Lost in translation

Yesterday evening I listened to St Kilda Wedding, mostly because I'd been humming The Braes o' Strathblane for a day or two. I'd forgotten that there are some good pipe tunes on the album, and I'd forgotten because they are not played on pipes. They are played on whistles (which is fair enough, I suppose - pipers seem to play whistles from time to time), fiddle, and Irish pipes. The tunes sound faintly familiar and feel oddly wrong played on Uillean pipes. It's like being abroad and catching a programme you know that has been dubbed. Characters you know as American or Cockney or northern are suddenly spouting in French or German or Italian. It's all the familiar faces, but the voices are all wrong. As well as the language they never seem to try to match the tone or timbre of the original actors' voices.

There was a time when I wondered why a band keen on exploring Scottish music would play Irish pipes. I suppose the answer is that St Kilda was recorded in 1978 before smallpipes were revived or reinvented. Although I do wonder why they couldn't have made a go of it with GHB. By the time we reach 1997 and the Carrying Stream (one of my all time favourite albums) we have smallpipes played by Iain MacInnes and made by Ian Kinnear, the Monkey's maker.

I didn't play yesterday. Today I had two minor breakthroughs. The first was finally cracking Trail and Captn, dotless. I tried them with the Whaling Song - the three seem to go quite nicely together. The second was a small patch where I felt as comfortable with the A as I do with D, felt the bellows and bag pliant and soft, tucked close to me and breathing with me. I had it...and then it went. It's like cats. D is the one that will snuggle and cuddle and purr into your face, A will momentarily rest on you under duress, but then with a switch of the tail is out of your arms and gone.