Joyful reminders of ancient pan-european bagpipe lineage
MUSIC
Piping Live!
Various venues, Glasgow
“NOW who shall play The Day It Daws,/or Hunts Up when the Cock He Craws?” Gey few these days: Robert Semphill of Beltrees’s celebrated 17thcentury poem provides a tantalising glimpse of a Lowland burgh piper’s repertoire, but The Life & Death of Habbie Simpson, Piper of Kilbarchan not only lamented his passing, but its distinctive metre would become widely popular with Fergusson, Burns and lesser Scots versifiers.
Hence a show titled Standard Habbie, at the National Piping Centre, hub of Glasgow’s week-long Piping Live! festival, saw the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society delve intriguingly into the poem and its world, enlisting singers Alasdair Roberts, Iona Fyfe and Neil Sutcliffe, piper Fin Moore, fiddler Roo Geddes and saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, conducted by piper-narrator and singer Donald G Lindsay.
Among the little-known tunes mentioned in the poem, Trixie became a harmonious, part-singing round, while for the contentious Day It Daws, Lindsay gave a striking rendition of Landlady Count the Lawin (aka Hey Tutti Tatti or Scots Wha Hae) before admitting that recent research suggested The Gentle Day Daw, which promptly floated melodiously from Wiszniewski’s soprano sax. Moore’s playing, on small pipes, of the gently paced and venerable sounding Hunt’s Up opened and closed the show, with the ensemble singing it to a conclusion that was oddly moving.
The day kicked off with the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band from British Columbia, six times World Championship winners, forming a semi-circle round the inscrutable statue of Donald Dewar, their marches and strathspeys, jigs and reels echoing off the urban canyon of Buchanan Street.
In the Piping Centre’s popular tented Street Café, performers included the Royal Army of Oman, impressively garbed in red tunics and tartan plaids, their conventional pipe band line-up augmented by three hand-drummers and a piper toting a squalling goatskin bagpipe with which he whirled around a bemused audience.
Two underground stops away, at the College of Piping (now merged with the Piping Centre but somewhat bureaucratically labelled “TNPC Otago Street”), the distinctive strains of the Irish uilleann pipe sounded in a low-key but enjoyable presentation by Armagh Pipers’ Club, an institution that has produced many notable players.
Back at the Piping Centre, a sobering exhibition, Pipers of the Great War, marks the centenary of the end of the conflict by invoking the regimental pipers who conducted themselves heroically – and sometimes fatally – amid the carnage. It includes such fabled piper-composers as PM Willie Lawrie (who died after being invalided home) and PM John Maclennan, enshrining the paradox that out of the mud and blood emerged such enduring tunes as Battle of the Somme and Bloody Fields of Flanders.
Ironically, it was from Flanders that one of the day’s brightest acts came, as Madingma – brothers Stefan and Diederik Timmermans – performed on bagpipes and diatonic accordion. On this occasion Stefan played mouth- blown Border-style pipes, as opposed to the long-droned Flemish instrument associated with bucolic Brueghel canvases, but their perky Flemish jigs and polkas, French bourées and waltzes, reminded us joyfully of an ancient pan-european bagpipe lineage.
JIM GILCHRIST
MUSIC
Rag ‘N’ Bone Man Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh
IT SEEMS strange bordering on mystifying that this latest Summer Sessions concert in Princes Street Gardens should reportedly have attracted noise complaints from attendees at the fireworks-tastic Edinburgh Military Tattoo, of all places. If there’s any analogue for the easy listening genre in today’s pop market, then Rag ‘n’ Bone Man is surely it, despite bearing the fierce vocal of a blues artist and an equally formidable collection of tattoos; yet skin ink is no longer the preserve of wild rockers, and Rory Graham is a soul man at heart.
“I’m gonna play a really miserable song now,” he said before Lay My Body Down, a track whose themes include feelings of worthlessness and troubled mental health. “They’re all fairly miserable, but this one in particular .” that may be so, but they and Graham’s delivery of them seem in perfect tune with the times.
Having already proven to be an unusual but worthwhile Edinburgh’s Hogmanay headliner nearly eight months ago, his songs proved rousing in the same venue once more, from the cathartic, redemptive The Fire – which featured his rapped vocals, a striking change of pace – and Grace, which fuses a sense of regret with a big, romantic heart.
The production levels for the show were pleasingly high, with horn players and additional vocals amid the full band setup, and the emphasis on elevating Graham’s voice as much as possible; the effect often sounded like a contemporary take on the 1980s blueeyed soul scene, although his fans may not get the reference.
There was a sense of uplift with As You Are and the signature track Human, now with a richer live arrangement, and Graham’s determination to press on even though storm clouds appeared to be gathering neatly summed up the mood of his music.
DAVID POLLOCK