Bagpipes

While I've heard bagpipes in person, I don't know that I’ll ever be able to mentally connect the reels of otherworldly sound that bellow forth with the instrument - a contrivance of tassles, ostensibly random pipes, and the bag itself, wedged like a pillow under the arm. Its various mysteries and miracles aside, most people associate bagpipes with the military music of the Scottish highlands, and I’m no different. I take it as further evidence of the 1960s as jazz’s creative and commercial zenith, though, that two unique jazz musicians - Rufus Harley and Duke Payne - were able to transcend the instrument’s popular associations, if for only a few choice releases.

1. Duke Payne, The Bottom (M and M)
They're all here. The layers of percussion, the bassline, a vibraphone, a Hammond organ, peals of wah-wah guitar. Here, in this dense, reverberating pageant of psychedelic jazz. Lo, is that the sound of the bagpipe swirling around in the mix? Yes, everyone is here. The bagpipe, capable of sustained, uninterrupted drones, is heard to spectacular effect on "The Bottom," a late ‘60s release on one of Chicago's finest indie R&B and jazz labels, M and M records. (See Red Saunders Research for an excellent overview and discography of this fascinating label.)

Artee “Duke” Payne is probably best remembered today for his forward-thinking saxophone and flute work with Odell Brown and the Organ-izers, a peerless ‘60s soul-jazz combo (see Larry Grogan's great survey of Odell Brown material here). Payne is also part of what's great about post-war Chicago’s community of musicians (and the proliferation of tiny record labels which serviced them). With plenty of work to go around, it was a community which seemed to encourage the exchange of ideas and a spirit of freewheeling adventure. A skilled musician like Payne? He might record with three completely different groups in as many days. You’d have a gig backing an R&B singer here, a club jazz date there, and, five fuzzy days later, you’d wake up on the benches in front of the public library to find that you'd cut a bagpipe record. You just didn’t care.

As of at least 2005, Duke Payne was still performing and actively playing the bagpipe.

2. Bros. in Co-op, Listen Heah (Bunky)
It starts out its brief life as a straightforward vamp on the perdurable “Listen Here” - an Eddie Harris composition that's the very essence of hip ‘60s jazz modernism. With the introduction of the bagpipe, however, “Listen Heah” is transformed. The bagpipe is no less hip, mind you - just a completely different kind of hip. Our ears adjust and, no sooner than we've found some sort of equilibrium, we’re joined by yet another set of bagpipes (presumably overdubbed). That is another set of bagpipes, right?

The bagpipe (or bagpipes) we hear is again the handiwork of Duke Payne. Little is otherwise known about the Bros. in Co-op; I would assume that they were Chicago jazz musicians assembled by arranger (and future ‘70s R&B superstar) Donny Hathaway for a one-off session, circa 1968 or ’69.

3. Rufus Harley, Bagpipe Blues (Atlantic)
Often mistakenly referenced as jazz’s only bagpiper, Philadelphia’s Rufus Harley is, with numerous guest appearances and five albums released between 1966 and 1972, nevertheless its most visible emissary. He's also, as far as I know, the bagpipe’s true originator as a jazz instrument.

As the story goes, Rufus Harley was already a professional saxophonist when, inspired by the Black Watch pipers at John F. Kennedy’s televised funeral, he decided to have a go at the bagpipe. I’ve read enough now to know that the bagpipe isn’t really the sort of instrument one just picks up as an afterthought; it’s to Harley’s further credit that by 1966 he’d released one of Atlantic Records' top-selling jazz albums, and was himself appearing on national television dressed in full Scottish regalia, wringing the hell out of his bagpipes - just like the Black Watch three years earlier. His “Bagpipe Blues,” a jazz march (vaguely reminiscient of Benny Golsen’s “Blues March”), is the title track of his debut album, and it seems appropriate that this was also the album’s lead-off track. Several years of marshalling his energies and here was Rufus Harley, a black jazz musician in a kilt, with bagpipes: the opening salvo of a creative mind marching into battle against squares, skeptics, and snobs alike.

Rufus Harley passed away in August 2006, a proponent of jazz bagpipes until the very end.