A note from the champs

Pipe-Major Peter Aumonier received this very gracious, classy note from a member of Cullybackey Pipe Band, which won the Ulster championships and then went on a run winning the Worlds and Cowal, as well as the Grade 1 (repeat, Grade 1) champion of champions title in Ulster.

Hi Peter,

Gordon Wright here, from Cullybackey pipe band, we met in Moira, and spoke about your concert

Just a note to say well done that is was a pleasure to meet you, and that your band were a credit to your organisation, and to Canada as a whole.

Although you may not feel it right now, you DID do well  and have great reason to be very proud.

Hope you got home safe and sound, and We as a band hope to play against you again soon.

Regards and best wishes to all you members

Gordon Wright

Cullybackey Pipe Band

Very nice to see this from an organization on such a roll. I suspect everybody in the band would like to see Cullybackey play again, but preferably as a Grade 1!

Headed home

Band members have scattered in many directions after the World’s weekend in Glasgow - maybe half headed home and the rest heading around the UK and over to the continent.

When the RSPBA finally posted its scoring grids, we saw the band finished 9th in its heat and the marking was pretty consistent. The playing was by no means flawless, but the placements had as much to do with the quality of the bands as with any blowing or drumming boos-boos on Hamilton’s part. Three of the top four came out of our heat.

The day was won by Culleybackey of Ulster, and it was well-earned. Niagara Regional Police made the final but had a rough ride, finishing 12th of 12.

The evening was spent by band parents and some of the adult players having a party in the residence, while most of the younger ones headed to the Lord Todd Bar, the unofficial home of the pipe band world during the big week. They were particularly anxious to get over there to congratulate Ian Madeiros, who instructs the Grade Two drum line and, as a drummer with the 78th Frasers, had just won the world drumming title.

Sunday was spent by many either packing up or doing one last sightseeing trip.

The flight home for roughly half the crew was mercifully uneventful and timely (note: Thomas Cook Airlines actually provides legroom for passengers, the temperature in the cabin was consistent, and the food wasn’t half-bad).

All in all, a great and memorable experience, and there are band members already pushing to return next year. More logically, think 2009. 

Band plays beer tent at Worlds

 

Now usually, playing in the beer tent at a contest is a momentous event. It usually means you’ve won.

In this case, it meant it was pouring rain in the morning and it was dry in there.

It is late afternoon in Glasgow, and it is still raining, and we are back in the flat at Victoria Hall drying off. The endless march past of bands on Glasgow Green is going on right about now, but given the results of the morning, we didn’t need to stick around.

 

There were 27 or so bands in the qualifier, including 13 or 14 in Hamilton’s heat. While the band played very well and was clearly better on the day than several other bands, there were also a lot of good ones in the contest - and the judges thought at least six of them had a better run than Hamilton. A couple of very well-known, very well-established bands also didn’t make it through.

On a positive note, our friends (and dorm mates this week) from Niagara Regional Police made it into the final 12. 

So by 1:45, when the qualifier results were posted, band members were done for the day, and for the competitive season.

No word on the winner yet, but we suspect it will be one of the powerhouses from Ulster we got clobbered by a week ago.

Band leaders have not really had a chance to speak at length with the kids, who will be disappointed a lot of hard work didn’t quite get the desired results. On the other hand, this is a very young band and band leaders have been hearing all week from others about the need to hold them together and realize the group’s potential.

Tonight, the kids will scatter downtown for one last party. Most of the parents will towel off and lay low.

Sunday is a packing day, and Monday, most of us head home. Not the results we pipe-dreamed about, but a great experience nonetheless. 

Piping Live

During the week of the World Pipe Band Championships, there is a parallel event called Piping Live. There is music being played at venues around the city, but the main action is in George Square - the city’s main public plaza.

The band was invited to play there this year and they went on Wednesday morning, ahead of Manawatu from New Zealand and LA Scots from the US.

The crowd was five or six deep around the edges of the performance square and the band’s performance was well-received.

Band members have been prowling the city by day and, at night, those old enough to get in have been mixing with the world’s piping community at the Lord Todd Bar on the University of Strathclyde campus. The pub is the unofficial hub of the piping world for one week each year.

The band is now into intense practices, fine-tuning the sound for Saturday. Weather has actually been very good, with high, broken clouds and temperatures nearing 20 C - luxury around here.

Many in the band went to see Field Marshall Montgomery perform in concert Wednesday night, with the event MC’d by Burlington’s own Bob Worrall. The organizational side of the event was a bit of a trainwreck, but the calibre of the music was unbelieveable. FMM is widely considered the best pipe band on the planet, though Canada’s Simon Fraser University band is also right up there.

A few snapshots …

 

Glasgow … finally

The band is now back in the familiar housing of Victoria Hall in Glasgow, where everyone stayed two years earlier.

After a fantastic day traveling up the Antrim Coast and visiting the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede Bridge, the band packed up and spent way too much of the day riding in buses and ferries to make the short hop over here from Belfast. That is one long, twisting road from Stranraer.

Anyway, we made it and the pipes were out pretty much as soon as they got off the bus. Much work to do if the band wants to make it through the qualifying round at the Worlds.

Meanwhile, back in Ontario

It will be a few days before I can update the band website (for Internet access reasons), so this will have to do for reporting on how the other Hamilton Police bands did at the North American championships in Maxville.

The Grade Five band was 4th (woohoo!) and Sandy McKail’s young drummers won the drumming title. Sandy also won one of the two solo professional drumming titles.

The Grade Four band was 9th but the drummers, again tutored by Sandy McKail, won the drumming title.

Well done guys! A tradition of great young drummers continues for the band. 

A trophy at Ulster, sort of …

Well, the band’s longtime drum major Russ Hamilton got a chance to walk to the head of the field and bring back a big silver trophy at the Ulster pipe band championships.

However, it was a bit of a Miss Congeniality-Thanks For Coming Out! deal. The big cup was for Marching and Deportment — which is pretty funny if you’ve ever seen Hamilton’s rag-tag mob on the field.

The band played well, but got their butts handed to them, finishing 5th in a 6 band field.

In simple terms, the bands over here are REALLY good - with a rich, bright pipe sound Peter is still working his kids towards. Most of the bands at this level are filled with Grade 1 level players too busy with job and family commitments to play at that quasi-professional level. While many of the kids in the band have played their way into Grade 1 solos back home, only a small handful of the musicians in our mob have even stepped on the field with a Grade 1 group.

They have the natural skills to get as good as these guys within a year or two, but only through maturing both mentally and physically. We also had to remind our collective selves that these kids were in Grade 4 just three summers back.

Still, a great experience overall - with the band bested by Culleybackey and three other Ulster bands that were just as good. Any of the four could win win the Worlds on Saturday, and certainly two or three of them will be in the prizes.

It is rare for an overseas band to pass through Ulster on the way to Scotland and the Worlds , so Hamilton Police PB drew a big crowd wherever it went on the park. At one point, in the final tuning area, there were scores of people encircling the band, having a listen and scrutinizing the unfamiliar competition.

The crowd was also five or six deep around the competition area.

The band got the chance to lead off the massed bands ceremonies and, with the College of Piping from PEI, highlighted and thanked by various people for making the trip to Ulster.

Just about everyone headed into the festival marquee — we call these things beer tents — after massed bands and just as the weather finally went south. It started raining and quickly turned into a steady downpour.

The famed Tanahill Weavers — the Scottish equivalent to the Chieftains — played in the tent, as did a trio of pipers from Dublin’s St. Laurence O’Toole. They were followed on, and pretty much upstaged, by three pipers from Field Marshall Montgomery, who roared through several tunes, including many of the bits from the band’s B52 medley.

Amazing stuff and a great topper to a long day.

Sunday is a chance to finally relax and look around. Unfortunately, the rain that started Saturday evening is still coming down, and it’s not looking good for our day off.   

The Lisburn concert

The band had a full day Friday in the city of Lisburn, a few minutes south down an M road from Belfast.

Blessed again by cloudy but dry weather, band members piled off a bus in the city centre, beside the Irish Linen Centre, to play a planned performance in the town square that served both as a promotional vehicle for the concert that night, but also a chance to run through the tunes.

The band drew a good, curious crowd of high street shoppers and were well received.

Some of the parents scattered and found a local pub — the Linfield Bar — and chatted up the locals, while the kids did some exploring.

The mayor of the city held a reception for the band, as well as the College of Piping band from PEI,  at the shiny new civic centre built on an island on the main river. The city put on food for the mob and were again well received.

Pipe Major Peter Aumonier split off to do an interview and play a tune live on the local BBC radio affiliate, and then caught up with the band at the concert venue.

The Ulster branch of the Royal Society of Pipe Band Association organized the concert at a local Methodist church, and event managed to sell out.

The concert featured the Summersicde, PEI band, Field Marshall Montgomery piper Ryan Canning, local highland dancers and then Hamilton.

Everyone got a great reception and the band played well, with the tenor drummers managing to play for roughly an hour teetering on tables and stools at the rear of the raised pulpit/stage.

It was a great welcome to Ulster and Peter made a special effort to thank organizer Lindsey Ellis and the RSPBA-NI’s George Usher.

Settled in … finally

 

It is a wonderful sign of how much Belfast has settled down after the years of sectarian violence that word of a flight from Canada being three hours late Thursday made the radio news.

We found that out while chatting with a local on the train platform at Jordanstown,  near the university residences where we are staying here in Belfast.

The band got here about 11 am Thursday after a flight that left on time but ended up more than three hours overdue because of an unplanned stop in Quebec City. The Air Transat flight was going along nicely when the pilot abruply slowed the big Airbus and told passengers some sort of navigation thing needed to fly over the ocean was not working.

The stop was supposed to take 20 minutes (yeah, right) but took more than two hours.

But, they beat something with a hammer or found some duct tape and we eventually made it back up in the air.

We arrived to broken cloud and, miraculously, some warm sun — rare this summer.

The band rehearsed for 45 minutes or so and then most of the mob headed to the famed Crown Saloon in Belfast for dinner. It was a bit of an ironic visit because after all the hype, the building was cloaked in hoarding. The heritage property is undergoing a £500,000 reno job.

Some of the boys had their first true Guinness pints and, overall, it was a great time. Thanks to band parent Jenny Henry for setting that up.

Some of the kids scattered after that, and a few parents had the energy for a bit of a crawl.

Lodgings here are, ummm, minimalist, to be kind. But the staff are uniformly warm and helpful, and excited to have us as guests. There is no Internet in the rooms, and wireless is hard to come by, so this is being typed at the campus library.

That stated, there will be no pix and few posts until we settle in Glasgow.

Today, the band plays a civic reception in Lisburn and a concert this evening.

Tomorrow, first on at the Ulster championships.