For pipers and drummers especially, the 2016 Celtic Connections festival was all about remembrance and celebration. An all-star cast from a host of musical traditions came together to honour the life and music of Gordon Duncan, a decade on from his untimely passing. A week later the great and the good of the pipe band community gathered in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for Live in Ireland 87, a recreation of the 78th Fraser Highlanders’ ground-breaking concert recorded at Ballymena County Hall 29 years earlier.
There was a surprise in store at the Big Music Society’s evening at the Drygate Brewery on January 22. The Society aims to create new and exciting contexts for ceol mor performance, and there could be no more different approach than that of New York-based musical experience Blarvuster. Pipe band followers may already know Matthew Welch as the pipe major of New York Metro, but his treatment of Ranald MacAilean Og’s The Finger Lock was anything but familiar.
After Blarvuster gave the audience a taster of the four-piece ensemble’s rock and jazz influenced sound with one of Welch’s own compositions, Callum MacCrimmon and John Mulhearn of the Society slow-marched from the back of the hall to join the band, playing the urlar one phrase out of sync to create an arresting and eerie harmony effect. Once Blarvuster struck up, however, any resemblance to traditional piobaireachd came to an abrupt end, as the band launched into a heavily-improvised half-hour bagrock extravaganza.
Fraser Fifield had the unenviable task of following the grand experiment, but in the company of guitarist Graeme Stephen and Brazilian-born bassist Mario Caribe, he succeeded in putting his own, much gentler stamp on the big music. Fifield too is fond of swapping pipes and whistles for the saxophone, with Stephen’s guitar equally free in switching styles from classical to bluegrass to heavy rock, which opened up new ways of interpreting some of ceol mor’s best-known classics including The Old Woman’s Lullaby, MacDougall’s Gathering and Lament for the Children. While there was a great deal of variation in treatment of the tunes, barring a reinterpretation as radical as Blarvuster’s piobaireachd, it remained a sedate affair, and the distinct lack any of jig and reel sets to liven up the tempos may have grown weary on some listeners.
While such unorthodox treatments of piobaireachd are becoming more and more commonplace, it was arguably Gordon Duncan who first laid the groundwork through his revolutionary use of Lament for Mary MacLeod as a harmony line in the title track of his celebrated début album Just for Seamus. More than 20 years after its release and 10 years on from his death, the line-up assembled for the Just for Gordon tribute concert at the Royal Concert Hall speaks volumes for his lasting influence not just on Highland piping, but on many different musical traditions.
The National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland opened the Just for Gordon proceedings in spectacular fashion. Thanks in no small part to their extremely well-set pipes and superb clarity of fingering, their rendition of The Cameronian Rant jig was eerily reminiscent of Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band playing that tune on the same stage at their Re:Charged concert nine years previously. In the words of compere Gary West: “There are a couple of Grade 1 pipe majors standing backstage looking very jealous.”
Galician piper Susana Seivane and fiddler, Duncan Chisholm, played a spell-binding rendition of the beloved air The Sleeping Tune on fiddle and gaita.
Another of Gordon’s former collaborators was Ross Kennedy, the bouzouki player on Just for Seamus, who performed two sets from the album accompanied by Angus MacColl and Stuart Liddell. The Tannahill Weavers, one of several bands Gordon played with on the folk scene, closed out the first half, with piper Lorne MacDougall subtly blending Thunderstruck into Andy Renwick’s Ferret. Perhaps more than any other Highland piper assembled for the concert, Lorne’s style most closely matched the natural exuberance that made Gordon’s playing so instantly recognisable.
After the interval it made for a welcome change to see former Pipeline, and now Enjoy Your Piping presenter Gary West get out his own pipes to join Ian Duncan and his son Alex, Allan MacDonald, Lorne, Angus, Stuart, Ross and Ali Hutton to perform the Wha Saw the 42nd set Gordon played at the equally ambitious Millennium pre-Worlds concert.
Gordon was by all accounts a quiet man who preferred to express himself through his music, but it was pleasing and fitting to hear his voice through the words of his son Gordy Jnr, an established session percussionist and emerging as a singer/songwriter. In perhaps the evening’s most poignant moment, he introduced his song Where I Belong by explaining he had last taken to the Concert Hall stage to play djembe alongside his father more than a decade ago.
The evening had flown by and the audience clearly did not want it to end, but they were more than satisfied with a suitably rousing encore as the full complement of Highland pipers returned for an epic tag-team solo of yet more of Gordon’s tunes, rounding off with a group rendition of The High Drive, one of the most gloriously happy pipe tunes ever composed.
It is easy to focus on the many stars of such an evening with so many greats of Celtic music gracing the stage, but they were far from the only individuals contributing to such a marvellous concert. Particular plaudits must go to the superbly versatile backing band, partly drawn from the ranks of Treacherous Orchestra; the terrific ambience created by lighting technician Gary Ebdy, a former Vale colleague of Ross and Ali; and the sound and stage team of the Concert Hall who dealt seamlessly with an incredibly complex and seemingly never-ending array of switchovers between acts.
The following day saw the main auditorium of the Concert Hall virtually sold out for both Live in Ireland 87 at lunchtime and West Coast ceilidh sensation Skipinnish that evening. Special mention must go to former Greater Glasgow Police Scotland Pipe Major Duncan Nicholson for playing both concerts in what must have been a stressful and exhausting day.
While it was reassuring to see the UK pipe band community turn out in droves for a unique recreation of one of the most influential concerts and recordings in pipe band history, Celtic Connections is all about bringing together as diverse a range of performers and audiences as can be imagined, and there is evidence to suggest it is working.
We pipers and drummers all know much we love the music of Gordon Duncan, the 78th Fraser Highlanders and the hosts of others who have shaped our tradition as we know it today. We were always going to enjoy these concerts. It is much more important to the future of our national instrument that the next generation of traditional musicians are connecting with equally youthful audiences who would otherwise never have given the bagpipes a second thought. Cause for celebration indeed.
•Words by Stuart Milne for Piping Today magazine issue 79.