i went to the scottish highland games yesterday, where i performed four times as part of the tattoo, with the ballard sedentary sousa band. it was, apparently, the third or fourth time the BSSB has performed at the highland games, but it was my first time performing, and the first time i had been to the highland games since i was very young – i remember going with my parents, before my older younger sister was born, so i must have been five or six years old. i very clearly remember being absolutly in awe of the pipe bands, and i also remember the drummers twirling their sticks in fancy patterns. it’s probably where i developed my love of the highland pipes, but even the memory of that event did nothing to prepare me for the awesomeness that came from playing in the middle of the massed bands at the tattoo last night. i had pipers standing all around me, i was playing my trombone, and i was in heaven. words are not enough to describe how awesome it was. other players in the BSSB were complaining about the noise, and at least one of the trumpet players was actually wearing earplugs, which i find almost insulting. it was heaven and i was right there in the middle of it!

first i played in the fanfare, which was just the trombones and the trumpets, along with our “drum major” (a diminutive woman who plays clarinet or flute, and is also the world’s only sedentary baton twirler), and we played the fanfare from “The Poet, The Peasant and The Light Cavalryman” march by Henry Filmore (who was part of sousa’s band, so it’s okay) while military people did things with the flag, and then we sauntered off the “stage” – after all, we are a sedentary band, and the concept of standing up, even for a fanfare, grated on most of us – we sat around for a while, during which time we heard performances by a pipe band from port coquitlam, a group called “Molly’s Revenge”, a guy with a guitar, and the silent drill team from some military outfit. then we did a short set, only three marches, and then there was a pipe band from some place in california, and another guy with a guitar, and another group or two, or possibly three (i don’t remember), then we played another short set of four marches. then the pipe band from SFU (Simon Fraser University) came on, and they were incredible. they started from all different sides of the stage, and came together, while playing. they did an arrangement of pachelbel’s canon, which must have been written especially for a pipe band, because otherwise it would have sounded wrong, and they did a piece that was for drums only, with massive quantites of twirling drumsticks in fancy ways and only one mistake. then we came out again, and played with all three pipe bands, and it was incredible.

we left home around 5:00, got to enumclaw at around 5:30, and we finished performing around 10:30. because of the fact that there was also a “rock concert” or something like that at the white river amphitheatre and traffic was backed up, we didn’t get home until after midnight. i have to remember not to eat, because moe and i, and a bunch of moe’s friends are going to maneki this evening.