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by John Slavin

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Pipes, folk and funk fusionCalum MacCrimmon

It seems to be that if you want to have a successful career as a musician in the piping or Scottish traditional music

scenes you need to have more to offer than just your playing ability. Giving music tui-tion would probably need to be a part of your weekly routine, and it would also be a big plus if you could turn your hand to multi-instruments, be a member of more than one band, maybe have your own CD or two to sell, write your own music, and have arrange-ment and producing skills to offer.

Calum MacCrimmon can lay claim to all of the above, and since graduating with honours from the BA (Scottish Music) degree at the RSAMD in 2004 he has applied these talents to keep himself busy. He was also pre-viously featured in Piping Today (issue 19) as part of the ‘Canadian MacCrimmons’ series of features which focused on his family as descendants of the legendary MacCrimmon dynasty who were the hereditary pipers to the Chiefs of MacLeod on Skye.

Calum was involved in the early days of The National Youth Pipe Band as a backing musician and as a pipe tuner/instructor, and this led to him being asked to be Musical Director and co-producer of the NYPBoS concert which opened the Piping Live! festival in 2004. Though his main musical focus since 2005 has been as a member of Breabach, a most welcome addition to the UK folk scene with their fresh, but traditional, take on good tunes and good songs played on twin Highland pipes, fiddle, flute and guitar. In fact they have such a knack for picking good material that it makes me wonder why so many other bands fail to do likewise (though that is a rant for another day — and I know it eventually boils down to musical taste and the ear of the beholder).

In 2005 Breabach won a Danny Award at the Celtic Connections festival Open Stage and that win sparked a change in the fortunes of the band, and in the five years since they have established themselves as festival and folk

club favourites. “Since 2005 we have worked with some amazing people like Donald Shaw from Capercaillie, whose label we signed to for our first album The Big Spree, and Lisa Whytock who became our agent. When we won the Danny Award, we didn’t really know how to take the next step, so we were very fortunate to have these people on our side,” said Calum.

Breabach’s busiest time in their work sched-ule is around the festival season or when they have a tour planned, and they have a UK tour just about to start as this issue went to press. “This tour is looking like it is going to be a big one running from March 20 till June 12. We do have some time off in there, but there will be a lot of traveling with many of the gigs in England and Wales. We are actually doing one gig in the Royal Albert Hall — though it is in the cafe — but we have just put Royal Albert Hall on our publicity!

“The tour includes a mixture of venues, and sometimes it can be great being in the

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Breabach at Celtic Connections 2010. Pictured from the left: Patsy Reid; Donal Brown; Calum MacCrimmon and Ewan Robertson

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more intimate venues which are only just big enough to put the pipes up. There are also a few festivals on the tour with us returning to the Gosport and Fareham Festival on the south coast of England across the Easter weekend and the Arran Folk Festival which finishes the tour on June 12.”

Coinciding with their tour they have the official release of their second album, The Desperate Battle of the Birds, although the band have been selling the CD on their website since January. “The end of March is the earliest our distributors could get the CD into the shops, but we have been selling it ourselves and will do so throughout the tour to try to make back the money we spent on it.”

The first CD released by the band, The Big Spree, was licensed for sale to Vertical Records but for their new CD they decided to take a different approach and keep control of eve-rything within the band. “Ultimately we felt that, as business people as well as musicians, we could achieve a lot with this CD if we took charge of everything ourselves,” said Calum. “We have had some assistance from our agent Lisa, and we have had a fair bit of learning to do regarding the distribution and getting a grasp of all the other aspects. The band are putting a lot of effort into Breabach Records at the moment and long may it continue — as long

as we keep getting ideas and are still passionate about presenting the bagpipe on a modern stage and performing to the public.

“It has gone so well for us, it is kind of hard to believe — especially down south. We seem to be really popular down there and have done very well out of festival performances over the last couple of years — and that surprised me! I wasn’t sure how two sets of Highland pipes in a folk band would be received in England. I think there may be a novelty aspect, but I like to think that people are really enjoying our music, and the signs are there that they are. We have been asked to return to venues and festivals, and are planning some trips to Europe fairly soon and to Canada in the summer, so it is going pretty well.”

SO ALL of Calum’s musical talents are put to good use within Breabach, but he still finds the time to fit in other musical projects. In 2007 he received a New Voices commission from Celtic Connections to put together a performance of his own compositions called Outside the Circle, which allowed him to work with eight of his contemporaries from within the folk scene. This commission led Calum to the realisation he would like to put out an album under his own name, and the cathartic process he underwent when producing and

performing Outside the Circle cleared his head for fresh ideas to explore — and basically took his music in a different direction which led to his own CD, Man’s Ruin.

“The main difference between my commis-sion and this album is the use of funk grooves and riffs to support modern traditional melo-dies. Everyone on the team felt great excitement about this kind of cross-over. The plan was to merge funk, and a bit of jazz, with Celtic music — which is where my tune writing came in.

“I think Man’s Ruin is a good representation of my musical path over the last few years. It incorporates the kind of music that I like to play and the kind of music that I like to sing. There is no piping on it: but that was never my plan, it’s just the way it worked out. I was get-ting ideas for arrangements and songs, and was just running with it. To be honest, it was only once the recording was finished that I realised there was zero piping. I always had something in the back of my head that said ‘we will get some pipes on it; there are some pipe tunes in there’, but once I had laid down the whistle parts I didn’t feel that there was any space for the Highland’s. It is kind of ironic that Calum MacCrimmon, the piper, does his first album and there is no piping on it — but it is part of the pun of the whole recording. It is maybe not what you would expect me to do, but it is maybe not what I expected me to do either — it is just the way it is.”

So by now you are probably wondering just what the music on Man’s Ruin sounds like — well, funky is certainly the word that springs to mind from the opening bars of the first track. I don’t want to turn this into a CD review, but just to give you an idea; my wife described the opening song as similar to the funky guitar vibe of the US rock band, Red Hot Chilli PEPPERS’ Blood Sugar Sex Magic album — that meant nothing to me — but it certainly met with her approval. The first track is certainly the most funky and ‘out there’, and most of the other tracks take different-sized steps back to traditional music, but all with an underlying funk groove in varying degrees. The instru-mental tracks are led by Calum’s whistle, with a fiddle taking the front from time to time, but the most outstanding aspect for me has to be Calum’s voice which is as very convincing as any up-and-coming funkster/popster’s should be, and there are definite similarities to Pat Kane, the well-respected lead vocalist of Glasgow’s late 80s/early 90s pop sensation, Hue and Cry.

‘It is ironic that Calum MacCrimmon, the piper, does his first album and there is no piping on it — but it is part of the pun of the whole recording. It is maybe not what

you would expect me to do, but it is

not what I expected me to do either’

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I’ve come to realise that musicians don’t really appreciate being compared to other musicians, but to give you a further impression of the tune sets (and at the risk of upsetting Calum) I would say that the instrumentals are similar to the type of feel you get from the flute and whistle playing of the ubiquitous Irish traditional musician, Michael McGoldrick, with the added drum and bass groove prevalent throughout Capercaillie’s music. Though there are a few instances on the CD if the drum and bass was removed it would give you a straight traditional music feel with whistle, fiddle and squeezebox.

All of the tunes on the CD are composed by Calum, and are written in a style “in the tradi-tion” for want of a better phrase — in fact I have just thought of a better phrase — iTrad tunes; which works on a couple of levels. Whether these iTrad tunes become assimilated into the traditional music repertoire will be down to the continual process of natural selection, but there are certainly more than a few melodies which catch my ear.

You can hear track samples and

buy CDs of all of the above from

the following websites:

www.breabach.com

www.myspace.com/breabach

www.calummaccrimmon.com

www.myspace.com/calummaccrimmon

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Er... it seems like I have written a bit of a review that I hadn’t intended to. So to finish it off: I do like this CD; the music is top quality and the funky drum and bass gels the various musical styles together to make for a complete listening experience, and I love the way each track seam-lessly joins onto the next without the usual two second silence — that is very clever. However, the CD was a slow burner, as it was not the kind of music I would normally listen to. I would usually prefer the stomp and grind of jigs that you could Strip the Willow to, rather than throw sinuous funky shapes on a dance floor, but I can certainly hear the appeal of Man’s Ruin. It would be the perfect music for a folk festival looking for something different to get people on their feet and dancing, and the material is not so far removed from traditional music that it would not appeal to a modern folk audience — and there is a chance that festival audiences might get to strut their funky stuff to Man’s Ruin.

Calum explains, “I am starting a band called Man’s Ruin, but I think it will be more song-based with some tunes involved when appropriate. I don’t see us trying to re-create all the music from the CD in a live setting, but some of it, certainly the harder hitting stuff like the songs,

I’m just aching to go out and perform. I’ve got a whole heap of songs I have been working on, and I have been doing some preparation with Innes Watson, who played a variety of instru-ments on the CD, and a bass player called James Lyndsay. We are also hoping to have a great kit drummer from Dundee called Scott Donald — and the plan is to get out and have a big singing and playing fandango!

“My priorities at the moment are with Breabach so when the Man’s Ruin band are finally out performing it will need to fit around Breabach. It will be a chance for me to do more of a... Calum MacCrimmon thing — and I don’t mean that I’m going to be some kind of front man or anything like that. I enjoy bands where everyone in the band is a big part of the team, and I think you get some great music when you can get that chemistry on and off the stage. But Man’s Ruin is going to be a lot of my own mate-rial, which is not necessarily what I get to accomplish in Breabach, so it fills a different part of my

career and path as a musician. “I’m very keen to play this music

to different audiences, but I don’t think it needs to stray too far from the folk scene, as there will always be elements of traditional music in there. There is certainly nothing to stop Man’s Ruin crossing over to a more popular market: there are blues clubs; jazz clubs; filthy rock bars — why not? If the music can cross over those boundaries then there is no reason not to do it — and it will be good to have the bagpipes in there just to shock them all. The pipes will be part of the show — it is not like I’m going to ignore the biggest influence on my musical life, and I’ve got quite a few ideas on how they can be incorporated into the set.

“I have got a lot of belief in the music, but even more so in the people whom I will be working with on the arrangements — they are amazing and come up with great ideas. That is what happened with the team on my Man’s Ruin CD, and the chemistry is already apparent for the Man’s Ruin band — it is really exciting.”

So the Man’s Ruin live perform-ances are something we can look out for in the future, but in the short term Calum’s sights are set on the Breabach tour and promoting his Man’s Ruin release. “At the moment all I’m selling is hard copies of the CD, but I hope to have digital downloads from my website fairly soon. Until then the CD is only available through my website or directly from me — I’ve constantly got a bag of CDs on my back so, literally, all the weight is on my shoulders.” l