By MICHAEL GREY. Let’s get this over with at the start – the boiler plate line from almost any positive review of a book that lands in the orbit of the piping world: the “new edition” of William Donaldson’s Pipers: A Guide to the Players and Music of The Great […]
Reviews
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 […]
REVIEW: Roddy Livingstone reviews Malcolm McRae’s ‘The Campbell Letters’
The Campbell Letters – Letters of James Campbell and of his father, Archibald Campbell of Kilberry. Edited by Malcolm McRae By RODDY LIVINGSTONE. When I was asked to review this book, it is fair to say I only accepted the task with some reluctance. The reasons for this were perhaps […]
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
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 […]
May 2008: A Celebration of The Music of Gordon Duncan
ON THIS DAY in May 2008, Greentrax Recordings released A Celebration of the Music of Gordon Duncan. It’s an album full of sparkling traditional music, including the fabulous Anada Pa Gael from the pipes of José Manuel Tejedor and the fiddle of Duncan Chisholm. The article below was published in […]
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!
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 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
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 […]