NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
The Birth of
Cappy's
Drift
Northumbrian Music Nights and the
North Pennines LEADER Project
send Cappy's Drift to Italy
for the International Bagpipe Festival in
Scapoli
Thursday, July 22nd, a very special band from the North Pennines will be making their way by air to Rome as invited guests of the organisers of a major international festival of the bagpipes, to perform before an audience of thousands. But tonight, in the intimate function room at The King's Head in Allendale, this band will play for a very select audience -- their neighbours and friends new and old from all around Tynedale! The band will be delighted to play for as many as can squeeze into the room.
Cappy's Drift was born out of another of those ideas that the Northumbrian Music Nights organisation keeps adding into the bowl they will insist on fathoming, again and again.
The North Pennines region has so much character to recommend it as a friendly region for visiting, and local tourism-based enterprises are increasingly sophisticated in their recognition that the best quality entertainment helps keep visitors happy, as well as providing a welcome spot of pleasure for local residents alike.
So too the mountainous region around Scapoli, three hours drive from Rome in the centre of Italy, has ample character and a home-based musical tradition to be proud of. When the idea of 'transnational cooperation' was suggested at a recent LEADER general meeting, it took only a bit of probing from the NMN group to make contact with the zampogna afficionadoes in Scapoli.
A brief exploratory visit here in March by representatives of the Italian group proved so successful that a return engagement, with musicians, was requested.
Requests for live music are what the NMN group thrive on, so it didn't take very long to get a band together composed of some of the best representatives of the Northumbrian musical tradition. Suddenly, spontaneously, Cappy's Drift was born!
And the sound they make is so sweet, so pure and so intimate, it could only be Northumbrian Music. For a chance to preview what thousands of visitors to Scapoli will be enjoying, and to catch a rare sight and sound picture of the band in action, Saturday night at The King's Head is the only place in Tynedale to be.
