20 years of McFall’s Chamber: Zappa, Zawinul and lots more

McFall’s Chamber’s bittersweet programme of Polish music referenced Tango in Warsaw, exploring the avant-garde of Grażyna Bacewicz and early and late Penderecki

McFall’s Chamber’s Red Blue Balance - music for chamber musicians and jazz trio, introduce three new works, revisit recent work and hark back to Bongo Club days with driving Zappa and swing band Raymond Scott pieces at Edinburgh’s Fringe.

Deft programming, fine arrangements and playing from Mr McFall's Chamber and guest soprano Susan Hamilton.

Mr McFall’s Chamber has a reputation for bringing surprise and delight to audiences, with a track record of unusual and compelling repertoire, often collaborating with both local and international artists.

In Scotland, where the word 'Baltic' functions as a colloquial substitute for 'extremely cold', it's odd to come across a programme on this theme in August. Fans of the ensemble Mr. McFall's Chamber delight in such idiosyncrasies and would not be thrown to find an embrace of tangos at the programme's heart. That there were Finnish tangos might be a surprise.

While on a wildlife safari holiday in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith asked his guides to take him across a river to where two primatologists were researching baboon behaviour. Baboons are matriarchal and uniquely in common with humans, high status is inherited.