As a quieter counterpoint to the tune sets, the members of Clandestine rework traditional songs from the British Isles, adapt some modern ones, and write a few numbers of their own, all arranged for two wonderfully harmonious women's voices. They know that jigs and reels are meant to be fun, and that sense of fun, as well as their enthusiasm for what they're doing, is a hallmark of their performances.

Clandestine comprises multi-instrumentalist E.J. Jones (Highland bagpipes, Scottish smallpipes, flute, whistle, and bombarde), singer/guitarist Jennifer Hamel, fiddler Gregory McQueen, and singer/percussionist Emily Dugas. After nearly four years of transcontinental touring, they've built a following of dedicated fans who hail from far beyond their base in the Lone Star State.

The band came together around Jones, a tall, soft-spoken man whose quiet demeanor belies his piper's air-compressor lungs. He was introduced to Scottish music and started playing the Highland bagpipes when he was just 11 years old. "I went to a private school in Houston where they taught bagpipes, the St. Thomas Episcopal School," he began. "They have a pipe band program where each boy gets to choose between the bagpipes or a drum. Their marching pipe band competes in contests, including the world championships, which they've won three times in the junior grade. I learned in that program. And then when I went to high school, I started playing in an adult band in Houston called the Hamilton Pipe Band. We went to Scotland a few times and won the Grade 3 world championships in 1997 and 1998."
Jones pointed out that the concept of a contemporary Celtic band coming out of Texas isn't quite as unlikely as it might first appear. "There's a big piping community in Houston," he explained. "There's the St. Thomas School, and there's also some other really topnotch bagpipers who have taught other people. There's jam sessions every Wednesday night at a downtown bar called the Brewery Tap that I've been going to for about eight years. It's a really good town for pipes."

Because his training and playing had been in the formal piping style of competitive marching bands, Jones had an epiphany at the age of 16 when a friend gave him a tape of Scotland's loud, brash, and loose Tannahill Weavers. "I just locked onto them and they kind of completely rocked my world. I had never heard that, and I never knew that as a bagpiper I could play that kind of music, danceable and energetic like that. They were my Rolling Stones when I was 16!"

The name Clandestine first appeared in 1991, when Jones, still in high school, formed a quartet with fellow Houston piper Lars Sloan and two drummers, playing local Renaissance fairs and Irish festivals until college intervened. Bringing his bagpipes with him, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a school that had also attracted Hamel. A woman with a ready smile, a droll sense of humor, and a sweet, bright singing voice, she grew up in the Putnam County suburbs of New York City, where she learned to play guitar but had no particular exposure to Celtic music. She was a visual arts student at CMU when musical fate intervened. "I would write songs in my room and not play them for anyone else," she said with a grin. "That was the level of guitar and music that I was at when I met E.J. I was in my third year of school, and a conga player who lived in my house brought E.J. home one night, and we just went busking, and it was the coolest thing I ever did. He said, 'You've gotta come with us tomorrow.' And I said, 'But I don't know how to play that kind of music.' And he said, 'No, it's okay, the bagpipes are really loud, and nobody will know.'

"We went out the next night, and then we went out more nights than we didn't for the next three months, busking all the time in Pittsburgh. And it was very, very addictive and very, very fun. And school went to hell in a handbasket very shortly!" she laughed.

This is an excerpt from issue #94.