He was able to adapt his playing in about six months. If all of this sounds hard, well, it wasn’t, at least not for Harley. Those nine notes need to do a lot of work. Add a trumpet player to the mix, and that player gets over 40 notes of his own to play around with. Probably not the ideal set-up if you’re trying to get on stage with someone like John Coltrane, considering Coltrane wielding a tenor sax could play over 30 notes. This pipe, played with two hands, provides the melody but it only plays nine notes. The bagpipes’ chanter also presented a problem. As author Daniel Goldmark explained in his essay “Slightly Left of Center,” Harley tuned his drones-the pipes that produce harmonizing notes-to F and B-flat, a switch from the instrument’s more common tuning, so that he’d be able to play with other jazz musicians. Harley enlisted the help of Dennis Sandole, a musician and music teacher who had been working with him for 20 years.Īdapting the bagpipes for jazz meant that Harley would have to approach the instrument unconventionally. History and relative oddity aside, the big question for Harley wasn’t why play the bagpipes, it was how. Over the centuries, versions appeared in Spain, Greece, North Africa, and the Middle East. The first written evidence of the bagpipes showed up in first-century Greece. He researched the bagpipes, finding out that, despite being most widely known as a Scottish instrument, the bagpipes have a worldwide reach. “In fact, every musician in Philadelphia thought I was crazy.” It didn’t matter, though. “The pawnbroker thought I was crazy,” Harley recalled in that same interview. There’s nothing like the real thing, and so that winter, Harley bought a set of bagpipes for $120 from a pawn shop, making him the first jazz musician to make the Great Highland bagpipes his primary instrument. He tried to make his horn produce that sound. “When I heard and saw the Black Watch Bagpipe Band marching across the funeral grounds,” Harley said in a 1982 interview, “I was very impressed with the sound of the instrument. Those low moaning notes falling over the procession were the exact sounds he had been trying to capture in his music. It wasn’t just the sadness of the day, it was that sound. Harley, a Philadelphia jazz musician who at that point had been playing the flute and saxophone, felt something stir in him. In the background, Harley heard a low sound. America had lost its leader, and with ears pressed to radios or eyes turned to television screens, each person witnessed the end of a tragic turn of events. That role has continued over the decades, through present day the current piper is Pipe Major Richard Grisdale, from the Royal Regiment of Scotland, who began his tenure in 2019.Like most Americans alive at the time, Rufus Harley was transfixed by the Novemreporting from John F. According to the magazine The Graphic in November 1882, 'Queen Victoria is awakened every morning by sound of the Royal bagpipes beneath her bedroom window the music generally lasts from eight to nine o’clock.' Soon, Victoria hired Angus MacKay as the first Piper to the Sovereign, and he played in the mornings and evenings. Victoria wrote to her mother during the visit, 'We have heard nothing but bagpipes since we have been in the beautiful Highlands, and I am become so fond of it, that I mean to have a Piper, who can, if you like it, pipe every night at Frogmore.' The tradition of a royal bagpiper began with Queen Victoria in 1843 after she and Albert visited the Highlands and stayed at Taymouth Castle, according to Bagpipe News. DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA // Getty Images 'Queen Victoria is awakened by a bagpiper.

Black bagpipe player