1. Buffalo Plaid
2. Silver Wings
3. Song For The Mira
4. Tell Me Ma
1. Buffalo Plaid
2. Silver Wings
3. Song For The Mira
4. Tell Me Ma
Caledon County grew out of the accidental musical collaboration of Stephanie Miletic and Rory Sinclair in early 2011. They were both playing ‘colour licks’ on opposites sides of a nominally Irish band when Rory asked Stephanie if she wanted to work up a couple of pipe tunes on her fiddle with a view to presenting them for play with Gordon’s Acoustic Living Room, a band he had been playing with since 2004. She enthusiastically agreed, and it was a terrific success. This set off a year of intense work where Stephanie and Rory developed a unique and tight style of playing Scottish pipe music. Soon a repertoire was developed and memorized and they moved to the idea that they should form their own stand-alone trio, with a guitarist filling out the missing spot. In the Fall of 2012, Gaye Zimmerman-Huycke, additionally a wonderful singer-song writer, joined the band and the trio, henceforth to be called Caledon County, came into being.
Continue reading “My Home: Scottish Music with a Canadian Accent”Over the past seven years, it has been my great pleasure to play in a band here in Toronto, which we call Gordon’s Acoustic Living Room. The band has indulged me as I brought pipe tune after pipe tune to try out – some Scottish and some not. When playing pipes with other instruments, rather than as a solo competitor or in a pipe band, the beautiful chords that are part of Scottish pipe music but merely implied with pipes alone, become manifest as the other players join in. This I love. Over time it started to dawn on me – indeed this is the seed of this collection – that there are many genres of music in the world that lend themselves to pipe solos if not also whole pipe tunes.
1. MacCrimmon Will Never Return
Vocals: Rebecca Barclay, Gaye Zimmerman Huycke. Pipes: Rory Sinclair. Guitar: Dean Cavill.
The MacCrimmons were the legendary hereditary pipers to the MacLeods of Dunvegan on Skye. Donald Ban MacCrimmon, against his Chief’s wishes, joined the cause of Charles Edward Stewart in the rising of 1745. In a skirmish outside Inverness known as the Rout of Moy, there was only one casualty – Donald Ban MacCrimmon – and it was he who predicted his own death by composing this eerie tune less than a year before it occurred.
Rebecca Barclay brought this extraordinary version of the tune to our band. Each line she sings occurs in the Piper’s Received Version but not in the same order we have here; I have honoured Rebecca’s interpretation by playing the pipes in parallel phrasing to her voice. Continue reading “Clan Sinclair Canada Salutes the 2005 Sinclair Gathering”