Summary
Some of us, of a certain age, still remember watching The Old Grey Whistle Test, back in the early 1970s, and blinking in disbelief as "Whispering" Bob Harris introduced this hirsute French guy who played bagpipes and the harp, for God's sake, and in a rock band - at that stage in the folk revival, when the template for folk- rock bands was fiddle-led Fairport, Steeleye, the JSDs, bagpipes were still the prerogative of uncompromising marching bands, harps for douce drawing rooms, or the afterlife.
Alan Stivell, however, was - and is - very much alive and what more appropriate festival for this ground-breaking Breton harper, piper and father of latter-day pan-Celticism to celebrate his 60th birthday at than Celtic Connections? The birthday is on 6 January (the birthday concert is in Glasgow on 17 January) but, he says, the anniversary he has really been celebrating this year has been his half-century of harping.See the full content of this document
Extract
Great Breton
Back in 1953, audiences at La Maison de la Bretagne in Paris were taken aback by a ten-year-old who got on stage and played just one tune, an old Breton hymn, on the harp his father, Jord Cochevelou, had made for him, modelled on the ancient Irish Brian Boru har...
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