We had an orgy of music at our local folk club in November: Emma Sweeney, Vamm, Anna and Mairearad, Breabach. Our folk club, quite fairly, I suppose, as we're in England, favours English Folk, so it was a welcome surprise to find so many Scots and Irish bands in the line up this season.
Anna has a good line in patter. She had an anecdote that required a Swedish accent, first checking that there were, of course, no Swedes in the audience. She had less luck with the French - there was a French man sitting (as she noted in a stage whisper to Mairearad) right in the front row.
During Braebach's set Calum noted they were about to play pibroch and asked if anyone was familiar with this. I obviously didn't shout up loud enough as Calum looked rather bemused and said he wasn't sure if that was a yes or someone's dinner disagreeing with them...
In the interval I did the fan thing and told JDM that I admired his solo CD. He seemed very surprised that anyone would have heard of it, seemed to think it made sense that I would be a fellow piper (he liked smallpipes, he said), but was amazed that I am not a lone piper in the South East. We have, I said, the Essex Caledonian, CADPAD, bands in Southend and Ipswich, and host the RSPBA London and South East competition each summer.
When Vamm were playing Catriona cheerfully said they had improved on three pipe tunes by playing them on fiddles. She did ask, laughingly, if there were any pipers in the audience. She was expecting silence, of course she was, but one voice piped up....
Vamm themselves are full of surprises. Their CD has an irritating lack of information about any of the tunes, but there is one that sounds rather Baroque-ish, and one that sounds as though it might be written by Duncan Chisholm. Nothing sounds quite as you'd expect a couple of Scots fiddles to sound, but it all sounds very good indeed.
Just the chanter today, and more work on grace notes. Surprisingly I rather enjoyed it.
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