Alan Jones (31)

Bagpiper born (likely in the 1950s) in the town of Monmouth, in Wales, and emigrated to North America in 1979. Currently living in Montreal, Canada. Well known in the broader piping world on both sides of the Atlantic, Alan Jones has been playing pipe for more than thirty years. Although he started his musical education on piano and started playing drums in local pop groups then switched to folk guitar, it is from traditional Celtic music that Alan draws his greatest love and interest. Based in Montreal, he performs mainly Northumbrian, Breton, Welsh, Scottish and Irish music on numerous varieties of bagpipe. He is also an accomplished player on the whistle. Alan is the owner of a very significant collection of pipes, flutes and whistles; it is deemed to be one of the largest private collections of bagpipes anywhere, currently now numbering over 200 different sets. His collection of folk flutes and whistles numbers around 400. He has made numerous journeys to meet and learn from the best of pipers, including Richard Butler and Joe Hutton in Northumberland, Joe McKenna and Liam O’Flynn from Ireland, Jim Dobbie and Alex MacNeill in Canada, Gordon Mooney from Scotland, Gerry O’Sullivan and Denis Brooks in the U.S.A. and Jean Baron and Patric Molard in Brittany, worked actively as a member of the Canadian Celtic Congress, consecutively won three times the International class of the Northumbrian Pipers’ Society competitions, given exhibitions with his unique collection of bagpipes and organized a number of successful North American Northumbrian Pipers’ Conventions.