken that ultimate step, but we can now add the name of Vamm, who sit in the newly-installed skittle alley at The Ditton cheerily listening to the excit- ing tales of last night’s pub quiz while detailing the satisfying evolution of a Scots-Scandinavian trio making quite a name for themselves.
Take two Scottish fiddle players – Catriona Macdonald from Shetland and Patsy Reid from Perthshire, already held in the highest esteem after extended spells in Blazing Fiddles and Breabach – and one Norwegian Látmandola player, Marit Fält, and you have a trio playing not only with superb technique but exceptional warmth and intuitiveness. While the two fiddlers mix’n’match, darting back and forth like a musical tennis match, Fält – best known for her duet work with Rona Wilkie – is an
even more intriguing ingredient, provid- ing dynamic rhythms, fully utilising the broad range of textures available to the Nordic mandola.
Purely and very proudly all instrumen- tal, they’ve announced their arrival as a formidable addition to the forceful parade of admirable bands currently emanating from Scotland with an outstanding self- titled debut album (Vamm is a Shetland word approximately meaning ‘bewitch’) that takes on everything from pipe tunes and strathspeys to Canadian dances and Scandinavian music, as well as tunes by the varied likes of Jerry Holland, Jim Sullivan and Aidan O’Rourke. It’s an album that marries an unusually pure sound to the sort of verve and unified spirit only ever conjured by those completely at ease with the musicians around them.
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