Jiggerypipery are a five-piece band based around Exeter, playing a listenable, electric-tinged selection of traditional based music. Jiggery? Only two jigs are included among this programme of slow airs, hornpipes and reels. Pipery? The Great Highland Bagpipe is featured to great effect through out this CD.
The Jiggerypipery line up is Tony Bayliss - citern and guitar; Carl Allerfeldt - fiddle; Martin Mead - bass guitar; Simon Crowe - drums and James Robertson - Great Highland Bagpipe. I am minded of Scottish Band Ceolbeg, by some of Jiggerypipery's lively arrangements. Instruments drop out or are brought in, as the band moves between hornpipes or reels with solo instrumentals featured on many sets. All are able musicians and all have their turn to "play at the front" but the pipes, bass and drums are the main attention grabbers.
Drummer Simon Crow, toured for many years with the Boomtown Rats and played the Live Aid Concert. The drum player's stock in trade, volume, depth and power are all here in plenty supply but these are tempered with measures of grace and cool maturity. A bass guitarist's input is not always so readily noticeable but here Martin Mead's agile bass lines supply a pleasing urgency and drive to many of these tracks. Hardly going unnoticed though are James Robertson and the "big pipes". A fine player and composer with a grand sounding set of pipes, showing no sign of the fierce dry edge that often beset the pipes in the recording studio.
At thirty-eight and a half minutes this CD is maybe a track or two on the light side but what you do get is of the best, the material, the arrangements, the playing and the production and engineering.
Peter Fairbairn.
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this CD online from The Listening Post The Listening Post is the CD mailorder service of The Living Tradition magazine. This album was reviewed in Issue 46 of The Living Tradition magazine. |