PLAYING in a traditional band offers musicians a fair degree of challenge within the genre. Singers, however, inevitably stray over the fuzzy line which separates song camps, and so Niamh Parsons is another enigma in the groove once occupied by Mary Black, Maura O'Connell and Dolores Keane.

Playing here with songwriter Dee Moore on electric bass, Gavin Ralston on acoustic guitar, Mick McAuley on button accordion and low whistle, and Colm Fitzpatrick on percussion, she ranged from Moore's pop country style Little Big Time through Forkhill writer Briege Murphy's modern day "folk"

Clohinia Winds to an old style Briar on the Rose. Equally testing is her vocal style a challenging puzzle of professional big time Pop, M.O.R adaptability and profound "traditional" passion.

Typically, as in Once I Loved, this latter intensity expressed itself in strongly delivered, effortlessly melismatic five beat passages alternated repetitively with weaker voice. The Boys of Barr na Sraide were annoyingly disarmed with the use of 314 time, and only in a truly wonderful Mickey McConnell Tinker Man's Daughter encore did Parsons treat us to the sustained impressive "big" end of her spectrum.