things
The ever popular village night returns to Wall Village Hall on Saturday 30th December. It’s Old Year’s Night, the last night of the old year and a celebration of Northumbrian Music, Song & Stories!
A Bring & Share Supper @ 7.30pm followed by a feast of entertainment including the talented Brothers Gillespie, sublime tunes on the fiddle and button accordion from Beth Chamberlain & Joe O’Connor and much more!
Tickets are £10 – contact me for tickets and additional info
A slow air from 2021 that I kept meaning to record on the appropriate date!
The tune is in the key of C which is an uncommon key for the smallpipes but perfectly playable. In this case the tune actually fits on the standard 7 key chanter as there are no F naturals. Drones need to be tuned to G and a C if you can get one; my A drone can be pushed up to a C.
A couple of new-ish jigs. The first is ‘Tunnock Law‘ which was written for my wife and a long running birthday tradition. No matter how small the Hebridean island the (tiny) local store will always have Tunnock’s teacakes by way of a birthday cake and they have to be eaten on the beach. A ‘Law’ is is also a hill round these parts and a veritable mountain of Tunnock’s featured at one significant birthday!
‘The Man Who Laid an Egg‘ was written for fellow musician and very good friend Mark Bazeley.
David Burleigh, the most prolific, and now retired, maker of Northumbrian Smallpipes very helpfully numbered his instruments from the mid 1970s onwards topping out at a whopping 3,269 in 2012. The exact dates for some instruments are known and from those a rough timeline can be derived. Sometimes, however, sets come along with the potential to cause confusion!
First up is an early set from the mid 1970s I had a play on last year and it was one of the earliest numbered sets I have seen – and there’s an obvious challenge in reading the number – is it #66 or #99?
The number is always on the low E key (with the name on the low D key) and in all chanters I have seen the numbers are read with the E key on the top of the chanter. This would mean that this set would be #99. In later sets there is a number marker – it’s not consistently applied pre/post the number but it is non-reversible!
Here’s the other set that caused some confusion; the owner had asked me to fettle a set and the number was reported (entirely legitimately!) “81 something but it’s hard to read”. I was expecting something from the mid 1970s. As it turned out the set was a good 20 years younger dating from the early 1990s:
The number marker that can be seen here appears to be the Greek letter Psi (Ψ) – it’s not known why this was chosen, it may well have just been an unused / non-roman type stamp that was too hand!