Hasn’t Tyler Duncan’s band done some things that are pretty far outside the generally recognized boundaries of “the tradition?”
I vividly remember living in Japan about 8 years ago and hearing some J-Pop song in a café that had flat-pitch pipes in it. I’m guessing it was Ronan Browne, but I have no idea…
I’m a bit of two minds about this stuff: on one hand, I find albums where Irish traditional musicians collaborate with musicians from other genres or otherwise attempt to “push the boundaries” of Irish traditional music in order to create some type of musical “fusion” to be (with a handful of exceptions) innocuously uninteresting at best and exquisitely irritating at worst. I’ve about had it up to here with hearing Irish musicians who have no formal training in–or demonstrable understanding of–Jazz sounding like bad, frustrated Jazz musicians. A local Irish musician when describing one such fusion project hit the nail on the head when he called it “two different kinds of musicians coming together to make music that would have sounded better if they’d just stuck to making music on their own.”
Having said that, we are seeing an increasing number of people who truly are musically multilingual coming along and being able to craft music entirely within the tradition on one end and very different, unapologetically un-traditional music on the other. That’s fine. Some of it I like; some of I don’t, but then again, you can’t please everybody all the time. Part of the blessing and curse with uilleann pipes, though, is that they have such a distinctive sound that I think it can be hard to present them in a context that is entirely removed from Irish traditional music for both the player and the listener. It’s particularly unfortunate that one of the few non-traditional genres where the pipes have been widely used has been in the production of New Age dreck. [This is a tragedy, though one that has likely helped keep a decent roof over more than a few pipers’ heads…]
I dabbled in doing electronic music a few years back, mostly playing bass and keyboards. For fun, I brought my uilleann pipes and smallpipes into the studio a couple of times. I never recorded the uilleann pipe chanter, but I did do a bit of fun stuff with drones and regulators. On another track, I recorded myself playing the ùrlar of a pìobaireachd on smallpipes and gave it to my collaborator (who knew nothing about traditional music) to mess with. She chopped it up into tiny bits and pieces, added all kinds of strange effects to it, and made it completely unrecognizable. This was fun, but in the end, I decided it wasn’t the kind of musical experience that I was looking for, though I wouldn’t rule out trying it again. The above tracks were never really meant for prime time, though you might be able to track them down on the internet with a bit of detective work…
Oh, and as for the chromatic possibilities of the uilleann pipe chanter, yes, a four-keyed chanter is chromatic, but the layout of the instrument coupled with the peculiarities of the playing technique conspire to make certain keys very uncomfortable to play in. In general, I find it much easier to play tunes outside of the typical pipe-friendly keys on flute than I do on pipes… Some pipers play very, very well in what are generally considered fiddle or box keys (e.g., A major, D minor and G minor), and with practice and persistence, this is doable for most pipers who have the necessary keys. Playing for more than a few bars in a key like Bb or Eb on a D chanter would likely be regarded as highly unpleasant for even some of the most experienced pipers out there, so ripping through charts with a Jazz combo probably would be a more complicated endeavor than most pipers would care to indulge in. I will say though that Joey Abarta recently blew through town, and he left jaws on the floor when he tuned his tenor and baritone drones down to C and played “The Graf Spee” (or “The Grand Spey,” or whatever that particular 5-part tune is called) in C on his D chanter. That was seriously impressive.
