Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrew McGregor.
Hi Andrew, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
About seven years ago I saw a woman named Chelsea the Piper giving a bagpipes performance on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. When she paused, I spoke to her and she told me the email of her teacher. His name is Aaron Shaw with a band called the Wicked Tinkers. I reached out and he took me on as a student and I started to take lessons once a week as a private creative practice to learn something new. I did not have ambitions on the bagpipes.
About a year later, I was asked to present about humanitarian work I used to do teaching journalism in East and Central Africa as well as a sport I do called chessboxing to a group of film and music composers. Afterwards, a person came up and inquired if I played any instruments. I told him I was learning bagpipes. He asked for a recording. I didn’t have one then so I made him one. He then invited me to be a part of an album he was making with no further details. A few months later, I received an address and call time and I went. I walked into a massive recording studio and it was full of elite and classically-trained musicians with about half of them speaking German. I realized that I had been invited to be a part of a studio orchestra in support of the brilliant spoken-word poet Sekou Andrews. I somehow figured out how to do what I needed to do and the collaborators seemed pleased. The album we made was nominated for a Grammy Award and then I was in that realm.
Later, when the pandemic and lockdown started there was that time when the best thing one could do was to just stay inside and avoid people. I wanted to do something to be of service. I am still not sure where this notion came from, but I started dressing in full Scottish attire and going to the bluffs that overlook the ocean in Palisades Park in Santa Monica and performing ‘Amazing Grace’ at sunset every evening. Many people were passing and we could not even bury our dead then. Word spread about what I was doing and people would approach me before I performed and ask if they could record my performance to share with their families in honor of a cousin in New York that had just died and things like this. I was soon giving a funerary performance for a specific person every sunset. After a few months, reporters from the LA Times came and did a story and then after that a CBS News van pulled up and recorded the performance and did a story and that evening the music was played on television in Los Angeles as part of the broadcast. Then, because LA is a global media hub, the story was picked up by outlets all over the world including in India and South Korea.
I still perform on Sundays at sunset for those who need it.
During the pandemic, I stayed in touch with a German yodeler and dearest of friends named Doreen Kutzke. We met while she was doing an artist residency with the Goethe Institute at the Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House in the Pacific Palisades (the house initially started as a sanctuary for German artists fleeing the Nazi regime). We had been mixing the sounds of bagpipes and yodeling and finding ways for the music and traditions to work together and gave ourselves the name YodelRoar. Then, an Emmy-winning producer named Jed Smith took us on and we started to release songs under his label called Betafish Music while giving performances and concerts in Los Angeles and Berlin.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I think the ability to freely choose how one spends time and energy and creativity while living in Los Angeles with potable water and indoor plumbing is a historically rare and spectacular reality for which I am profoundly grateful every day. When something unpleasant occurs, I tend to cite a line from a Cormac McCarthy novel: “You never know what kind of worse luck your bad luck saves you from.”
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I now primarily work as a musician, a novelist & typewriter poet, and a research scientist studying animal cognition while designing wearables and interfaces for pigeons and squirrels to help them communicate with people and better understand how they think.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I like that one can easily meet the most brilliant and accomplished of minds in most fields in Los Angeles and there is often a spirit of connection, care, and collaboration when doing so.
I least like that people frequently die on the streets unknown, alone, and unremarked.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://yodelroar.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yodelroar/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YodelRoar/
- Youtube: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCaBGc57XQ75PeBzbA9NnGGA
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/yodelroar-music
