Reviews

New album review: LAS – Brìghde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie

New album review: LAS – Brìghde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie

Review by Chris MacKenzie • Great White Records, GWR008CD. Those of a certain vintage will remember the days where there were regular releases of solo piping recordings, featuring the piper playing a formulaic repertoire of marches, some hornpipes and jigs and, of course, a piobaireachd. These days, the truly solo recording […]

New album review: Kyle Warren – Relentless

New album review: Kyle Warren – Relentless

Review by Chris MacKenzie • Greentrax Recordings, CDTRAX411 The first fifty four seconds of Kyle Warren’s Relentless CD sets down a marker, that what follows will not be a gentle stroll through piping’s gently verdant pastures. Instead, it discombobulates you into thinking you have slipped Megadeath into the CD. Slowly […]

June 2006: Michael Grey’s Shimla Hum

June 2006: Michael Grey’s Shimla Hum

ON THIS DAY in June 2006, Michael Grey released Shimla Hum on his own label, Dunaber Music. The album was reviewed in Piping Today #23. If you missed it first time around, or if you are just as youngster and haven’t researched as far back as 2006, then it is still available on […]

Album review: Ross Miller ‘The Roke’

Album review: Ross Miller ‘The Roke’

THE ROKE CD Review by Stuart Milne. Piping Today #100, 2020. Ross Miller is a great example of what it means to be a modern piper. As Ross explains in the sleeve notes to his debut solo album, The Roke, his early musical background was purely in pipe bands (formerly Peoples […]

More power to your elbow – and foot!

More power to your elbow – and foot!

REVIEW by PETER McCALISTER This year, for the first time, the annual competition held by the Lowland & Border Pipers’ Society (LBPS) was held in Linlithgow, at the historic Burgh Halls. This marvellous old building has been re-purposed with meeting rooms and a café – and the acoustics are superb. […]

The Campbeltown Book of Piping

The Campbeltown Book of Piping

The Campbeltown Book of Piping by Iain Duncan — a review by Duncan Beaton When I left the countryside of Argyll for the ‘big city’ of Glasgow in 1965 I felt like a 16 year-old pioneer, naively unaware that plenty of others had made a similar journey before me. One […]

Stuart Letford reviews the James Duncan Mackenzie Collection

Stuart Letford reviews the James Duncan Mackenzie Collection

James Duncan Mackenzie had a busy and creative lockdown. The Silver Medallist from Lewis, Scotland published this, his first collection, at the end of 2021 and he has just released his third solo-piping album, a recording that features music from the book. Too many collections produced these days contain page […]