Roddy MacDonald, Good Drying (Greentrax, 2003)
Roddy MacDonald comes from a line of pipe players. Both his father and grandfather played the pipes. Roddy himself has been writing, playing and recording music for three decades with groups like The Tannahill Weavers, Ceolbeg and Shooglenifty, as well as traditional pipe bands. Roddy MacDonald now resides in Japan and Australia, and this album was recorded in the latter, produced by Murray Blair, also a piper but mainly playing the keyboards here. Greentrax labels it "a compilation of Roddy's lifetime musical excursions."
If you want to sample the album and get a musical overview of what is on offer, I recommend you to try track seven, a twelve minute medley called "Departure," consisting of six different tunes. It starts out slowly with a drum far in the background, giving it a bit of a sinister feeling. A guitar and a bouzouki lead us into an air with some rhythmically tricky notes in the middle eight. Then we get some programmed percussion reminiscent of the Battlefield Band, and the pipe playing shifts into a higher gear. Some atmospheric keyboards provide an interlude before the pipes return with another rhythmic tune, this time using the guitar as the rhythm provider. The keyboards return, creating a tension between the fast bagpipes, the rhythmic guitar and its own block chords that just lay there.
Instrumental albums tend to sound a bit "same-y," especially if they are centred round just one solo instrument. Roddy MacDonald tries to overcome this by creating different settings for his pipes. "Meal Fuar-Mhonaidh" gives you the pipes on their own, and the opener, "Bullet Train," uses samplings of different sounds and voices to create folky bagpipe disco music; "I'll Paco Grande" opens with flamenco guitar to a great effect. Each track gets its own sound, with MacDonald's pipes being the thing you recognise all the way through.
Whether you like this album or not comes down to two things. First of all, do you like the highland pipes? I am not that keen on them in too large portions, and I confess I like this album the most when I play a few tracks at a time. Secondly, if you are a purist, better leave this alone. Roddy MacDonald has a broad musical taste, and he really shows it here. He has nothing against mixing his pipes with any musical style that comes to mind.
In other words, Good Drying is mainly an album for those who like the pipes in different contexts. I will keep it as a showcase to take out whenever my friends air preconceptions about highland pipes only being fit for marching bands.
Greentrax has a Web site here.
