Police division’s pipe and drum band celebrates Celtic tradition with each word – The Mercury Information

It was a warm, clear summer night when Los Gatan Maribeth Allen heard the music. She had been outside
stargazing when she heard a melody begin, but she couldn’t believe her ears. “Were those bagpipes
playing?” she thought. It couldn’t be. Not in a modern city, and especially not in Los Gatos.

When Allen realized it actually was bagpipes, she jumped on her bicycle and started pedaling toward the sound. Moments later, she found herself at the Los Gatos Presbyterian Church and in front of the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Pipes and Drums band.

While Allen had wanted to join a bagpipe band for years, she had never picked up the instrument and didn’t know how to read music. But when she found out the only requirement for new members was that they be enthusiastic and interested in bagpipe music, she knew she had to join the band.

“I’ve always watched pipe bands from the sidelines and admired them. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in,” Allen says. “This (band) has been a wonderful avenue to pursue to get into bagpipes, something I thought was closed to me.”

Now in its seventh year, the band has grown to more than 40 members and performs at about 40 events a year across the nation. The band performs at a wide array of events, including law enforcement and military funerals, police and fire graduations, birthdays and parades. This St. Patrick’s Day, the band will perform in San Pedro Square in San Jose for the St. Patrick’s Day Pub Crawl.

The group was formed in 2001 after pipes instructor Jay Tuttle, noting a lack of pipes players in the area, approached then-Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Chief Larry Todd about creating a police pipes band. Up to that point, Tuttle was usually the only pipes player performing at local law enforcement agencies’ funerals and graduations.

“I was giving (bagpipe) lessons and had a few students that had no place to go,” Tuttle says. “I went to three or four different (police departments), and they all turned me down” until he spoke with Todd, Tuttle says.

Since its inception, the group has had members from several police departments, including Los Gatos, San Jose, Gilroy and Palo Alto. Members have also joined from the Santa Clara Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. military.

However, the group now consists of mostly civilian members, some of whom have never been in law enforcement or even picked up a bagpipe.

One such person is Elsie Lam, who joined the group after a co-worker showed up to work one day in a kilt. After talking to him, she found out about the Pipes and Drums band and joined.

“I was born in Hong Kong,” says Lam, who left her home country at the age of 12. “Because it was a British colony, there was bagpipe music everywhere.”

Growing up, Lam played piano, bells and snare drums. Although she has been a member of the band for six months and has participated in four parades, she has yet to play drums in public with the band. That will all change this St. Patrick’s Day when she plays drums for the band during the San Jose pub crawl.

Although not all of the band members are of Scottish or Irish descent, the one thing they all have in common is their love of the bagpipes and passion for music.

“The music is played from the soul,” says Brian Hyland, a retired San Jose police sergeant. “The soul of the piper is played through the bagpipes. That’s what people [listening] should feel.”

It’s all about carrying on the tradition and culture of bagpipes, says Hyland, who is of Irish and Scottish heritage. Hyland has been a member of the group since its inception, and says that in a time and society where tradition is being lost every day, he is glad to keep the ancient tradition of bagpipe playing going.

Pipes player Vince Guinnane says playing the pipes brings a visceral feeling, and listening to the music gets into your blood.

“If you’re just playing the notes, you’re just doing mechanics,” says Guinnane, who has played the pipes since he was 8. “If you’re getting into it, people will notice.”

When band member Philip Laidlaw joined the group, he thought people were going to ask him to stop playing when he was practicing his bagpipes. To his relief, he finds that people have been mostly positive when they hear him play on his practice chanter, a pipe instrument that is often used to prep players before moving on to actual bagpipes.

Drum Sgt. Jeff Gordon says the response Laidlaw gets to his playing is typical. Last year, when the group was participating in the San Francisco Columbus Day Parade, a woman ran a city block to catch up to the band to tell them she was so touched by the bagpipe music that she cried, Gordon says.

Playing with the band “is especially gratifying when people come up to you and tell how much they enjoy it,” Gordon says. “On a personal level this has been something special for me. Making music was a big part of my life when I was young, but I lost it along the way.”

Not everyone is a fan of the pipes, however.

“The bagpipes have one volume: loud,” Hyland says. “People either love them or hate them. You can’t turn the volume down like you can on other instruments.”

Hyland says he’s noticed that most of the people who enjoy listening to bagpipes are of Celtic descent or have a family member who is a civil servant or in the military. The band has performed at many funerals for fallen police officers and military personnel. When the bagpipes start playing, people often start to cry, Hyland says.

“One of the things you’ll notice is that when the news covers a military or police officer’s funeral you’ll always hear the bagpipes playing in the background,” Hyland says. “Why is that? Because that’s what people remember. When you close your eyes, what you remember about the funeral is the bagpipes playing and the coffin being carried away.”

There has always been an association among bagpipes and police and military funerals and graduations, Guinnane says. Although the band tries to have as much fun as possible, they also take what they do seriously, he says.

“The main thing is that we want to look good and sound good,” Guinnane says. “We don’t want to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths – or ears.”