EMILY SMITH opens with A Day Like Today, the title track from the young Scot's debut album.

BBC Radio Scotland's Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2002 may not have wished for a day like yesterday: the wooden-panelled Wolfe Room is full to overflowing on yet another clammy York night. A good crowd, but not good for her voice, rendered husky by an ongoing bout of the 'flu.

With a medicinal glass of port by her feet, she coughs before the opening line, and she is not the only one under the weather; guitar and bouzouki player Steve Byrne (familiar from his Malinky gigs) has a sore back from some previous revelries and New Zealander Jamie McClennan's errant wisdom tooth is giving him a sore jaw. Thankfully, he plays the fiddle, and the flute work is left to Alan Doherty.

Yet Emily, 23, a graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and her equally young band throw off these shackles, lifted by the joy of playing, in particular in four sets of old and new traditional tunes in which McClennan's enthusiasm infuses all. His whooping music is delightfully exuberant, complementing the contemplative airs of piano and accordion-playing Emily.

As is the way with bonny folk singers, she likes to banter jovially between songs that deal in the unhappy business of broken love and death in bygone days, whether reviving the Dumfries and Galloway repertoire, or adding new compositions of her own to the manner born. Even when she writes a contemporary song, she sings of her 87-year-old Polish grandmother.

Charles Hutchinson

Updated: 12:16 Friday, August 13, 2004