Folk, Jazz etc: Surprised by a welcome double blast from the past on harp, pipes … and volcano

Published on Tuesday 14 July 2009 19:02

COINCIDENCE, synchronicity, phases of the moon, or what? New CDs generally arrive on my desk unobtrusively enough, demurely clad in Jiffy bags. Twice last week, however, they were thrust into my hand in the street by folk I hadn't seen for a long time.

The first incident was when a vaguely familiar-looking character beaming from beneath a baseball cap hailed me on my home turf of Portobello High Street. It turned out to be harpist and composer William Jackson, whom I'd last seen sharing an Edinburgh Harp Festival stage with the Irish harpist Grinne Hambly a year or two back. Jackson spends much of his time in North Carolina, but was visiting a daughter, and promptly handed me a copy of his most recent album, The New Harp (Mill Records), a fetching selection of traditional and tunes and his own compositions, two of which in particular, the title track and the closing Flight of the Earls, display the characteristic Jackson lyricism and delicacy of touch.

Encounter No 2: I emerge from The Scotsman's office, in search of caffeine, when a motorcycle approaches and mounts the pavement, its black clad, helmeted rider booming something unintelligible at me. I'm wondering whether I should henceforth walk in the road and leave the pavements to motorcyclists, when the Darth-Vaderish apparition heaves off his helmet to reveal the distinctive shades and bushy locks of Jimi McCrae, aka "Jimi the Piper". And, yes, he has a CD for me.

It's an alarming ten years this month since I last interviewed McRae, when he was making the transition from being the weel-kent, blue-faced and be-plaided "Braveheart piper" of Edinburgh's Parliament Square into an eclectically-inclined recording performer.

His latest album, Global Gathering: Music of the Clan MacRae, anticipates his role during the forthcoming Gathering in Edinburgh when, amid the tartan hordes converging on the city, he will pipe MacRae members up the Royal Mile – not to mention up Arthur's Seat.

The ascent of Edinburgh's own volcano is to commemorate a famous incident in 1778 which became known as "the Affair of the Wild MacRaes", when the newly formed 78th Seaforth Highlanders, composed predominantly of MacRaes, camped in the Hunter's Bog during their mutiny over being posted to India following an assurance that they would not be posted outside these islands.

A path on one of the hill's ridges is still known to this day as Piper's Walk, supposedly after the MacRae piper who paraded there, and on the album, which features exuberantly Jimi-esque layerings of Highland and small pipes, percussion, electronics and the odd didgeridoo, McRae plays The MacRaes' March to Arthur's Seat, which he unearthed in an old David Glen collection of pipe music.

He also includes a tune of his own, The Patagonia Highlanders, which he assures me was part-inspired by an interview I wrote for this paper earlier this year with one Eduardo Macrae, an Argentinan of Scots descent and enthusiastic clan activist who will also attend this month's global tartanalia.

The indignant Seaforths weren't the only clansmen to have camped out on Arthur's Seat. Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite army did likewise on its way to Prestonpans during that earlier business of '45, and I was always led to believe – local lore, possibly – that they did so as the hill was out of cannon shot range of the Castle.

As it is, Jimi will have his work cut out maintaining his puff while piping his global clansmen and women up the hill.

He doesn't busk these days – although "never say never" he tells me, but in his time has run the gauntlet of the irate legal sages of the Signet Library who objected to the strains of pipe music from Parliament Square disturbing their deliberations. But he hasn't been fired on with cannon. Yet.

&#149 See www.wjharp.com and www.jimithepiper.co.uk