Jim Gilchrist: Tidal wave of talent at this year’s Celtic Connections

In his enduring Gaelic lament, An Ataireachd Àrd, Donald MacIver potently evokes “The eternal surge of the sea... the sound of the high swelling waves / The ocean’s thunder is as I heard it in my youth /

Unchanging, pitiless, beating the sands on the shore.” That eternal surge against Scotland’s 10,000km of convoluted coast erodes, enriches, creates livelihoods, takes lives and, in the case of MacIver’s inspiration, disperses communities through clearance or other emigration. Inevitably, its tides ebb and flow through the music of our seaboard cultures.