A Halloween Tumshie

I’m often asked, believe it or not, what the words are that kick off the “Sergeant Malkie Bow’s Consternation” tracks from my Shambolica! and Unqualified Favourites recordings. For the record, the words are, “Mikie, it’s Malkie, you’re a big tumshie…”.
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DDD: Signature Tunes

Most musicians have music that is associated with them, either through performance or composition. For the pianist Glenn Gould, for instance, it’s his interpretation of Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations“.
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1950s Tenor Drummer

Here’s a neat whisky advert from the 1950s: a tenor drummer in full flight – both flourishing and sounding the drum, too.
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Log Driver’s Waltz

Here’s a nice sample of Canadian folk music – or a kind of a Canadian folk music: Wade Hemsworth’s bouncy, cheerful “Log Driver’s Waltz”. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1979 this little “vignette” as the NFB calls it, has become an iconic bit of Canada’s cultural flotsam and jetsam.
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Alex MacMillan: It’s a Small World

It’s a small world must be one of the most often said bromides in the English language. But, surely for a reason: it is a small world. The top-of-the-small-world-pops in my family belongs to the story of my younger sister and her husband.

Here’s the scoop: After meeting and date number three or so they start talking a little about their families. He says to her something like, my Mum’s family comes from a little place in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland: Benbecula. Yikes, thinks my sister or something like that. That’s where my father’s mother comes from!
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Thank You / Gracias / Merci / Tapadh leibh / Grazie

A rare and wonderful thing happened yesterday. At Georgetown highland games we saw a most deserving public thank-you [understatement].
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Making Music

Everyone’s always looking for the “secret“: how do I make music happen?

Making great music is a different story, but good music, to make good music? That’s a horse of a different colour.
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Practice Practice Practice

I was pretty much without bagpipes for the month of April. I play McCallum bagpipes, as some of you may know, and decided to take Kenny MacLeod up on his offer to have them refurbished. I’ve worked with Kenny and Stuart McCallum for years (the two who lead the McCallum Bagpipe enterprise) and have been an early and enthusiastic supporter of their efforts to make great bagpipes happen in Ayrshire. In fact, the set I play today is the first silver and “ivory” set the company made. So there you go.
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A Comparative Look at Pipe Band Ensemble

Here’s a copy of the slides I used in the talk I presented at the Pipers’ & Pipe Band Society of Ontario’s annual adjudictor’s seminar, March 21, 2011, in Milton, Ontario.
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Humility and Grace

It seems to me that one of the hardest lessons to learn in the competitive piping game – or life, for that matter – is around winning – and losing. “Win with humility and lose with grace”, goes the old saying. Like just about every other piece of well-kent advice of the proverbial sort, well, it’s all easier said than done. Think of the Golden Rule or “ethic of reciprocity”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If that simple tenet of human rights was easy-peasy to make happen we’d all be living in a Utopian Shangri-La.
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