In this picture we see the band seemingly going about a sort of fancy Kiwi-esque marching routine. The sun shines. Happily and blissfully ignorant of the concept known as “political correctness” the band regales the crowd resplendent in sealskin sporrans, their V8 Plymouth Belvederes – with 9 and a half miles to the gallon – idle in the car park. Without the aid of today’s fantastic synthetic bagpipe accoutrements their cane reeds, “elk” hide bags and unmatched pipe chanters help the air “tremble” with “…the sweet, sad breath of the pipes” (so says the advert).

This is Maxville and pipe bands before my time but I do know something of pipe band history – especially in these parts. I am pretty sure this band is the Worcester Kiltie Pipe Band – an American pipe band based in Massachusetts. An American pipe band in an ad for Canadian tourism! Perfect.

The Worcester Kiltie Pipe Band was no ordinary band. One of the oldest pipe bands anywhere, they were formed in 1916 and worked their way to becoming the pipe band of the early 60s in Maxville – and North America, for that matter. With a battery of ex-Shotts, ex-Scots players (Pipe Major Jim Kerr, leading drummer, Davie Armitt, et al) they won the North American championship in the years 1960-1963 [my facts need vetting - friendly suggestion to the current version of Worcester to flesh out the history section of their website].

Anyway, an interesting bit of ephemera. Feel free to pass along facts connected with the photo in the ad. I may have it all wrong.

M.

I obviously have zero understanding (nor do many outside of Google, apparently) how the algorithms work to make Google’s search engine so effective. But I’d have to think that previous searches and the general popularity of a search subject have to come in to play.

So what gives with “bagpipe cartoons”? What do people want with “bagpipe cartoons”? What do they do with these things (aside from tarting up whingey blog posts)?

Man, bagpipes need some new PR.

M.

Blah blah blah.

M.

At last night’s band practice the piper next to her turned and said, “I only soaked my reed for an hour, and, is it ever good!”.

Soaking a reed for any length of time will make it anything but good (for a non-piper reading this you’ll now understand the “LOL”). Water is the reed’s enemy. It brings instability and dullness to pitch. Water generally ruins a reed; it shortens its productive life. Tip of the day: soak a reed for an hour if you seek crappy sound.

Yes, reeds require moisture to produce bright, vibrant, engaging sounds. That moisture should only ever come from breath. Play a new reed in the pipe for 20 minutes and you’ll find that natural moisture postively transforms the sound produced by a reed. Living in a dry centrally-heated house I can empathize with a piper`s temptation to throw some water a dry reed`s way. But never soak it. Save that for your feet – or your head after a late night.

And a final funny from the same band practice; it sort of speaks to perspective and the importance of attending band practices so the whole team knows what you can and will contribute. In my friend`s words: “…the (new-ish) bass drummer asked me if I wanted a music stand for our ‘Scotland the Brave’ set. I think I need to attend more practices…”

Off to Glasgow (and Dublin) this evening. Celtic Connections calls.

M.

Happily, my shift didn’t start until the afternoon of January 2, 2000, so I was good to go and enjoy the passing of the millennium as I pleased. And my choice happens to kick off my list of memorable musical moments of the “noughts”: 2000 through to two days from now:

And my list in rough chronological order (note: these spring first to mind and I wouldn’t be surprised, if I tried again, the list might be slightly different):

10. New Year’s Eve 1999. James and Jan MacDonald host one of Vancouver’s most famous Hogmanay doos. The hoi polloi of Vancouver’s piping and drumming community all find their way to the MacDonalds. This special year I managed to snag an invite and subsequently flew five hours west to be part of the fun. What hosts. What fun. A remarkable midnight marchpast of our throw-together pipe band with members including Pete Aumonier, Jack Lee and Angus MacPherson will never be forgotten. Good people; good times. [by the way, for fans of the movie "Whisky Galore", James MacDonald is the wee baby in the carriage in the scene where his dad, Neil Angus, plays at the réiteach].

9. Recording Shambolica! and Jane Siberry, July 2001. I was awfully lucky to engage a pile of talented people to work with me on Shambolica! and one of my all-time favourites was among that group. There’s something about Jane Siberry’s voice that moves me. She’s a national treasure – or, more rightly, an international treasure. She jammed her eclectic backside in Bryan Greenwood’s studio’s sound booth and for six straight hours made amazing music. Her work on “Nut Brown Maiden” is electric.

8. Bruce Gandy’s Gold Medal-winning performance, Northern Meeting, Inverness, September 2003. Bruce and me go back a long way and while we’ve always been intense competitors (especially with each other) I was thrilled to be there for his winning tune. One of those performances that fires on all cylindars and can’t help but win. “The Rout of Glenfruin” was the tune, for the record – a tune that should be played more, I think.

7. Colin MacLellan’s Clasp tune, “End of the Little Bridge”, at the Northern Meeting, Inverness, September 2003/4 [Colin, nor I, sure of the date]. What a tune. This tune was edge-of-your seat stuff. Tempo, rhythm, drama, all falling together in one rare and fabulous explosion of pibroch playing. People who hate pibroch should’ve heard this tune.

6. Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band tuning up for the World Pipe Band Championship, Glasgow, 2007. FMM are the poster people for precision and musical intention. Listening to them prepare for their world-winning performance: an indelible memory.

5. A week in Glasgow with the 78th Frasers (Halifax Citadel) Pipe Band, 2007. As a traveller to Glasgow for piping and pipe band events the 2007 trip with the Halifax Frasers, a great band I “guested” with, will be hard to forget. I can’t speak for any other time but in August 2007 this band had magnetic and percolating pipe band chemistry. What a great time. Win or lose, this was a great adventure with great people – one that sustained the whole week’s visit.

4. Toronto Police Pipe Band playing off the field at the North American Pipe Band Championships in Maxville, Ontario, August 2008. The park had been beset by hurricane-like rain and the usual (fantastic) performance spot had been moved to a farmer’s field – or what felt like a farmer’s field. The crowds were right up yer backside and well in to their rain-delayed cups. This was the year of “Variations on a Theme of Good Intentions” and marching off with Padrig Sicard’s Breton march will never be forgotten.

3. Ruth Sutherland’s singing of, “Tuireadh Mhic Criomain”, at Scott MacAulay’s memorial gathering, November 2008.

2. The Toronto Police Pipe Band’s playing of “His Father’s Lament for Donald MacKenzie” in the car park of Lycée Des Métiers Marie Le Franc in Lorient, France, August 2009. A strange moment. No one around. Our band manager, Jack Wield, ex-Edinburgh Police Pipe Band, thought the same. He said, “My God, that was beautiful”. Goose-bumpy.

1. OK. This isn’t in order. And, its not a bagpipe-y sort of thing. But a bit of a confessional: One of the most memorable musical moments for me may not’ve been in the bagpipey world. Here is k d lang:

All the best!

M.

The raga is an interesting art form. A melodic, heavily improvised, exploration of a simple theme, the raga might be compared, to a fair (yet limited) extent with pibroch. I’ll leave it to you to delve in to the raga and make your own comparison but I will suggest, the level of performance sophistication and musicianship required to deliver a raga exceeds what’s needed to deliver a postively impactful pibroch.

Right now, I don’t want to dwell on the music. It’s Ravi Shankar I want to talk about. I mean, eighty-nine! He’ll be ninety in April! Sure he may’ve been helped to his place by his (strikingly beautiful) daughter, Anoushka, but once seated, he displayed calm, controlled, musicianship. His ability to move his aged hands up and down the lengthy expanse of the sitar – and at sometimes impressive tempos – is other worldly. What magnificent music. This old master made some seriously great energy happen.

Relative to the overall number of Highland bagpipers in the world, it seems to me there’re few who actively perform past age fifty or so. Outside of pipe bands it’s a real rarity. In fact, come to think of it, outside of non-competing pipe bands it’s still a rarity.

Maybe with more performance venues, places other than solo competitions for instance, we might see piping “Ravis” appear. To now we’ve been pretty good fostering a youth movement in the piping game.

I see Ravi Shankar making remarkably beautiful, masterful music on the cusp of his tenth decade. We need to think about nurturing a piping master’s movement, one that has nothing to do with prunes – or competitions.

M.

Facebook, MySpace and all the other online “time-wasters”, surely take up more and more of our prime living, breathing, thinking time. I use the internet a lot. It’s an important tool for my work, my job. I probably use it more on-the-job than off. I’m fairly sure I’m near the top of my demographics’ internet usage stats.

No matter how we spend our time, especially our “free”, non-work, non-family time, we know that it’s finite – there’s only so much of the stuff to go around. I wonder if the internet, while a fantastic medium to connect people, may be having a negative impact on the quality of other “free time” pursuits; think pipes, drums.

Really, think about it: if someone is frantically clicking away on Facebook, regaling their friends with weather updates, their moods and the pork chop in the pan for supper, then you’d have to think that for the average user, more Facebook — for example — means less attention to other things, like music-making – and thinking about music-making. From my experience, when it comes to creating music it is the thinking part that is more important than the making part.

Just a thought.

A little book I’ve always enjoyed is Angus Macpherson’s autobiography, “A Highlander Looks Back”. In a cultural context, a bagpipe context, he writes of another time and place: the nineteenth century Scottish Highlands. I wonder if his time was more conducive to great music-making than ours:

“As a very willing pupil by the peat fire at Badenoch, I was initiated into the mysteries of piobaireachd, my tutor being my father, a product of the MacCrimmon school of Skye. In this modest school of learning, I have seen men who after a hard day’s work, walk ten or twenty miles for their ceol mor lessons, no matter what the weather, and in the small hours of the morning, after Highland hospitality and the environment of the good old-fashioned ceilidh, they would tread their homeward way with their minds steeped in that which conveys to the Highlander something which nothing else can.”

Not so much time in those days for Facebooking, “Mike is happy that the grass is cut”.

M.

One of the great figures of the north of Scotland at the time, and the whole of Britain, for that matter, was Brigadier Simon Christopher Joseph Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat: War hero, soldier, politician, sportsman, one of Britain’s largest landholders, a Lord of the Realm – and lover of bagpipes.

Winston Churchill, in a letter to Joseph Stalin, described Lord Lovat as, “the handsomest man who ever cut a throat”. It was Lovat, the war hero, who led his commandos ashore on D-Day – “The Longest Day” – to the sound of Piper Bill Millin’s bagpipes.

At “Inverness” (the competing piper’s synonym for the Northern Meeting) during the year of my recollection Lord Lovat was in attendance on the second day, the day of the Clasp event, the big event for former winners of the Gold Medal. Bill Livingstone competed in the event and was introduced to Lovat. They struck up a good conversation, probably the only kind both could carry. It should be noted Lovat was 25th Chief of the Clan Fraser and Bill, Pipe Major of the 78th Fraser Highlanders Pipe Band, a group sponsored by a group of Canadian historic commemorators of the seminal, “Battle of the Plains of Abraham” where the 78th Fraser Highlanders, and Lovat’s forbears, figured prominently. Anyway, the conversation of the Fraser piper and the Fraser Chief proved satisfying enough to warrant an invitation to tea the next day at Beaufort Castle — Lord Lovat’s home on his Beauly estate outside of Inverness. And guess the name of the gooseberry travelling with Bill and his wife Lillian?

Yes, indeedy, it was me. No shame. Tea with Lord Lovat at his castle – bring it on!

So it was to be. The three of us loaded up the rented Ford Fiesta and made our way from our Kenneth Street, Inverness, B&B to the castle for a spot of tea with His Lordship.

And here’s your cliche of the day: I recall the whole meeting like it was yesterday. After winding down the long tree-lined drive of the estate we arrived. We parked and nervously made our way up to the castle’s big door (I’d wager even Bill, the experienced lawyer that he was, would concede nervousness). And knocked (and, with apologies to Mel Brooks, “what knockers!”). Expecting no less than Jeeves to answer the door we were greeted by a kindly Highland woman dressed in a cleaning smock, “Yes?”, she said. “We’ve an appointment to see His Lordship,” Bill replied. “Yes, come this way”. And in we were. I recall Bill saying ‘His Lordship’ because I clearly recollect us dissecting the visit and laughing together at the line. I mean, outside of a movie set, how many times in your life would you find yourself saying, “We’ve an appointment to see His Lordship”? We thought it hilarious.

We were seated in big comfy over-stuffed chairs in a bright sitting room. Within minutes Lovat entered the room and warmly welcomed us all. I recall a big presence: well over six feet in height, a healthy, ruddy complexion and an impressive shock of thick white hair. Shortly after sitting tea was brought in on what I recall to be an especially ornate-looking tray. “Would you pour the tea, Lillian?”, Lovat asked Bill’s wife, and, of course, she did. But I think Lillian may’ve felt a bit like Hyacinth Bucket’s accident prone neighbour, Elizabeth (see the BBC show: “Keeping Up Appearances“), in dutifully filling the Limoges cups. Happily, no breakages.

So there we had it. Tea with Lord Lovat. A lovely meeting with a bona fide 20th century hero and undeniably warm, friendly person. We discussed his estate, the challenges in keeping it, bagpipes, bagpipe politics, and, I distinctly recall, his opinion on the prospects of a Canadian band winning the World Pipe Band Championship (he thought likely). Lovat had a lot of Canadian connections and he was genuinely pleased to see the result two years later, when the 78th became the first non-Scots band to win the championship.

Lovat saw us out to our car. As we made our way down the tree-lined drive we looked back and saw Lord Lovat slowly walking down the middle of the road back to his home. The three of us all regretted not having a camera, thinking this a great image of the man. “What a great band album cover”, we thought.

Lord Lovat died in 1995.

Anyway, there you have it, a look at of one of my great and good memories.

M.

They say that people when travelling together learn the most about each other. Well, I think someone said that. Anyway, it’s true that we get to connect with people on a deeper letter while bunking and breaking bread together. A band is no different from any other team: members need to have a civil personal connection – at the very least – before having a chance at making great music together. So, for the “team-building” alone (I catch myself writing corporatese here!), the Breton adventure was tops.

It’s funny how the small things are often the most memorable. Just as a late bus can sometimes trigger disproportionate crabbiness (we learned a lot about “late buses” on this trip), an impromptu tune well-played (or poorly played, for that matter!) in the street, an exchange of a sovennir (as, for example, many of the guys did in swapping ties with Bagad Breig – much to the consternation of Jack Wield, our tremendous band manager), the little things resonated with me more than the big stuff.

In the unforgetable memeory bucket the regular, and silly, 4 am queues for kebab avec sauce chaud trumps Highland Cathedral at “nuits magique”.

Anyway, a great trip. Eyes opened wider, and all of us better for it.

I’m off for duty-free.

M.

One of the local schools is used as headquarters for feeding the hundreds of performers. The food is classic institutional, as you’d expect, but the management of the cafeteria “system” is remarkable.

Here’s the drill: you grab your tray, select your eats and out the door you go to the tables. But not before the lunch security matron counts the food on your tray. Feel like two slices of cheese in lieu of say a salad? Forget it. You’re sent back, tail between legs, to return your ill-gotten grub. Two rolls? Mon Dieu! Not on. One of our guys had his food matron-handled as hidden stashes of food were sought – concealed, perhaps, under a piece of meat. “Watch out for him”, she called to her colleague. Anyway, its all good fun. A real experience. There lots of wine and cidre at every meal and, anyway, we’re not here to eat – or sleep, for that matter.

I am writing this in the Lorient town square (with Doug Stronach, Tom Foote, Nathan McLaren, Reagan Jones, Shane Cressy) in an outdoor table of the Cafe Parisien. The sun is setting, the beer is cold, bombardes are playing, people are dancing.

When you have this, who needs a second piece of cheese?

M.