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Family legacy becomes lifelong obsession for Seattle's only full-time bagpiper
Monday, October 4, 1999
By CECELIA GOODNOW
Tyrone Heade was 8 when his grandmother offered him granddad's bedraggled set of Irish war pipes, which had moldered in her Portland garage for decades.
Too smelly and mildewed to be allowed inside, they seemed destined to molder in Tyrone's garage as well.
But the kid was always fiddling with those crazy pipes -- otherwise known as Scotland's great Highland bagpipe -- trying to coax sound from the African blackwood chanter that dangled from the rotting elkhide bag.
"We felt like if he was really that interested, we'll back him up," says his mother, Marie.
That's how it started -- Tyrone's lifelong obsession with an instrument that demands the dedication of a Zen master and, in his case, almost a vow of poverty.
Marie jokes that it really began when Patrick Michael, Tyrone's oldest brother, offhandedly picked up the pipe set and tried to wring sound from it.
Pat, a lordly 26, put down the pipes, turned to 8-year-old Tyrone and said, "I'll tell you one thing -- you'll never be able to play these."
Reminded of this family lore, Heade just smiles beatifically. At 36, not only does he play the bagpipe, he's known as the only full-time, career bagpiper in Seattle.
He's got a black belt in obsession, fed by his love and fascination for a musical form that dates back more than 800 years.
"If anyone had told me five years ago that I was going to be doing this full time, I would have laughed," he says. "You can't do this full time."
Heade (HEED) is pipe sergeant and president of the non-profit Elliott Bay Pipe Band. At more than 20 members, it's one of the largest pipe bands in Washington and Oregon and includes Washington's only two "open," or professional-grade, competition pipers.
"We were established in 1992 at this very table," Heade says, sitting at the dining table that doubles as office and classroom in his tiny, one-bedroom Queen Anne apartment.
The table's blond finish is worn where students have rested their pipes during endless hours of lessons. Heade, who teaches about 30 students a week, believes pipers are duty-bound to share their skills so a new generation will carry on the tradition.
"We have to grow 'em like wheat," he says.
Heade also plays the sweetly mellow Scottish "small pipes" with his group, Iona Abbey. The combo, which aims for a rustic, fireside sound, includes cello, fiddle and bodhran, a Scottish drum.
In full regalia, Heade looks the part of a romantic hero who took a wrong turn at Wuthering Heights.
His auburn-brown hair falls in curls almost to his shoulders, and his beard is neatly trimmed. His eyes -- strikingly blue and open -- seem to jump out from his broad, guileless face.
Heade smiles patiently when reminded that bagpipes are not to everyone's taste -- that some folks consider them a nuisance akin to street mimes and accordionists.
Heade says the bagpipe's bad image comes from "people trying to learn it on their own and doing a bad job of it."
"The one thing people really don't hear," he says, "is the delicacy."
As bagpiper-in-residence at St. Mark's and St. James cathedrals, Heade still plays the century-old bagpipe passed down from his grandfather, Nicholas Patrick Heade Sr., who used to perform with Mel's Irish War Pipers.
Heade, a parishoner at St. James, became its bagpiper-in-residence in 1990. Since 1993 he has held the same post at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral.
"He got so good," says James Savage, director of liturgy and music at St. James. "He is simply one of the outstanding musicians in the area. I don't mean simply bagpipers -- he has become an extraordinary musician."
Heade has performed for, among others, Mayor Paul Schell, Republican presidential wannabe Malcolm "Steve" Forbes Jr. (who has a yacht here), the Bank of Scotland and the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel.
Heade, who competes at the second-highest amateur grade, is not yet the most technically superb bagpiper in town. But he is one of the most dedicated.
"He's very serious about every detail," Savage said. "There are a lot of players who gig, who play for hire. Tyrone doesn't 'gig'; he plays because he has a passion for it."
Seven years ago Heade found his other passion -- an effervescent redhead named Rachel. They met at church, where Heade was a lecter -- a lay reader of scripture during Sunday Mass.
'He was wearing this gorgeous, green summer suit -- pale, mossy green," Rachel recalls.
She went on to become, in her joking words, "Mrs. Heade, the piper's wife," after a colorful courtship that began with an unforgettable rendezvous at Discovery Park.
Heade showed up for that first date in his 1965 Mercury Monterey -- an 18-foot-long, two-door, heavy-metal clunker.
"I hear this amazing noise coming from the street, like BANG, BANG, BANG," Rachel tells it. "I look out and here comes this Batmobile. Then I see Tyrone coming out of it."
The courtship ripened a year later when they sailed to Victoria for Rachel's birthday. There, at the Dashwood Inn, they became engaged.
"We used the little phone in the hallway to call our parents," Heade says.
Their wedding, on Jan. 29, 1994, was a storybook spectacle, set in the ornate nave of St. James Cathedral.
"The guys all wore their kilts and his wife was this smashing redhead," Savage recalls. "It looked like something out of a romance novel."
"It was really beautiful," Rachel says. "When the door opened, this really cool white silvery light flooded in."
All was well until six months later, when Heade came home from his marketing job and poured out his frustration at balancing career, marriage and bagpiping. Rachel urged him to chuck the job and follow his dream.
"We didn't have any kids, we didn't have a house payment," Rachel says. "It was a great time to experiment."
She later told Father Michael G. Ryan, "I hope you'll say some extra prayers for Tyrone because he's going to take on piping as a living."
"I work seven days a week," Heade says, "and I work really long hours."
Rachel calls herself his caddie, shuttling him between back-to-back weekend performances in a silver Subaru she calls the "Shamrock Shuttle."
Like other pipers' wives, she has taken up quilting and knitting to while away the hours at competitive games.
"There is definitely a bagpipe-widow culture," she says. "Bagpipers are a wee bit of a different breed. I don't want to say it's in your blood to do it, but it's not a hobby. It goes deeper."
Rachel now works in Microsoft's legal records department, but years ago she was a stand-up comic and improv artist in Los Angeles. Her sense of humor -- and her empathy for a performer's life -- survived the career change.
"The No. 1 thing," she says, "is to be really supportive of him when things don't go right -- to remember how I felt when I didn't get a part or an audition."
She says Heade is a true romantic, sending her roses on her first day at work and seeding the apartment with love notes when he goes on the road. She might open the freezer to find the message: "When you get this, you'll know I'm thinking of you."
Marie Heade says Tyrone, the youngest of five kids, "was the sweetest one of all to raise."
He has enough starch in his tweeds, however, to enjoy an occasional 18-year-old Macallan scotch and a good cigar. And, adds his dad, Nicholas Patrick Jr., "He just roars when he laughs."
Helen Sanders, who plays in the pipe band and studies with Heade, says he's a welcome contrast to her first bagpipe instructor, a 20-year-old Microsoft intern who whacked the table with his ruler when Sanders committed the faux pas of calling a bagpipe tune a "song."
Heade has his own brand of intensity. Rachel says she occasionally hears him teaching in his sleep, mumbling things like, "No, no, no, you have to breathe."
She says she rolls over in the dark and whispers, "It's time for the student to leave."
Paul Mueller, 39, another of Heade's students and pipe-band colleagues, says Heade cares deeply about the future of bagpiping in Seattle.
"He encourages me to teach," Mueller said, "because he really wants the Seattle bagpipe scene to grow."
Following age-old Scottish tradition, Heade teaches by singing a tune to the student and hearing the novice repeat it. That's a tough sell in oral-retentive American culture.
"The most difficult thing to do is get people to sit in that chair and sing," Heade says. "I've had people fold their arms and say, 'No, I won't do it.'"
Heade, a former high school and college debater, fought back this fall by doubling his rate from $20 a lesson to $40. But there was one important proviso: If students do everything he requires -- sing, count time and record the lesson -- they get the lesson for half-price.
"Remember," he says slyly, "my background is in applied persuasion."
David Bordeaux, 17, a Bainbridge High School senior who commutes to his weekly lesson, says Heade approaches the music analytically, sketching melodic patterns on paper so they're easier to learn.
Heade himself studies with 23-year-old Alan Bevan of Abbotsford, B.C., an "open" grade piper who's good enough to play solos in Scotland. Bevan in turn studies with Jack Lee, one of the most highly decorated pipers outside Scotland.
"The old legend," Bevan said, "was it took seven generations and seven years to be a good piper. It's one of those lifetime things."
Bevan says Heade has a strong, consistent sound but must now work to gain expression and control.
Although Heade sometimes plays the more modern airs, marches and dance music known as "light music," his specialty is the ancient, "classical" genre called piobaireachd (pronounced PEE-brook).
"Piobaireachd is very surreal and doesn't have a real rhythm," Bevan says. "The first time you hear it, you don't really know when the tuning stops and the playing begins."
He and Heade will continue lessons via audiotape, e-mail and Internet sound file over the next five years as Bevan pursues a doctorate in medieval history in Toronto.
Bevan foresees a piping-hot future for Heade. Given time, Bevan predicts, "I think he'll make the open ranks."
Even if he doesn't, Heade has what he needs to be happy -- his beloved Rachel and his beloved pipes. It all adds up to a life well lived.
"It is hard to stay afloat financially," Heade says, "but I'm doing something I love."
You can e-mail Heade at tyroneh@eskimo.com
Heade's ongoing Intermediate Bagpipe class (for all skill levels) meets Monday evenings at the Ballard Community Center. Information: 684-4093.
Heade's annual Highland Bagpipe and Reed Maintenance Class will be from 1 to 3 p.m. Oct. 17 at Dusty Strings, 3406 Fremont Ave. N. Registration is $25. Information: 634-1656.
The first written mention of the "great pipes" was in 1623, when a bagpiper from Perth, Scotland, was prosecuted for playing on the Sabbath.
During Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion of 1745, the Loyalist English government considered bagpipes instruments of war because of their role in rallying Scots to battle. One man, James Ried, was executed in 1746 for high treason for the crime of playing the bagpipe, although he insisted he had never borne arms against the English king.
The instrument itself is an engineer's nightmare (or delight), fashioned with more than 100 different tools and using reeds that get off tune at the slightest change in temperature and humidity.
"The tuning of the instrument, by itself, is horrendous," says Helen Sanders, a member of the Elliott Bay Pipe Band. "You've got four different reeds that have to be tuned, and it's just a mess."
Even the music is complex. It uses a pentatonic, or nine-note, scale and features some of the fastest notes -- 1/64th and 1/128th -- in music.
There are no rests, so the piper must have good lungs and a strong left arm to squeeze air from the bag to the pipes. Without constant practice, the piper quickly loses his "lip," and the instrument dries out.
Ear plugs help minimize hearing loss from an instrument whose sound can travel miles across the lonely Scottish moors.
"For 800 years," says piper Tyrone Heade, "this was the loudest thing they heard."
Even in the urban cacophany, the sound travels an embarrassing distance.
"I can practice at the bottom of Queen Anne," Heade says, "and they can hear it up on Magnolia."
P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow can be reached at 206-448-8353 or ceceliagoodnow@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE-POST INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
His parents finally made the long drive from Clatskanie, Ore. -- population 1,044 -- to the Scottish Shopper in Burien, just so Tyrone could get the set restored.
Heade played his grandfather's bagpipe for an audience at Lynndale Park Amphitheater this summer. Mia Song/P-I
As a lone bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" from the balcony, the body of Seattle Archbishop Thomas Murphy was laid to rest in the crypt of St. James Cathedral yesterday.
Heade was the "lone bagpiper" in that Post-Intelligencer story two summers ago.
Heade's days now revolve around teaching, performing, competing at Highland games and studying to hone his own skills.
Heade believes pipers are duty-bound to share their skill so a new generation will carry on the tradition. He teaches about 30 students a week. Gilbert W. Arias/P-I
For more information
Iona Abbey's CD is available for $12 at the St. James Cathedral book store, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral gift shop, Galway Traders in Ballard, Dusty Strings in Fremont and Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle. It also can be ordered through Tyrone Heade's Web site -- www.bagpipe-entertainment.comBagpipe facts
The bagpipe is one of the oldest and most complex of musical instruments. Much of the music dates to the 1500s, but the instrument itself goes back at least to 1150, when it was featured in a woodcut of a pig playing a pipe.
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