(From top) Shots of HKVDC members in the 1930s, Anthony Brewers and Chris Lee. Photos provided by Red Door News

We may only hear them on New Year's Eve but Hong Kong has an impressive collection of bagpipe bands and some internationally-acclaimed players. However, the city's bagpipe-playing community is not always as harmonious as it is accomplished. Simon Parry reports.

Stand on the edge of Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour at midnight on New Year's Eve and when the noise of the fireworks and the cheers have died away, a haunting sound - at once familiar and yet foreign - will drift across the night sky.

It is the sound of some two dozen bagpipe players striking up at different locations around the harbour, all of them hired to pipe in 2011 at private parties and functions in some of the city's top hotels and venues.

Hong Kong may be thousands of miles from the traditional home of the bagpipes in the Scottish Highlands, but the city has a wealth of experienced, international-class bagpipe players including a bounty of home-grown talent.

There are an estimated 15 to 20 pipe bands in Hong Kong and enough world-class players to stake a claim to being Asia's piping capital - but at the same time enough factional differences to prevent that ambition being achieved at least for now.

While the sound of the different sets of bagpipes drifting out on New Year's Eve is a symbol of the instrument's enduring popularity, the sound of Auld Lang Syne being struck up in dozens of different locations symbolizes the discord between pipe bands.

Whatever their differences, however, Hong Kong's pipe bands have no shortage of ability - and that ability is epitomized by the precocious talent of Chris Lee Cho-lam, a 21-year-old from Sham Shui Po who as a teenager in 2009 joined a band of pipers on stage in Nova Scotia in Canada playing Mull of Kintyre with Paul McCartney.

His journey to play alongside the former Beatle in front of an audience of thousands of people was a remarkable one that started when he heard the sound of bagpipes in the distance as he took part in a Boys Brigade parade at the age of just seven.

"The bagpipes were so far away that I couldn't even see where the sound was coming from," said Lee, who has just returned from his third visit to Nova Scotia. "It always seemed like a secret sound - like some sort of magic - and it stayed with me.

"Then, when I was 13, I had a friend who played bagpipes and that was the first time I had seen them close up. It took a lot of work to learn how to play them but I didn't care. I just wanted to play the bagpipes."

The instrument may have been centuries old but Lee's method of learning it was very much 21st century Hong Kong. Entranced by the sound of one particular player on his first bagpiping CD, he went onto the Internet to track down Canadian maestro Bruce Gandy.

"I asked him if he would teach me online, and he said he'd never done it before but he'd try," Lee recalled. So began an extraordinary learning process where Chris would communicate with Gandy by Skype, playing a small practice chanter pipe in front of his computer screen to master the art of the bagpipes.

"It was quite difficult because of the time zones," he said. "He would play something to me while I watched on Skype and I would play it back to him. I was his first online student and now he has 50 students who he teaches on Skype.

"After three years of taking lessons from him, he invited me to go to Novia Scotia on a scholarship. I've been three times. It's been an amazing experience. I am just really lucky to have had the chance to go over there.

"Paul McCartney invited our band to play with him in July 2009. We came on stage and played Mull of Kintyre. I was with 15 pipers and we played with drums. The audience was huge - I've never seen that many people in Novia Scotia before."

Lee, a member of the Scout Pipe Band and the Civil Aid Service Band in Hong Kong, has become the first Asian player to qualify to join the elite 78th Highlanders Halifax Citadel band. He has won a succession of international awards in Canada and the US.

His success and that of other Chinese bagpipers is all the more remarkable for the fact that Hong Kong, with its small living spaces and high-density population, is probably one of the world's least suitable environments for playing the bagpipes.

Bands struggle constantly to find suitable places to rehearse where they is enough space to play and obliging neighbours who will not object to the high-decibel output of bagpipes striking up in unison.

Scottish-Canadian teacher Anthony Brewer, a geography teacher and member of the Hong Kong International Pipe Band, has been made only too aware of the difficulties of keeping his hobby up since moving to the city eight years ago.

"I live in the New Territories up a hill, and I've had the police called on me four times now," he said. "The first few times a neighbor complained. The third time it was a park attendant.

"The police are generally quite good about it. They've got a pipe band themselves. So when they come to see me, and realise what the complaint is about, they say 'We're just doing our job'.

"The biggest problem with the bagpipes in Hong Kong is that you are often in such a small space that you're blowing the eardrums of people who are in the same vicinity.

"When you play the bagpipes for non-piping audiences, it really is a couple of minutes here and there because it's just loud. Even if they do like the bagpipes, it does tend to become a bit of an intrusive instrument.

"I'm lucky because I have a car - so I literally go up to the top of a mountain and practice there. It's the only place I can go sometimes."

Perhaps the one night of the year when the sound of bagpipes is universally welcomed in December 31, and Brewer will spend the evening entertaining a private party at the Peninsula Hotel. "A lot of expats who live here in Hong Kong like to hear the pipes on New Year's Eve," he said.

"You play Old Lang Syne on New Year's Eve and of course everybody breaks out in song with a drink in hand after the clock strikes 12."

Brewer teaches the bagpipes privately and says some of his best students are Chinese rather than expatriate. "Hong Kong people are generally quite keen on music," he said. "The Chinese students I've had have been keen at learning and learning well. They are very meticulous.

"Perhaps my strongest student was a young Chinese lad who now plays in a very famous Australian band and he plans to go to the Edinburgh Tattoo with his band. Another student I had was a Chinese lad as well and he's now playing with our local band and enjoying it."

Despite their strong pool of talent, however, local bands fail to make the most of Hong Kong's potential because of differences in the piping community, Brewer believes. "The biggest problem we face in Hong Kong is the number of different bands we have," he said.

"We suffer from having too many small bands. We lack the ability to come together and do really big nice performances, marching in parades and competing and having a large enough pools of good pipers to draw the best pipers to compete at international events.

"We have been trying to address this problem for at least a couple of years now. It is bit of a power struggle more than anything. You have people who are just not willing to take a subordinate position.

"It is really quite silly because there are quite a few capable good pipers out there but they want to be the pipe major and they are not willing to take anything less so it frustrates everyone involved."

Alvin Chung - an accomplished piper who was with the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) pipe band in Canada before returning to Hong Kong - is clearly disillusioned with the local scene since his return.

Chung set up an online forum to try to unite local players but said in an email: "Frankly I haven't got any positive things about the bagpipes community in Hong Kong to say. I set up the Facebook group to connect with the other local players not long after I returned from Canada but that has led me nowhere."

Ron Abbott, chairman of the Hon Kong Piping Society, sympathizes with Chung. "He's probably fed up with some of the politics that has been going on and the fact that everyone wants to run their own little band instead of getting together and playing properly, improving playing standards and forming a decent big competition band," he said.

Abbott said he "completely agreed" with Anthony's argument that the city had too many small bands. "There is a lot of politics unfortunately," he said. "It's just a matter of getting people to agree, to stop the nonsense and to get together.

"It's also a fact that because of the nature of Hong Kong, you can't just practice like you would elsewhere. You have to deal with built-up areas where you get people complaining about noise a lot."

As far as Lee is concerned, the bagpipes are his future, however divided the local piping community may be - and he has plans of his own to broaden the appeal of the instrument in the Chinese community.

"I want to do piping for a living from now," he said. "I have some private students already but not enough. The problem is that most people don't even know what bagpipes are. So I am going to have to do some promotion."

Lee has teamed up with local wind instrument master Guo Yazhi on his latest album City Rhapsody which includes a track that combines the bagpipes with traditional Chinese instruments - a world-first, according to Lee.

"I think it goes really well together. I don't think anyone has done the bagpipes with Chinese instruments before," Chris said. "I am going to try to arrange a concert so I can introduce the bagpipes to a wider audience. I think people will like it and find it's something new and interesting."

If Lee succeeds, the distinctive drone of the bagpipes might just become a sound that is heard around the year in Hong Kong and not just on New Year's Eve and Burns Night.

(HK Edition 12/31/2010 page4)