AS part of the family group which pioneered harmony folk singing in the Sixties, Norma Waterson has been a landmark in English traditional music for thirty years. It was Martin Carthy who passed on Scarborough Fair to Paul Simon, played electric guitar and sang with Steeleye Span and toured and recorded with Dave Swarbrick. Appearing here with daughter Eliza (fiddle) and Saul Rose (melodeon), this was their typical adherence to the old, country and seafaring repertoire. Their delivery was spiced with some perfectly blending Forties jazz borrowings.

Opening instrumental waltzes flowed into Waterson's slow jig, guttural Rambleaway. The younger Carthy was given full head here - a baton passing on that disappointed some of the spring water fans, but only because of a dearth of the older duo's voices. Eliza indeed sang a wonderful 6/8 Banks of Claudy, joined in mesmeric chorus by mother, a combination like our own Sarah and Rita Keane.

Jacob's Well, one of a series, of Yorkshire social harmony songs, brought all three together a cappella; Ron Kavana's Midnight on the Water, hornpipes and polkas, too, gave full vent to box and fiddle. Carthy lay disappointingly low, applying himself instead to guitar and mandolin instrumentals, harmony and chorus.

Fiddle sound was profoundly inferior to that on their new album, but the balance of such decisive voices and well worked accompaniments was memorable, not least for the sheer beauty of acoustic instruments and unglamorised traditional singing style and intonation which the professional face of Irish music currently lacks - if not rejects. Underlining that very point, the group's finest encore was a full blooded Bould Doherty sourced from our own Mary Ann Carolan of Co Louth.