By STUART MILNE
“The world will come to an end, but love and music will endure”
Thank goodness for Gaelic proverbs. There are plenty of people who believe for many reasons that the apocalypse did finally come crashing through the door in 2016. Thankfully, the Celtic Connections festival arrives at just the right time to remind us that the Gaels were right, with the world’s largest winter music festival descending on Glasgow to wash away the memories of that most head-bangingly depressing of anni horribiles – fans of the Chicago Cubs, Leicester City and Hibernian Football Club aside.
With so many concerts to choose from at the 18-day event, deciding how far and for what to stretch the wallet gets harder every year, and in 2017 devotees of pipe music faced some particularly excruciating scheduling dilemmas. However, no Celtic Connections festival would be complete without at least one visit to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and the ‘must-see’ for many pipers and drummers is the annual piping concert.
Someone once said that a bagad is the only musical ensemble in the world that can make a pipe band sound like two fairies playing kazoos at the bottom of a garden. Bagad Kemper brought a distinctly continental flavour to the traditional Saturday matinee, with reigning British and Scottish Grade 1 Champions Inveraray & District Pipe Band representing the kazoo-playing fairies.
The visitors from Brittany got the music underway with their new show Melezour — Breton for mirror. A bagad in full flight is a truly spectacular sound, especially when the pipes, bombards and percussion are joined by yet more instruments — in this case guitar, bass and saxophone, plus vocals from Marthe Vassallo and Sylvain Girault. Suspicions that Vassallo was periodically singing animal noises in the opening number were confirmed when she revealed that the extravaganza was in fact a children’s song – we await pipe major Ryan Canning’s interpretation of Old MacDonald Had a Farm when Shotts & Dykehead Caledonia Pipe Band take over the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall this August.
The centrepiece was unquestionably the sumptuous rendition of the haunting air Ar Charlezenn, played so emotively at the funeral of Bagad Kemper’s influential former pipe major Erwan Ropars two years ago — have a look at the footage on YouTube and be prepared to cry. However, throughout the show the sheer complexity of the different instruments layered on top of each other sometimes resulted in sensory overload, with perhaps a little too much singing for those who would prefer just to appreciate the bagad itself.
Inveraray & District have become equally famous for their entertainment value as their competitive prowess in their seven years in Grade 1 and have lost none of their character since performing one of the all-time great “pre-Worlds” concerts on the same stage in 2013. The ever-relaxed Pipe Major Stuart Liddell, unburdened by the need for such mundane things as a microphone and a set list, calmly shuffled the programme and invited audience requests without a care in the world.
The material he eventually decided to stick with was a mixture of old and new, including 2/4 marches in Inveraray’s familiar Canadian barn dance style, the second half of their She Moves Through the Fair medley from 2016, and a slow Gaelic number full of “C” naturals, given an intriguingly bluegrass feel by Pipe Sergeant Alasdair Henderson.
The Inveraray drum corps have been in sensational form recently, unsurprising considering leading drummer Steven McWhirter has now won six World Solo Drumming titles in a row. However, opting to play the full complement of snares for most of the concert created a balance issue with the 19-strong pipe corps, made more noticeable when reducing the snare line to five for one set immediately felt much more harmonious.
Following the début of their new MSR (The Links of Forth, The Bob of Fettercairn, and Charlie’s Welcome), Inveraray finished off with a driving pair of distinctly retro hornpipes — Raigmore and Sandy’s New Chanter, and the closing Thunderhead set from their Ascension concert and album, which fittingly begins with the air Travels Through Brittany. There was, naturally, an encore, which featured the sublimely cheeky act of the pipers striking each other’s chanters in the last part of The Mason’s Apron. Inveraray’s portion of the concert could comfortably have been a little longer, but then again, the rule of showbusiness is to leave your audience wanting more rather than glancing at their watches.
There was an altogether more intimate atmosphere that evening at The National Piping Centre, which played host to two winners of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award with Hebridean roots — smallpiper Brìghde Chaimbeul and former Gaelic Singer of the Year Mischa MacPherson. Both served up a range of classy tunes and songs with some rather quirky titles, Little Wee Winking Thing and There Was Once a Big Potato being the standouts.
The other big piping attraction of this year’s festival was the Tryst concert promoted by The Big Music Society. The night’s proceedings were subject to a later-than-planned start due to a fire alarm — a nightmare scenario for any concert heavily involving bagpipes.
The supporting group on the evening were Irish newcomers Connla, and if they were at all fazed by the delayed start to the concert they certainly didn’t show it. Their set in the New Auditorium highlighted the rich sound and sophisticated arrangements that makes their début album River Waiting such a joy to listen to.
Vocalist and bodhran player Ciara McCafferty stunned the hall with a deeply emotional rendition of Mary Dillon’s heart-breaking song The Boatman, but sent the audience out to the bar in fine spirits at the interval with some classic Eric Clapton.
In the second half it was time for, as John Cleese once said, something completely different. In recent years the Big Music Society has been heavily involved in fostering new interpretations of piobaireachd, the idiom of pipe music often said to be the most strait-jacketed by the conventions of tradition. To push the boundaries still further, they have enlisted the help of Tryst — a true supergroup of 10 of the best-known Highland pipers in the folk scene – to imagine a new “big music” for the 21st century.
The diverse talent of the group — Finlay MacDonald, Ali Hutton, Ross Ainslie, John Mulhearn, James Duncan Mackenzie, Lorne MacDougall, Mairearad Green, Rory Campbell, Calum MacCrimmon and Steven Blake — was on full display, with many switching seamlessly between pipes, whistles, keys, string instruments, accordion and vocals to bring the original compositions by each band member to life.
The pieces, mostly around five minutes long, reflected some of the main themes that have resonated in Scottish music for centuries and remain highly relevant today — enforced migration, a changing world and the bond between land and people.
Tryst went down a storm in Dundee’s Caird Hall at the Scottish Traditional Music Awards in December 2016 with their highly innovative setpiece In the Pipes – would their take on that most hallowed form of pipe music have the same impact?
Think of Marty McFly’s performance at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance at the end of Back to the Future. The teenagers of the 1950s could not relate to his heavy guitar solo without having lived through the musical transformations of the 60s and 70s first, prompting Marty to conclude: “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet.” Tryst could well be heralding the dawn of a new age for the “big music”, but back in 2017, perhaps we just aren’t ready yet either.
The 2017 Celtic Connections festival reached a fitting climax with the final of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition at the City Halls on February 5. This year’s line-up featured Grant McFarlane on accordion, Ella Munro and Iona Fyfe singing Scots song, Kim Carnie singing Gaelic song, Dougie McCance on bagpipes and Charlie Stewart on fiddle. Several of them have clearly been honing their stagecraft playing to big audiences for many years, despite their young ages, and came with party tricks or in Grant’s case, party wigs hidden under a few audience seats in tribute to his father Jim, who called the dances for Grant’s ceilidh band when he was wee. Dougie’s time with the Red Hot Chilli Pipers has honed his showman’s swagger, and it was refreshing to hear his dextrous finger work and original compositions with the spotlight all to himself.
If there was one true-showstopper out of all the magnificent performances, it was Iona Fyfe’s powerful rendition of the classic folk ballad Queen Amang the Heather, made all the more magical by her exquisite and beautifully dark piano accompaniment. While the finalists were undeniably talented in their own right, full credit must go to backing musicians Mike Bryan on guitar, Iain Sandilands on percussion and Jennifer Austin on piano for assimilating 90 minutes of hugely diverse material with six different leads. At the end of a closely-fought and immensely enjoyable competition, a gobsmacked Charlie Stewart was declared the winner for 2017.
It was the perfect conclusion to the latest incarnation of a festival long famed for its seamless blend of old and new, traditional and ground-breaking, homegrown and international. The six performers who made it to the final have all mastered their respective traditions, and added to them with their own arrangements and compositions.
Reflecting on this, an obvious connection emerged with Tryst’s performance at the first weekend of the festival. The first piece to be performed was Finlay MacDonald’s In Praise of the Pioneers, which, according to the programme notes, salutes “individuals who through their innate creativity have helped to push the tradition forward, at times, against prevailing conventions”.
A self-evident truth emerges from this: every piece of music we now think of as being part of “the tradition” was new when it was written — all composers throughout history have been pioneers in their own way. Many faced criticism and outright rejection because what they did was perceived as too different, too radical — too foreign — because the community they lived in was, shall we say, not ready for that yet.
These days the temptation to retreat into our own bubbles and turn away from anything we don’t recognise seems to be growing harder to resist, but music can challenge us to reconsider our preconceptions — to listen again, more carefully, for the beauty beneath the surface to try and understand the “other”.
At a time when the world is plagued by intractable wars, nations are divided and walls, both concrete and metaphorical, seem to be rising wherever we look, the message of the Gaels rings true.
“The world may come to an end, but love and music will endure”.
“Love and music” — there can be no better tools for transforming walls into bridges, swords into ploughshares, and enemies into brothers. We need them — and our pioneers — more than ever.
•Words by Stuart Milne for Piping Today magazine issue 85.