The Gordon Duncan Memorial Trust

Tunes For Gordon

Following the success of the first concert last year, the Trust wish to establish it as an annual celebration of Gordon’s music. In addition it will provide a platform for young musicians (including in time those that have received funding from the Trust) and encourage the creation of new work by commissioning a piece of music each year, under the title Tunes For Gordon.
As a ground-breaking creative force in traditional music, one of our foremost aims is to encourage young musicians to write their own music using Gordon’s open-minded approach as an inspiration. For this year’s concert we have deliberately recruited four of the finest young writers in traditional music to compose the first Tunes For Gordon. With support from the Scottish Arts Council, we have commissioned Ross Ainslie, Jarlath Henderson, Mairearead Green and John Somerville to write 25 minutes of new music to be performed by them at tonight’s concert. To accompany them we have a band containing some of Scotland’s finest young traditional talent.
This joint commission in itself echoes Gordon’s unconventional spirit in creating music. The resulting pieces will be recorded for future release. Each musician will compose one piece individually with one piece written by all four collectively.

Hosted by our two comperes for the evening Gary West and Fiona Ritchie, we are delighted to welcome a compilation of truly world class musicians from across the Celtic nations.

The Composers

Ross Ainslie
Ross Ainslie, from Perth, became a highly accomplished piper with The Vale of Atholl Pipe Band before touring with Gordon Duncan. He has since been involved in Ivan Drever’s band “Clueless”, Flook!, Dougie Maclean and Salsa Celtica.
As well as touring world wide over the past two years Ross released a debut album with Jarlath, “Partners in Crime”, in February 2008. He will shortly be heading to India to record a second album with Indian/Scottish fusion band India Alba, as well as undertaking a commission to write music for Perth Theatre’s December show, the Snow Queen.

Jarlath Henderson
Jarlath, from Dungannon, County Tyrone, has been playing the Uilleann pipes since he was 10 years old, learning initially from the renowned Armagh Piping Club. A talented and versatile musician, Jarlath also plays whistle, classical and traditional flute and guitar and has a keen interest in traditional song. In 2003 he became the first person from Ireland to win the BBC Young Folk Musician of the Year Award. He has been ‘All-Ireland Champion’ uilleann piper three times, teaches music with the Armagh Pipers Club and has both taught and performed at a number of international piping festivals on television and radio.
Currently in his fourth year of a medical degree Jarlath continues to manage his studies alongside a steady stream of concert performances.

Mairearad Green
Originally from the Wester Ross village of Achiltibuie, Mairearad is now based in Glasgow as a professional musician equally talented on the accordion, the pipes and the piano. At just 16, Mairearad was in the finals of BBC Young Scottish Traditional Musician of the Year 2001. She then went on to attend the Plockton Music School of Excellence for her final year at school. She has since studied French and Marketing at the University of Strathclyde and recently graduated with a BA Degree.
A keen composer, Mairearad’s tunes are rapidly becoming popular session tunes, with some recorded by Canadian band Clan Terra and fellow accordionist Gary Innes. Among the best-known are “Maggie West’s Waltz,” “Dad’s Landrover” and “Dram Behind the Curtain.” Mairearad is a member of the all female pipe group “Tachem” as well as the new accordion extravaganza known as “Box Club”. She has also recently toured with the fantastic Karine Polwart Band.

John Somerville
John Somerville hails from Abriachan on the banks of Loch Ness and currently stays in Glasgow. One of Scotland’s top young accordion players he is known for his high energy, dynamic playing style. He has in the past worked with a host of bands on the Scottish music scene including Croft No Five, Salsa Celtica, Session A9 and Franz Ferdinand and is currently involved in accordion supergroup Box Club, 13 piece outfit the Treacherous Orchestra and Folk/Jazz Sextet Babelfish. He has always drawn a lot of inspiration from Gordon’s music, especially at a younger age hearing a lot of Gordon’s tunes being performed by bands such as Wolfstone and Ceolbeg. His piece in tonight’s concert, ‘Otherland’, is based around a simple slow melody written with the Uileann pipes in mind. The opportunity to write for pipes is something which John saw as a bonus having never written specifically for the instrument before.

Special Guests

Hannah Fisher
Hannah was born in 1992 and grew up around Dunkeld in Perthshire. She began playing the violin at the age of seven, before discovering a love for traditional fiddle music with Dunkeld and District Strathspey and Reel Society. She is currently studying under Pete Clark, who has been a major influence on her musical style, along with Alisdair White and Duncan Chisholm. Hannah has recently been awarded a place in the junior department of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where she will be studying traditional Scottish music.

Sheila Stewart
Born in 1937, in a stable that belonged to a hotel in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Sheila grew up in a family of travelling people whose music and song gained world-wide renown during the folk music revival.
Her mother, Belle, was a great singer and tradition bearer as well as a songwriter, and her father, Alec, was a piper and storyteller. It was Sheila’s Uncle Donald, however, who chose her to carry on the family’s songs and stories. While other children were out playing, Sheila would be sat on her uncle’s knee learning another song. This paid off handsomely when, at regular family ceilidhs, Uncle Donald would ask Sheila to sing song after song in return for a ten-shilling note – quite a sum in the 1940s.
Sheila later sang with the family concert party, playing village halls all over Scotland and when, in 1954, journalist Maurice Fleming and folklorist Hamish Henderson arrived in Blairgowrie looking for singers of traditional songs, the Stewarts of Blair became a folk club, festival and concert attraction on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America the Stewarts of Blair were given the red carpet treatment and Sheila went on to sing in the White House for then-President Gerald Ford during America’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Six years later, on June 1 1982, Sheila appeared before her biggest audience ever, some 300,000, when she was chosen to represent the travelling people during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Scotland.

Kyle Howie
Kyle, from Dundee, is 16 years old and has been playing pipes under the tuition of Ian Duncan for six years. Now in his final year at Harris Academy, Kyle has had many significant achievements, not least coming runner-up at the Dundee Schools Young Instrumentalist of the Year competition in 2008, the first year that a piper featured in the prize list. Kyle is currently Pipe Major of the Massed Pipes and Drums of the Army Cadet Force, 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland (Black Watch). In addition to this he has been a member of the National Youth Pipe Band for the past two years.

Tangi Josset and Yannick Martin
These musicians, twins, were born in Africa in 1986. Shortly afterwards they were adopted by separate Breton families and didn’t meet up until they were six years old. Whilst seeing each other regularly from that age, each got on with his own life, yet both cultivated an interest in Breton music. As teenagers, both the boys were recruited by their local bagads; Yannick by Lorient, and Tangi by Malestroit. However, their aim was to play together, and by 2000 they began to compete jointly, and very successfully. In particular they won the Pierre-Pulvé trophy, the Fest-Yves in Vannes and the Gourin championships in the under 20 category, in 2002 and 2003. Since then they have carried on winning competitions, proof of their perfect mastery of their instruments.

Vale Veterans Pipe Band
The Vale Veterans are a gathering of many of the members of the Scotrail Vale of Atholl Pipe Band from the late 1980s. This was a highly successful time for the Vale, when they won titles such as British and European Champions and came 3rd in the World Pipe Band Championship. It also marked the beginning of many concert appearances for the band and they made several successful recordings, including “Both Sides of the Tracks” which achieved silver disc status, unusual for a traditional recording at that time.
Many of the band members have continued to play with bands including Grade 1 bands such as, Field Marshall Montgomery, Boghall and Bathgate, Spirit of Scotland and Scottish Power and of course, the infamous, if not quite Grade 1, Atholl Highlanders.

Many individual members have also taken the experience of playing in the Vale onto other traditional music arenas with bands such as Wolfstone, Ceol Beg and the Tannahill Weavers.

Andrew Carlisle
Andrew Carlisle from Ballygown, Northern Ireland, graduated through Broomhedge and Ravara Pipe Bands to the present World Champions, The Field Marshall Montgomery. He has won many top prizes in the solo field, for example Ulster and All Ireland titles for March, Strathspey and Reel and Piobaireachd – Champion of Champion titles. Scholarships to USA summer schools, also feature in his impressive CV. Andrew won the years Gordon Duncan Memorial Competition at Celtic Connections 2008.

Brian Finnegan

Brian Finnegan, from Armagh, is probably best known for his work with the ground breaking group Flook, with whom he has played for the past 10 years. His background is firmly rooted in Irish Traditional music, and in his teens he won the prestigious All Ireland Fleadh Cheoill for flute and whistle on 6 occasions.
His playing is truly unique, drawing influences from music the world over and combining a rare blend of fiery technical brilliance with a bold, adventurous musical imagination. Brian first came to public attention with the Irish group Upstairs in a Tent, and then in 1993 he recorded a solo album “When the Party’s Over”. Since then his work with Flook has taken him all over the world and has produced 3 highly acclaimed albums: Flatfish, Rubai and Haven.
Brian has been described as ‘…a thrilling talent, marvellous technical dexterity, bold musical imagination and urgent tone combining in playing of breathtaking suppleness and delicacy’ (Scotland on Sunday)

Cathy Ann MacPhee
Cathy Ann was born and raised on the Island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She started singing at the age of 5, entertaining locals on the winter nights and enjoying wider audiences when tourists came in the summer. After being invited to audition for the first ever Gaelic repertory company at the age of 17, Cathy Ann became a member of ‘Fir Chlis’, touring with the company for 31/2 years. Her first big TV break came during this time, playing Catriona, the barmaid in Can Seo, the first Gaelic language series.
After ‘Fir Chlis’ Cathy Ann joined the 7.84 theatre company and travelled the world with them for a few years singing in Russia, Germany (East and West) and Canada. During those years she was spotted by Ian Green of Greentrax recordings who invited her to join his label. She has recorded a number of Albums with him over the years and still believes her wish to record a Country album will come to be one day….’though Ian has still to be persuaded’.
After getting married to a Uist man in 1990, Cathy Ann moved back to the Hebrides and settled down to raise a family. In 2000 the family moved to Ottawa, Canada, although her heart is still very much at home.

Anxo Lorenzo
Anxo Lorenzo born in Moaña, a small village on the Atlantic Coast of Galicia, in 1974, is a new breed of musician who sees no barriers when experimenting with traditional and contemporary music and has the ability of seamlessly amalgamating the two into vibrant, fresh and new melodies and rhythms. Anxo has managed to fuse the unadulterated natural sound of the Gaita (Galician Bagpipes) with a wide variety of alternative music styles such as : Rock, Pop, Jazz, Flamenco, Chill out, Hip-Hop, electronic… converting the Gaita into an avant-garde instrument without giving-up his celtic roots. Anxo has collaborated with what reads like a Who is Who of the music world, from the pure traditional folk scene to jazz, not forgetting rock, pop and electronic genres. As a classically trained musician, soloist and composer Anxo continues with his research into various fields of music and gives master classes all over the world. …Geoff Wallis from the Irish Music Review described Anxo’s performance as” … a staggering improvisation whose combination of sheer speed and unbridled imagination simply defies belief!”

The ‘house band’
Hamish Napier (Piano) – Hamish, finalist in the ‘Young Scottish Traditional Musician of the Year Award 2006′ and nominated for ‘Best Up and Coming Artist’ at the Scots Trad Awards 2005, plays piano, flute, whistle and sings. For seven years he played with award-winning folk quartet Back of the Moon, touring extensively throughout Europe, Canada, and the USA

Mike Bryan (Guitar) – Mike has been inspired by Gordon’s music since the first time he heard ‘Break Yer Bass Drone’ played on the fiddle when he was 16 or 17 years old. At the end of the set he found it was written by a piper called Gordon Duncan. At first he was amazed that it was even a pipe tune; it sounded so melodically strong that he thought it surely went outwith the bog standard pipe scale. Over the ten years since then he has lost count of how many times he’s sat playing (or listening) to a melody for the first time that has totally blown him away, only to be told that it was a Gordon Duncan composition.

Conrad Ivitsky (Bass) – Electric and double bass player Conrad Ivitsky has maintained a connection to two musical worlds; although he played fiddle in his father’s ceilidh band, he was drawn more to rock groups, including the Corries and Deep Purple, and the jazz fusion of Miles Davis.

Dougie Hudson (Percussion) – Doug “El Pulpo” Hudson plays Congas with Salsa Celtica, who have very successfully created a fusion of salsa and traditional Scottish music, including elements of folk and jazz. Dougie, who also plays percussion, travels annually to African and South America to study.