Piper's Crow: Press

A-List Pick for 1/25/06
Piper's Crow (CD-Release Show)
This gig marks the release of the premier album from Piper's Crow, the local quartet that specializes in traditional material (plus sympathetic originals) from the breadth of the Celtic realm, stretching from Scotland and Ireland to Galicia and Cape Breton Island. The band's eponymous CD is a gorgeous collection of rich, haunting melodies, exhilarating jigs and reels played with rippling zeal, and songs featuring Laura MacKenzie's exquisite voice. Much of Piper's Crow's charm is derived from the sparkling interplay between the musicians, especially the exotic bagpipes and assorted wind instruments deftly wielded by MacKenzie and master piper Dick Hensold, while Zack Kline's fiddle weaves devilishly amongst them and Karen Mueller helps drive the entire business on guitar and bouzouki. This is wonderful stuff that's musically provocative while rarely failing to elicit a smile or an urge to bound about the room.

From the "Reel World" column of Dirty Linen magazine:
"Also featuring bagpipes, among other things, is the Minneapolis quartet Pipers' Crow, whose eponymous CD [self-released PC101 (2005)] features a blend of mellifluous Northumbrian smallpipes (and a couple of other reed-and-bags variants as well), flute and whistles, fiddle, autoharp, and guitar on material from Scotland and elsewhere, including some tuneful originals. The interplay of pipes and autoharp on the arrangement of Jerry Holland's "My Cape Breton Home" is especially neat, and the delicate combination of two gemshorns, autoharp, and octave violin on the Scottish air "My Treasure, My Delight, My Love" is quietly spine-tingling. Multi-instrumentalist Laura MacKenzie also capably handles vocals on four songs in Scots dialect."

Traditional and original Celtic music ---- Brilliant !!
All four of the players in Piper's Crow are superb musicians in their own right, and what comes through in listening to this CD is that it is definitely a band CD; it is definitely a team effort, and everyone has a chance to shine. The layered approach the band takes in adding instruments to the overall mix is very carefully thought out, as are the harmony lines and musical settings. Between the four of them, the band members can muster well over a dozen different musical instruments, plus vocals, so no one single instrument dominates. There is a nice mix of traditional tunes drawn from Scotland, Northumberland, Cape Breton, and Ireland, and several newer tunes mostly written by band members. The slow air “Mackenzie's Misfortune”, from Dick Hensold is destined to become a classic. It is a gorgeous tune with some unusual progressions, and it stays in the memory a long time after the CD has finished playing. The songs on the CD, “The Kirk o' Birnie Bouzle”,”The Reel of Stumpie”,“Mormond Braes”, and “My Treasure, My Delight, My Love” are all beautifully sung by Laura Mackenzie, with very sympathetic backing from the rest of the band. A couple of the tune sets feature a very sweet-sounding English concertina, an instrument which is becoming popular once again. This is a very satisfying CD to listen to, the tune sets all go well together, and the musicians sound like they are having a lot of fun. And you can't ask for more than that.

A quartet of dazzling virtuosos, Piper's Crow play a treasure trove of jigs, reels, and hornpipes from the far-flung outposts of the Celts. Their approach is bristling with energy and distinguished by dynamic interplay...