Jim
Malcolm, the singer and guitarist with the Scottish band Old Blind Dogs, is
going to church before he plays at one of our local watering holes. In his
online tour diary, Malcolm describes himself as being too ‘Presbyterianized’ to
feel comfortable in the red-light districts of German cities where he plays,
but it isn’t exactly piety that is drawing him into a big stain-glass-windowed
building. It’s music.
Malcolm
is going to perform tunes originally composed for bagpipes with the local
Fรฉadon Or Pipe Band, which plays the traditional pipe music of Scotland, and
the Third Church Chancel Choir. I got hold of Malcolm in Scotland via email
through his wife (and manager), Susie. She typed up his answers to my questions
(because, she claims, he uses two fingers to type and the other eight to make
mistakes).
City: So, how did the Fรฉadon Or
Pipe Band get hold of you?
Malcolm: Kevin Angus of Fรฉadon Or Pipe Band came
to see Old Blind Dogs when we were playing at Milestones in Rochester, and
heard the band playing my song “Battle of Waterloo,” which I wrote to the old
pipe tune of the same name.
Then
he found I had also written a lyric for the famous pipe tune “Lochanside,” and
that another pipe tune features at the end of my song “Jimmy’s Gone To
Flanders.” This gave him the idea of a collaborative concert with the pipe
band, and he has put in all the work to make it happen.
City:Have you done this
sort of pipe band collaboration before?
Malcolm: No, this will be the first time and is
therefore very special for me. The pipes are the most emotive of instruments,
and I think the concert will be very moving for anyone with Scottish
connections. One of Scotland’s biggest and best-known pipe bands has also
expressed an interest, so I do hope something similar might happen again.
City:What will this
performance be like?
Malcolm: The concert will feature separate
performances by me, the pipe band, and the Third Presbyterian Church’s Chancel
Choir, and also collaborations between us all. That is going to make the
program quite varied and, I’m sure, highly entertaining. The choir will sing
harmonies on some of my songs as well as having their own spot, and the pipe
band will play with me as well as playing the songs independently, as a study
of how differently pipe tunes have been interpreted. I’m going to find it
fascinating, and I hope the audience will too. It will certainly be a world
first.
City:What it is about pipe
tunes that lends them to development into guitar-based folk songs?
Malcolm: The pipe tunes for which I’ve written
lyrics are simply wonderful melodies. “Battle of Waterloo” was written as a
march, but I once heard it slowed down, played as a lament. Played that way it
simply cried out for words.
Those
words came to me after I watched a documentary about the battle. It was
appalling to see how the soldiers were dressed in their red coats and sent out
to march against Napoleon’s men row upon row, like slow-moving scarlet targets.
It
made me think about the men from Scotland who had gone to fight in the
Napoleonic wars, and I chose to tell the story of a man from Kirriemuir, a
small town near where my family lives, who, like Napoleon, was broken on the
field of Waterloo.
City: Where did you learn to play
traditional music?
Malcolm: I learned classical guitar, but wanted
to play traditional music after hearing Jim Reid, among others, playing music
that had so much more to say to me about my own experience and homeland.
Sessions in local bars, where sandwiches were passed round half-way through an
evening of informal communal playing, were a great place to learn, and Scotland’s
folk club network gave me a good grounding in performance.
City:How long were you a
solo artist before hooking up with Old Blind Dogs?
Malcolm: I had been working solo for about 10
years when Jonny Hardie and Buzzby McMillan asked me to join Old Blind Dogs.
Ian Benzie, my predecessor, had decided to leave the band and I was delighted
to be asked to take his place. Scotland’s music scene is tiny, and I knew the
band very well. I’d always enjoyed what they had done with traditional Scots
music.
Jim Malcolmwill appear
with the Fรฉadon Or Pipe Band and the
Third Church Chancel Choir on
Sunday, October 24 at Third Presbyterian Church, 4 Meigs Street (at East
Avenue), 3 p.m. 234-0727. Malcolm also plays Tuesday,
October 26, at Milestones, 170 East Avenue, at 8 p.m. Tix: $12-$15.
325-6490
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2004.
