Bruegel Bagpipe Blues

For a vacation from the Pandemic, I cloned myself into a 3-piece jazz band and time traveled with my cat to the 16th century. There we partied with Flemish peasants and jammed with bagpipers in Bruegel paintings. My schäferpfeife bagpipes were custom-made by Toru Sonoda in Bayern, Germany. They play most of the most of the chromatic scale, with a range of almost an octave and a half, and are similar to Flemish bagpipes seen in the Bruegel paintings. My low whistle is from the Kelischek Workshop of North Carolina. The clarinet is a Conn I got from my father. I remember listening to him playing it at wild parties downstairs when I was a toddler in my bedroom in a Massachusetts farm house in the early 1960s. This video is the culmination of a five-year journey that started when I first heard Swedish jazz genius Gunhild Carling blowing blues on her bagpipes. The tunes are “Summertime“ by George Gershwin, “Beer Barrel Polka“ by Jaromir Vejvoda and “Bill Bailey (won’t you please come home)“ by Hughie Cannon. The rhythm track is “Lemonade,“ licensed from Big Fish Audio.