Thanks to the wonderful Marshall family, Linda Hill, and the warm congregation at St Mary’s Episcopal church of Big Spring Tx, I was able to play pipes with a couple of friends and catch this beautiful Texas sunset.
Richard Kean and Randy Wothke were both in good form as we played some tunes at the evening St Andrew’s service and then jammed in the courtyard while an excellent reception meal was had by all. A bass drummer named Roy from the Thorn and Thistle pipe band helped us out on a few tunes which was great.
On the way back to the airport I caught a picture of a working oil field with giant windmills in the distance. The future looks bright.

Here are two tunes written by a friend of mine named Richard Kean: St Vincent’s Reel and Café Aviño. I don’t know who St Vincent was but Café Aviño was a coffee shop in the Montrose area of Houston where we used to play tunes around 1999 and 2000.  Richard and I might be playing these tunes at the Teribus show on Sept 2nd at the Mucky Duck in Houston. Blackwood ivory smallpipes video 1 

Last night I finished two chanters for Richard and I to play in Teribus. I’d like to get a drone done but not sure if there’ll be time. At least we’ve got bags and chanters now. 

The weekend of July 4th started out with a plane ride to Tx and the finishing touches on a set of Cocobolo pipes to be delivered in Austin. I managed to finish in time to get out to the Houston session on the wednesday night at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck. I walked in to find Gregory McQueen, the fiddle player from Clandestine, Al Cofrin, the cittern player from Clandestine and director of Istanpitta, and Larry Mallette, a flute player, M.D., and composer of one of my favorite tunes “The Rolling Jig” playing away.  The next day Clandestine played a show at the Cactus Cafe to a great crowd of friends and did the Austin release of ReD. I had spent the afternoon playing smallpipes at Things Celtic on 35th, one of the last and best storefront shop for kilts, Irish and Scottish music, gifts, jewelry and general cool stuff.  On Saturday we played two full house shows at the Mucky Duck and I started practicing some tunes from next year’s silver medal list I’ll have to submit for the Winter Storm contest in KS City next January. I had also brought the ProTools setup with the new microphone to finish the last bit of the tracking for the Teribus album “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombard”.  It felt great to have a weekend with Clandestine and being back in that band feels like having a member of my family back from beyond. The camaraderie is wonderful and the music is really something I can believe in. Emily and Al as a writing team have turned out to be kind of a miracle since a year and a half ago we were all sitting in Emily’s house at rehearsal saying “we really need new material and that means new songs”. She and Al opened the floodgates and now we have more new stuff than we can play in a normal show. The band’s back at the Celtic Classic, TSF, and we’re going back to AZ in February to a highland games we used to love.  Now that we’ve got a new CD I guess we’ll go for Lorient as well and see if we can go overseas in 2009. I spent last week doing the final, final bombard parts for the Teribus album and we made our printing deadline by about one day. I was worried it wasn’t going to happen and went through what felt like the cycle of grieving for a while, eventually getting to acceptance that what would happen would happen and I was just taking each step in the recording process for it’s own sake. The lesson I got back from this experience was that if you just keep throwing as much love as you can at something there’s a chance it’ll work out. In this case that’s what happened and the album is full of heart from all three of us. I feel incredibly lucky that we’re playing together and finally have our first album. Now to think about the second. The same goes for Clandestine and I’m supposed to be practicing some of the old tunes and a couple of complicated new ones for the next show Labor Day Saturday.  I did as much practicing for the Grandfather Mt Games this past weekend as I could given the recording and performance schedules of the last couple of weeks. I had thought I had missed the entry deadline at one point but squeaked in under the wire. It was a gorgeous day on the mountain and I had nothing else to do that day except compete in the five events and go play smallpipes with Ed Miller in one of the groves. By the time the day was over I had won the Strathspey and Reel contest which was a great encouragement considering two years ago I had a problem with my left hand and couldn’t play an E doubling. That’s been getting steadily better over time and while it affected a couple of the other events I managed to rip out a tune called “The Piper’s Bonnet” and “Lochiel’s Away to France” which are as full of E doublings as a tune can be. So now I’m really encouraged to practice like hell. Next stop: Pennsic 37 playing crazy medieval style bagpipes and trying to keep up with Kevin and Richard as part of Teribus.  

Last weekend I went to the Norman Medieval Faire in Oklahoma and played with my friend Al’s band Istanpitta. It was about half playing the flute and singing and half playing crazy Medieval bagpipes. One of the nicest things about the weekend was that in addition to our stage sets we went out and busked. Now theoretically we’re supposed to be out there selling CDs and making money by doing this. We did get a bit of a crowd but at the end we were in a circle singing and playing to each other. One of the things I love about this is that we were “found music”, an unexpected scene of four people just playing for the fun of it, for “free”. Ever since the first time I went out to the Dickens festival in Galveston when I was 13 I’ve loved putting out the hat. I find myself playing with more urgency and also more joy since playing in public unbidden has to be for a reason and I find the reason in providing an atmosphere with the tunes. Part of the urgency is in the uncertainty in whether people will like the music, whether somebody is going to file a noise complaint, and maybe become a welcome surprise in the day for the audience walking by. The whole point is to make a normal city street feel special, or a festival seem more full of music. I’ve found the best policy is to forget about the tip hat and try to make people feel something using the pipes which are so good at invoking feelings in people. Anyway after playing stage sets and a few busking sets with Istanpitta all weekend I took the rest of the band to the airport on Sunday. It was so early that the festival was still going on after I got back to Norman and I decided I would go out and play some celtic tunes after a whole weekend of Medieval music. I took the great pipes that Richard and I made and a few Willow CDs and played for about an hour in one of the lanes. I realized that the pipes give something different to different people. There were bikers and computer nerds and women all dressed to look good, and moms with little kids. At one point I had a couple of three year old children with tie dye and fairy wings on dancing while their parents watched. Some kids with metal music themed t-shirts walked by and gave me the thumbs up. So funny how one tune on one instrument can appeal so clearly to children, parents, rebels, soldiers, office workers, and senior citizens of all different ethnicities. So to make a long story short I had a great time getting the Irish and Scottish tunes out of my system in one of the paths at the festival while the sun went down. I made some dollars and sold a couple of CDs enough to buy dinner.All that busking last weekend has got me all into doing it in Asheville where there are dozens of players downtown. I’m taking the osage pipes out tomorrow to give them some testing in public before sending them to a very patient customer. About half the people with instruments and a cup for tips in downtown Asheville are just idiots who can’t actually play anything. They just make random sounds on instruments and expect the tourists to give them money. I’m really enjoying trying to contradict the image of the annoying vagrant. The smallpipes are perfect for playing in Asheville’s downtown setting that’s not too loud and often full of people who are here on vacation. More on this later.Tonight I finished the bag and the connectors for my next C set for a customer up north. Tomorrow starting on the chanter and maybe boring the drones.