Guest Author - Susan Curtis

A sold out night at the Blackstone River Theater for the Battlefield Band from Scotland! For 30 years, Scotland's Battlefield Band has continuously explored new musical avenues within their traditional Celtic heritage.

Current band members are:
• Mike Katz (Highland pipes/small pipes/various whistles/bass guitar)
• Alan Reid (keyboards/guitar/vocals)
• Alasdair White (fiddle/whistle/banjo/bazouki/Highland and small pipes/bodhran)
• Pat Kilbride (vocals/guitar/cittern)

It was a wonderful night of music. Pat Kilbride, on guitar, was a little late coming on stage, but didn't disappoint when he started the night off with the first song. Not feeling well with a sore throat and fever, band member Alan Reid sang all of the other songs but for one other song sung by Pat. Pat also started the second set with his excellent guitar fingering on a slow moody piece that ended in a duet with White. Alasdair was magic on the fiddle and mandolin to the delight of the audience. During the performance, Alan Reid mixed his own compositions with a 17th century song and a song written by Robert Burns, a renowned Scottish poet, who liked to toot his own horn in a song about himself called "Roving Robin".

Unashamedly, I love the bagpipes. Mike Katz, a tall man with a foot long beard, is among the best on the highland pipes. He brought the house down more than once during the course of the evening. While waiting for Pat Kilbride to join the band on stage, he joked about his first trip to the United States. He stopped somewhere in the mid-west for a cup of coffee. He had thought the waitress had asked him if his beard came with the hat. What she really had said was, "Be careful the coffee is hot".

An added bonus to the evening, the band recorded a live CD of the night's performance. After the show, they burned the recording to CD format and offered the two disc set to the audience for a reasonable $20. All together the band made for a very enjoyable evening.