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Join Wake and District Saturday, December 7th @ 7p as we celebrate another amazing year of making music — while recognizing our members and our mission. Special guests Raleigh Scottish Highland Dance and Michael Grey. A limited number of tickets are available for online purchase (see bottom of this page). Tickets WILL NOT be available at the door.

The celebration will take place at All Saints Chapel located at 110 South East Street in Downtown Raleigh on Saturday, December 7th from 7p - 10p.

Tickets are $10 and include entertainment, some salty snacks and savory desserts provided by our band members. Dinner will not be served. Beer, wine and soda will be available for sale. Bottled water will be available at no charge.

Souvenir pint glasses and stemless wine glasses will be for sale for $10 and include 2 free refills of beer/wine.

The evening will feature the stirring sounds of the Wake and District Pipe band throughout the evening fair. Special guest performances by Erin Bartow's Raleigh Scottish Dance and the infectiously talented bagpiper, Michael Grey.

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About Raleigh Scottish Dance:

Erin started Scottish Highland Dance at the age of 6, under the instruction of Jo Moore Kalat, through the City of Raleigh's education classes. Her love of dance took her to dance competitions across the Southeast, US, Canada and Scotland, where she won many prestigious championships and competitions. She was twice ranked second in the United States Inter Regional Highland Dance Championship and numerous times in the top four. Erin is a Fellow Scottish Dance Teacher with the British Association of Teachers of Dance, where she has been teaching Scottish Highland Dance for 16 years. She is available for on site classes around the Triangle where she caters to different Homeschooling Co-Ops, as well as for performances. Her goal is to provide her dancers with the highest level of training in Scottish Highland Dancing.

The Scottish Highland dances are a beautiful combination of strength, agility, movement, music, and costume. Unlike other dance forms, the Scottish Highland dances are generally danced solo and in competition. Although regularly confused with Irish Step Dancing, Scottish Highland dancing uses soft shoes, and arm positions.

About Michael Grey:

While he has had a string of impressive competitive successes over many years, Michael Grey will certainly be remembered most for his compositions, arrangements and the all-round creative component he brings to all of his endeavours.

His talent as a piper has always been clear, and his exceptional hands have allowed him to do whatever he wanted with a pipe tune. His influence on the 78th Fraser Highlanders at the peak of their success, and then on the Peel Regional Police Pipe Band during their best years in Grade 1 are testament to his skill at helping to bring out the creative and musical best in a band.

But with five books of bagpipe music and six CDs released to this point, his creative tide appears far from ebbing, and it would be hard to find a composer whose tunes have graced the World Pipe Band Championship program more frequently in the last 20 years than Michael Grey.

He remains one of the world’s most influential and distinctly creative composers and arrangers, without doubt the future holds morer to come from the creative genius of Michael Grey.

The biography below appears on Michael’s Dunbar Music

JM, June 2007

Born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Michael Grey received his first lessons at twelve from George Walker of the 48th Highlanders of Canada and was a member of this illustrious band for three years. He studied under John Wilson, one of the twentieth century’s greatest players, and received extensive tuition from Bill Livingstone and John Walsh. He has four times won the North American Championship, the overall title at the Vancouver Indoor Meet twice, the Piobaireachd Society Gold Medal and that venue’s March, Strathspey and Reel and Former Winners’ MSR on the same day. In 1989 he won the aggregate championship at the Cowal Highland Gathering. He has seventeen times won the professional Ontario Championship Supreme awards for both piobaireachd and light music. In 1995 he won the Toronto Piper’s Society Knock-Out final; in 2003 he again won this testing event – for the third year in succession.

Since his early piping years Michael has been a prolific and innovative composer. Evidence of this remarkable composing success is apparent in the on-going popularity of his tunes with bands and individuals at the major competitions: at 1990’s World Pipe Band Championship in Glasgow, there were more examples of bands performing Grey’s tunes than any other composer, living or dead. In 2001 he was commissioned by Piper & Drummer magazine to compose a new piobaireachd aimed at pushing the musical boundaries of the traditional form.

A founding member of the 1987 World Pipe Band Champion 78th Fraser Highlanders Pipe Band, he left that organization in 1995 and became Pipe Major of Peel Regional Police Pipe Band, one of the world’s top bands. In 1999 Michael left the PRP Pipe Band to focus on solo piping; this same year he won the Scottish Piping Society of London’s (UK) Strachan Cup and again was the aggregate winner of the Vancouver Indoor Meet.

In 2003 Michael consulted with renowned composer John Beckwith on Beckwith’s commission for pipes and orchestra, “A New Pibroch”. Grey performed the piece’s premiere in March 2003; the piece aired in June of that year on CBC Radio 2.

An adjudicator, workshop leader and a serious student of written pipe tunes and their composers, Michael has four published books of music and five solo recordings including the October 2003 release, “Nine Blasted Notes”. His fifth book, “Music for Everybody”, was published in November 2006.

His sixth solo recording, Shimla Hum, was released May 8, 2006.

Festival distributes his music in Canada, CelticmusicUSA in the US and Highlander Music in Europe. He is a partner in his own label, Dunaber Music.

A native of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Michael Grey resides in Dundas, Ontario.

Related website: www.dunaber.com

About All Saints Chapel:

Built in 1875, All Saints Chapel’s history is as unique as the structure itself.

For decades, the chapel was part of the Church of the Good Shepherd on Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh. After the congregation grew and needed a bigger church in the early 1900s, the chapel was moved around the corner to Morgan Street.

In 2005, the congregation decided they needed more space for a parking lot and planned to raze the chapel if someone didn’t buy it before demolition day. Raleigh redeveloper Greg Hatem caught wind of the possibility, and in the 11th hour, stepped in to save the chapel.

On June 18, 2006, the 70-foot-long, 40-foot-wide, 235,000-pound structure made its second move, this time a half mile east to the edge of historic Oakwood in downtown Raleigh. Hatem and his team held their breath, praying the historic structure was not damaged en-route. After the chapel was safely settled in its new location on South East Street, the second task began: looking at dozens of old photos of the chapel to ensure the team could restore it to its original glory, from ornate lighting fixtures to intricate wood trim.

Nearly $1.5 million and countless man hours later, the chapel has been restored to reflect the work of its original designer, Reverend Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, and the sanctuary looks like it did upon opening for its first service on Easter Sunday in 1875. With its wooden aisles leading to a gothic cross configuration, highlighted by five clerestory windows on either side of the five-bay nave, cathedral-like ceilings, stained-glass window and pointed arches, All Saints is an architectural treasure and one of the few left of its kind.

Tickets:

Tickets can be purchased through the PayPal "Buy Now" button below. All tickets will be mailed out via the United States Postal Service.

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