>>The Times - Robert Dawson Scott - 27Jan03

Celtic Connections, Glasgow

Celtic Connections has a near exemplary record of allowing and encouraging its acts to try something new even if the experiment, as with Evelyn Glennie's first appearance at the festival, leaves more questions than answers.

Even the way support acts are chosen has an element of "suck it and see" about it. For example, putting the sweet sounding all-girl Dochas on the same bill down at the subterranean Arches venus as the grungey (and all male) Croft No.Five was not an obvious fit.

But it will have done Dochas, who owe their success to the festival#s open stage programme for the young acts, no harm to play to a less indulgent audience. And the decent-sized audience of Croft fans who turned up early will have seen that it's not just boys who work up a sweat.

As for the boys themselves, thay go from strength to strength, making lots of noise, perfecting their mixture of traditional sounding tunes with very un-traditional funked-up rhythm section (the bass player Somhairle MacDonald is a key part of the texture and drive) extending tunes way beyond their basci 16bar shapes and generally positionaing themselves as the brightest young things around.

When Adam Sutherland, the baby-faced fiddle player, stops looking like an angel that just stepped out of a Giotto Fresco they might even be dangerous. The crowd was dancing down at the front and it wasn't an eightsome reel.