Tonight’s show is a difficult one to review, most obviously because one of its key players is conspicuous by her absence.  Kate Garrett, the former singer for The Mystics who founded the Young Women’s Band Project at the Ark T Centre and who was, musically and personally, a significant influence in Oxford and beyond, died in 2009 and this concert is a very personal tribute to her from her friends and family, as well as a fund-raiser for the projects she started.  As someone who neither knew Kate nor was familiar with her music, for most of the evening it’s hard not to feel that I’m intruding on a private function.  There are thirteen acts, performing mostly a couple of songs each, leading up to the finale of Kate Garrett’s backing band performing her songs with six stand-in singers. As the acts have been chosen for their connection to Kate’s work, the quality of performances ranges from highly professional – as the majority are – to somewhat ragged around the edges, but since all acts seem to have the full support of the paying audience it feels curmudgeonly to be overly critical of the less experienced performers.  All that being so, much of the night does feel slightly uncomfortable to us outsiders, and there are only a couple of acts who make us forget that division.

The night is split into three sections, compèred by poet and former The Anyways and Blue Kite member Alan Buckley.  The first third is given over to a rolling lineup of Kate’s friends and former co-performers, mostly fitting into the category of folk-influenced pastoral-urban acoustic music, somewhere between Martin Carthy and Steeleye Span, generally singing songs about wandering and travelling, typically backed by guitar, fiddle, cello, harmony vocals and occasionally percussion.  Magpie Lane’s Jon Fletcher begins the night with two songs on bouzouki and mandolin before handing over to the Joan Armatrading-style singer and guitarist Lisa Fitzgibbon, who continues the ‘wandering life’ theme with her first song before apparently recognizing the hollow nature of that lifestyle and its effect on personal relationships in her second song.  It’s an apposite observation tonight, and sets an understandably bleak tone for the early part of the show – a tone broken by the folk tunes of guitar and fiddle duo Colin Fletcher and Jane Griffiths, who turn the mood from commemorative and contemplative, bringing a welcome sense of celebration.  The sparring of fiddle and guitar is lively and energetic and an early high point of the night.  Next up are a capella vocal group Trio Hysteria’s striking close harmony singing and Alan Buckley‘s reading of Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush and his own Voicemail, both of which are bleak and affecting.  There was disagreement between my companion and I on whether his slow, exaggerated reading interrupted the rhythm of the poetry or whether his clarity and emphasis brought the imagery to life rather than coming second to the flow of the words, but we were agreed on the strong and heartfelt nature of the content.

Zoe Bicat followed with more consideration of the wandering life and a touchingly direct if simplistic metaphor about death, before Matt Sage, the only solo-performing musician of the night, sang two songs backed only by bluesy electric guitar: the first a poem by Pablo Neruda set to a new tune, assuring a loved one’s importance while acknowledging their imperfections, followed by his own melancholy and very pretty song for Garrett.  Four-piece band Cirrus rocked out with a lot less polish than the preceding acts, relying a little on expression through volume, and Uneek and Rachel Hughes of the Young Women’s Music Project, both clearly nervous, performed very well though clearly not in the league of the more experienced musicians. Bicat had said earlier that being able to see friends in the wings – and, no doubt, the North Wall Arts Centre’s location on the site of St Edward’s School – made it feel like a school concert, and the YWMP acts’ performances sustain that impression, with the discomfort implied for those in the audience who lack a connection to the ‘school’ in question.  Teen MC Uneek deserves particular credit, though, for coping admirably with technical issues, eventually performing her song “Soul Destroyer” twice – once with dubstep-influenced backing track as intended, but prior to that with the impromptu drum kit backing of stage manager and Garrett’s successor at YWMP, Baby Gravy’s Zahra Tehrani.

Headline act Chris Wood, a star of the national folk scene, played a short set of ‘contemporary’ folk songs after the first interval, beginning by tackling issues like the credit crunch and the fatal police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station, drawing one-sided political conclusions in crayon which could almost have been designed cynically to appeal to the grow-your-own sensibility of the expected audience, but which, on reflection, do seem to be (perhaps inadvertently) very effectively sustaining the folk tradition by serving as a reminder of how one-sided the perspectives of folk songs throughout history generally are.  It all helps to serve the story, anyway, and he is an excellent storyteller, with a rich, warm voice accompanied by acoustic guitar played with simple rolling rhythm.  The song ‘Two Widows’ takes a step away from the politics and eases into more straightforwardly emotional territory while the closing song about his six-year old daughter is clever, warm, witty and tender, very sweet without being at all mawkish, and is definitely another high point of the night.

The Garrett Family take the final third of the night, with sister Helen giving a direct, clean and almost childlike performance of two songs and the Kate Garrett Band closing the show with a set which seems understandably nostalgic, to celebrate Kate’s songwriting.  It’s a massive shame therefore that for the first few songs the words are utterly unintelligible, initially because of first singer Nick Gibson’s relentless drawl and later because of the cathartic rocking-out of the backing band.  At its best the songs are mournful and build to epic crescendos; at its worst it sounds like pub-rock, albeit very proficient pub rock, and while it feels like sacrilege to criticize this aspect of a night like this, the fact is that if this was on at the Wheatsheaf we’d be quite tempted to take the chance to nip downstairs for a drink.

Ultimately, however, the night belongs to Barney Morse-Brown: as the organiser of the event, as Kate’s husband and, most strikingly, as the most energetic, charismatic and engaging performer of the night, despite seeming quiet and shy throughout.  Having lent his cello backing to most of the performers, including one song with Chris Wood, the three-song set of his own Duotone project is the only one which really makes us forget we’re at the wake of a person we never personally knew.  His voice is clean, bright and cold, but with restrained and evident emotion rather than detachment, and his playing, backed occasionally by percussion, fiddle and the vocals of Trio Hysteria, begins as a precise and beautiful accompaniment to his simple and unadorned voice but swiftly takes on a life entirely of its own.  His second song, ‘You Don’t Need Church’, is a staggeringly touching love song which is as near to perfect as songwriting gets, and his lyrics and simple performance manage to reconcile the two lyrical themes of the night – travelling and family.  His third song, ‘Greetings Hello’, begins unassumingly on guitar and voice before the night’s only technological trickery is used to create loops of vocal harmony which, rather than simply building to a crescendo, weave round with immense dexterity and intelligence until he leaps from guitar to cello, standing and swaying, developing a pounding groove and running with it.  It’s wonderful and hugely impressive to see and hear and it’s no surprise that by the end of the night he’s shredded two bows and is on to his third, and while it would be fun to see him as the first in a movement of Rock ‘N’ Roll Cello it’s hard to see anyone combining it with as much grace, modesty and charm as this man shows.  It’s been a grand tribute to the life of a clearly influential woman, obviously much loved by all those present who knew her – most evidently her husband, who crucially never once says so but makes it abundantly clear in his presence and his playing, and is the one performer who really makes us outsiders feel welcome.