What do you get when you mix a flared mini-skirt with head-banging rock and bagpipe? Answer: Ally the Piper! And that’s what the audience at Albany’s The Egg got Wednesday, July 29: a weird amalgam of heavy metal and traditional Scottish instrumentation, led by a lassie in a black leather Celtic dance skirt.
It’s not a joke. For those unfamiliar with Ally the Piper, Ally Crowley-Duncan, a Latham, NY-raised, auburn-haired, Celtic beauty, gained fame on TikTok making videos that combined rock, pop and metal, which she plays on bagpipes!
Wednesday night, she and her three back-up musicians brought her unlikely act home to the Egg’s Swyer Theatre where a sold-out house included Crowley-Duncan’s parents, elementary school principal and other local fans.
Although Ally has millions of Internet platform followers and a brisk schedule slated to take her from Albany to Syracuse and then Erie, PA in the two days following the Egg gig , there’s still enough down-homeness about her to keep her endearingly human.
At one point, for example, she and bass guitarist Ian Ross collided while hopping about the small stage and then shared a grin; at another, her band mates had to correct her on what the next song would be on their set list, unfortunately after Ally had fitted her bagpipes for the song which was to follow.
“It’s almost like I didn’t make a set list and print it out and have it right here with big enough print so I don’t need my glasses to see it,” she apologized, “but now that I’ve embarrassed myself, we’ll be playing a New Song (literally: it doesn’t yet have a name), that will be on our next album.”
The audience, hungry for more of the Scottish /metal fare, more than took the little faux pas in stride, and the show moved on without a hitch.
One of the interesting things about bagpipes is that they are a wind instrument of sorts, but the wind or “air,” as Ally pointed out to the audience, “is in the bag,” allowing the musician to breathe freely in between refilling the bag’s air supply. A continuous humming is produced through three long pipes called drones which rest on the musician’s shoulder. The actual tune or melody is played by fingering the holes in a pipe called a chanter, which is fed by the air in the bag. Ally’s fingers fairly flew over her various chanters.
“My [online] haters think I’m faking it [when I’m playing without blowing into the bagpipes], but the air is in the bag,” Ally said. Consequently, she’s underscored that point (and perhaps jabbed back at doubters with humor), by having merch tote bags printed with that truism: “the air is in the bag.”
For a good part of her 90-minute performance, Ally and bandmates Ross on bass, Dominic Marraffa III on drums and newcomer Avelar De Oliveira on guitar, did anything but fake their hard-rocking, energetic blend of music and showmanship.
The band led off with a rousing rendition of the Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” for which the audience was encouraged to sing along in parts. Band members meanwhile bounced, whirled and swung in a pseudo-choreography and played hard on their instruments, including Ally, who made the bagpipes scream, imitating an electric guitar.
“I’ve been playing since I was 14,” she told the audience, “I think it (the bagpipes) is the most beautiful instrument. To show people who might disagree with that, I play music in way they know about, and that’s rock and heavy metal.”
While some numbers were covers of songs by the likes of Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, others such as “Redemption” were written by Ally, who told the audience she learned her skills in the former Scotia-Glenville Piper Band and won the World Championships in 2012 as a teenager.
For the Ozzy Osbourne number, Ally played the lead guitar part on the pipes, at one point down on her knees, bending backwards for the guitar-like riffs.
During the opening bars of the song, an audience member recognized it and contributed a loud “I-i-i,’’ which Ally complimented before the following song, “Follow Through.”
“I’m glad you did that because it means you can participate in the next song,” she said. “The only word you need to know is ‘do’.” Subsequently, Ally rehearsed a sequence of ‘’dos’’ (and “de-dos”) with the crowd, which then assisted with the light-hearted number as band members swung low with their instruments.
“Recalling the Green,” another song Ally penned, started out light and poppy, but sped up into a reel with Oliveira hopping and twirling on one foot then pumping up and down in repeated knee bends with Ally. The song gained even more intensity as all the instruments converged for a full-force, joyous conclusion.
“High on a Hill” was a combination of two songs from Ally’s teen years, which she had played very traditionally back in the day, but which she had arranged in her unique, hard-rock way more recently.
“If I had tried to do any of these things then, I probably would have been institutionalized,” she joked.
Several numbers showcased Ally on the Irish tin whistle, in between stints on the pipes, including “A Story of Old Echoes,” for which she had to take time to tune the pipes.
“Bagpipes don’t play nice with other instruments,” she explained, “So you have to keep changing the key, which means you have to tune them.”
“Story’ began with Ally on tin whistle against a reverberating synthesized sound. Other instruments, such as faintly played cymbals and guitar, gradually fed in before the sound built with drums, guitar and bass and Ally switched over to the bagpipes.
When the instrumentation was at its fullest, Oliveira hammered on the body of his electric guitar as the various musical parts intensified to near abstraction then slackened to allow Ally to end the song with tittering flute-like notes.
Following “Story”, Ally paid tribute to an 81-year-old Robertson bagpipe set and the people who had helped her career advance. She began by sharing a lengthy anecdote about the refurbished World War II-era instrument, which she credited with “bringing me all over the world.” The pipes apparently are so meaningful to her, she had a picture of them tattooed on her arm.
Per Ally’s yarn, the pipe set was shared with her by a woman named Janet whose Scottish father had owned the rare set. Ally’s mentor at the time, Donald Lindsay, knew Ally had been playing pipes for service members’ funerals and needed an upgraded set. He also knew of Janet’s desire to place her father’s historic pipes set in the right hands.
After much oiling and soaking to make the pipes playable again, the hands in which the pipes settled were Ally’s, and they accompanied her to Scotland and international competition, she noted.
Ally joined her bandmates afterward for faster, more contemporary numbers such as “Pumpkin’s Fancy” and “Hail to the King,” which she described as “the most metal thing we’re going to play tonight” and which included fist-raised shouts of “Hey, hey, hey, hey”.
A medley of “five songs I think you’ll know” followed as the band regrouped, but Oliveira hesitated. “You don’t know this one?” Ally asked him, and he shook his head no before launching hell-bent into the trademark introductory chords of Guns ‘N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the medley opener.
At drummer Marraffa’s urging, the audience rose and helped along with the familiar segments.
Midway in the medley, Ally sat down in the front row of the theater with her pipes then climbed the steps to the top of the middle aisle, turning to take in the crowd.
The band closed with “Iridium” and a literal bang-up drum solo by Marraffa before Ally’s closing words to the audience: “Follow your dreams…no matter how weird a thing they are.”
Set List: I’m Shipping Up to Boston, She’s a Pirate, Redemption, Metallica, Crazy Train, Follow Through, Recalling the Green, North to Palmer, Session, High on a Hill, New Song, A Story of Old Echoes, Solo of Hector the Hero on Robertson bagpipes, Pumpkin’s Fancy, Hail to the King, Metal Medley (Sweet Child O’ Mine, Through the Fire and Flames, Free Bird, I’m Good (Blue) and Sandstorm), Iridium
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