Fleshmarket Close (Glad It’s Not Trad)

Of all the tunes I have built the one that gives me the most copyright grief is “Fleshmarket Close”. This tune wasn’t two years old and it appeared on a recording, a vinyl recording, with the dreaded “public domain/traditional” note. I won’t bother mentioning the offending parties – but it was not a bagpipe group. It was a “folk” band. Anyway, the cool part – especially thinking about it today – was the vinyl record bit of the story.
Continue reading Fleshmarket Close (Glad It’s Not Trad)…

So You Want to Compete at the Big Games

Thanks to the recent purchase of a video-to-digital box I’ve been able to post some ancient video. This particular sample presents as a fine demo of what it’s really like to compete at a big outdoor contest – in this case, The Argyllshire Gathering, Oban, Scotland. While this comes from 1991 (gulp) things haven’t changed and what you see is what you get.
Continue reading So You Want to Compete at the Big Games…

New Calum MacCrimmon Recording

It seems somehow right that I should be listening to Calum MacCrimmon’s new record, “Man’s Ruin”, on a Westjet flight to Calgary. The Scotland-based Canadian piper/multi-instrumentalist – and heir to the MacCrimmon piping line – comes from Alberta. It was western Canada, too, in Saskatchewan (the place you can all “say without starting to stutter”), too, while teaching at that school I first met Calum. Anyway, gotta write about his CD work, its “excellento” as Jack or Victor might say. His music is cool in that confident, strutty, know-what-I’m-doin-and-I’m-doin-it sort of way. I guess that’s as a good a definition of cool as anything, isn’t it.
Continue reading New Calum MacCrimmon Recording…

Bagads: The Long and Short of It

Yesterday morning I dragged my ass out of bed and caught most of the bagad performances from the season’s first bagad championship. The camera work wasn’t especially sophisticated but the sound seemed pretty good and I was really thankful that a TV network in France opted to stream the contest live. Very, er, tres cool.
Continue reading Bagads: The Long and Short of It…

Pipe Bands and Political Parties

One of the few purely academic things I remember from my time grinding away at university and studying political science is about political parties; specifically, the definition of political parties. You’ll know political parties are about bringing together like interests, promoting those interests and engaging people to a level that makes political authority happen. Political parties are about aggregating interest. Simply put, political parties are about bringing together people who think the same way.

It strikes me that pipe bands are no different.
Continue reading Pipe Bands and Political Parties…

Joyeux Noël on Remembrance Day

In honour of the day, here’s a short clip from a really good “war movie”, Joyeux Noël from 2005, based on the true stories of the World War I Christmas ceasefires along the Western Front. It’s one of those movies that uses bagpipes in a rare authentic way.
Continue reading Joyeux Noël on Remembrance Day…

Aged to Perfection (Ravi Shankar)

I had a great night last Saturday. I was treated to a concert of Indian classical music. And what a treat. None other than the world’s greatest exponent of the art was centre stage, sitar in hands. Ravi Shankar, the eighty-nine years old living legend, and his twenty-eight years old daughter, the remarkable, Anoushka, enthralled the sold out audience with non-stop musical virtuosity.
Continue reading Aged to Perfection (Ravi Shankar)…

Idiomatica

Idiomatica. A bit of a poncie sort of self-conscious name for a medley, isn’t it. But what fun to say – and play. I feel confident saying that the Toronto Police Pipe Band had a great, if not challenging, winter of practice shaping this puppy up (as Pete Aumonier might say). And If anyone had any doubt about the degree of serious intensity most of the pipe band world takes pipe band music you only have to look to the internet. Yikes. Reading a sampling of the voracious and sometimes downright bitter opinion Idiomatica elicited made me think the Toronto Police Pipe Band might’ve had a cheerier response had we marched on the field and pulled a Sinead (publically rip up a photo of the Pope). Either that or offer the world the 7,864th medley that starts with a marchpipe. Continue reading Idiomatica…

A View of Pipe Band Ensemble

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Pipers’ & Pipe Band Society of Ontario’s annual adjudicator’s seminar. The theme of the day was the always-befuddling topic, “pipe band ensemble”. As you should expect, there was lots of interesting discussion. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a high degree of dislike for the word “ensemble” – I’d never thought much of the word, either; in fact, it was a possible majority who thought the word could be replaced with something better.
Continue reading A View of Pipe Band Ensemble…

A Pipe Band for the Masses

Iain MacDonald passed along a youtube link at the end of the string of comments from the get-rid-of-the-über-boring-pipe-band-set post. Really, now. I think it deserves full front row centre treatment. It is marvelous.
Continue reading A Pipe Band for the Masses…