Dunaber Music

Band Travel

A quick note as I sit in a sunny Glasgow cafe digesting the entertaining editorial that was the band’s score sheets from yesterday’s contest in Dunoon (what a great day, by the way – congrats to Boghall! I’ll share more when I have easier access to technology).
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A Smart Ashes’ Prediction

The Icelandic ash thing ain’t going away. I wonder how news that makes headlines like today’s “Ash cloud set to close Scottish airspace” will affect the overseas attendance of pipers and pipe bands at the late summer competitions in Scotland?
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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 a summer piping school, that 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.
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CBC Radio One Interview

An excerpt from a piece produced by CBC Radio’s Aparita Bhandari. Broadcast January 25, 2010.
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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.
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A Good Reed Soaking is What You Need

My first email of the day was a seriously laugh-out-loud experience. I mean LOL in the real sense. Not just the sort of thing we all do when we often send a sort of nondescript note or text and add “LOL”: “I backed out of the driveway today and nearly hit the neighbour’s cat LOL”. Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t write that, but I know you get my gist.
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Happy New Year!

All the best to you and yours for a happy New Year – may it be the best ever!

And here’s one of the oddest postcards I’ve ever seen; someone actually posted this – in 1912!
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10 Favourite Musical Memories of the Noughts

Yikes. Its two days to 2010. Cliché alert: it seems like yesterday … we were all freaking out about the apocalyptic possibilities of a new millennium. Then, as now, I was working in the technology field and clearly recall being assigned a “war room” shift. For those not familiar with the tech business staple of system recovery, the “war room” is a small group of multi-skilled people charged with restarting failed computer systems. I was the scribe of the group (an important role, of course). With black marker at the ready I was set to record the crashing systems and falling sky. Continue reading 10 Favourite Musical Memories of the Noughts…

Merry Christmas!

Here’s a bit of a Christmas laugh for one and all: a Toronto Police Pipe Band Christmas Greeting (none of the elves, by the way, know they star in the show [oops] – but you may recognize Ian K MacDonald, Doug Stronach, Malcolm MacLean [of Ardnamurchan], Angus Douglas Lampkin and me).
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The Piper as Jack O`Lantern

An interesting image of an old postcard, circa 1912, provided here:
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