I was very curious, after all his appearances with Paddy Moloney in recent years, to meet "the seventh Chieftain". Carlos Nunez is our long-lost 28-year-old Celtic cousin from Galicia in northern Spain, with his energetically showy style of playing ocarinas, recorders, low whistles, Scottish pipes and, of course, the gaita, the mouth-blown Galician bagpipes. It's now an iconic instrument of the region, a wild, medieval, two-droned affair, with a melodic chanter which squeals a strident alarum - a full octave above our own dear, sedentary uileann pipes.
Between the Chieftains and Liam O'Flynn, they have made Nunez something of a star. And, apart from the pot-pourri of Galician, Flamenco, Arabic and even Israeli musicians on his latest, second, big-production album, Os Amores Libres (Free Loves), Nunez is smothered in Gaelic guests - O'Flynn, Derek Bell, Donal Lunny, Frankie Gavin, Mairtin O'Connor, Sharon Shannon, Mike Scott and even Traveller-piper Paddy Keenan flown over from Boston.
Like many pipers, Nunez cuts a relatively diminutive figure. The long, narrow, symmetrical, earnest face is frequently enlivened by a toothy, 45-degree, Lucky Luke grin. He talks passionately, despite slightly halting English, with its endearing mispronunciations and whipping, Galician laryngeal aspirates.
His high-domed forehead, like some odd medieval Spanish tonsure, is framed by two long spaniel-ears of hair, which he uses to great advantage onstage, standing on one leg and stomping shit out of the floor with the other, as he pipes himself and the band into a lather of rock'n'roll folk-delirium.
Coming from the remote, westernmost tip of a mountainous northern Spain of culturally distinct regions (Catalonia, Asturias, the Basque Country, etc) which never came under Muslim rule, Nunez is one of three million speakers of Galician, a Romance language very close to Portuguese which until recently was not recognised as a minority language. Nunez claims the region still has "some little words of the ancient Celtic language, in the names of rivers, mountains and other topography . . ."
Although an enthusiast of the mythic links between the Celts of northern Europe and Galicians - exemplified by a fanciful derivation of the Latin word for Ireland, Hibernia, from Iberia - he says he's "uncomfortable with the word Celtic. But we have pipes and fiddles and rhythms . . . musically a lot of things in common." He cites Sean O Riada's musings on an older European culture which survives in peripheral fragments, and even Bob Quinn's film, Atlantean.
Certainly, there have been trade, military and religious links between Ireland and Galicia. They range from the ancient pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, through the Flight of the Earls, and on to Spain's 19th-century statesman, Leopoldo O'Donnell. And, in this century, many Irish fought on both sides in the Spanish Civil War - the Republican side is celebrated by Mike Scott and Liam O Maonlai on Nunez's new album. But the Celticcy bit, most scholars would regard with great suspicion.
Nunez began learning the pipes at school at the age of eight: "It was a very modern school, teachers generally from the Left, very cultural people. Then I started in the conservatory when I was 10 for classical music, playing baroque and early music on a recorder. But for me the most important thing was traditional music, which you cannot learn just in a conservatory, a culture which is about so much more than fast fingers . . .
"At that time, the quality of pipers in Galicia was really bad. Franco centralised Spain. He was Galician, but he had that inferiority complex - same as with the Irish, from a long tradition of poverty. Many Galicians emigrated to Latin America - Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina. The father of Fidel Castro was Galician - and there are more than one million Galicians in Argentina.
"So Galician music has huge influence from Latin American music. In the rhythms, we have rumbas, tangos. Even in the muineiras, which are the Galician jigs, there is tumbados from Cuban music - the bass is always syncopated, particularly in the big port town of Vigo in the south of Galicia, where I come from.
"The best players left when Franco came into power in 1936. So when I started to play, I didn't like the Galician style - it was very Francista, from the 40 years of Franco, when the real music nearly died. There was a movement called Section Feminina, playing music from every part of Spain, with traditional dress, but this was just the folkloric thing for museums."
Then the Chieftains played Galicia in 1984. Nunez was very impressed by the virtuousity of the musicians - "but there was something more than spectacularity. With Matt Molloy and Sean (Keane), there are codes besides this music. There is a reason, even a story beside each tune and even little ornament. It also broke my conception of traditional music when I learnt they had played with the Rolling Stones . . ."
A couple of months later, at the age of 13, he was at the Lorient Festival in Brittany playing with a band of 40 Galician pipers. He was invited to play in front of an orchestra on Sean Davies' The Pilgrim. "Liam was there - I didn't know this guy who played this kind of octopus. I was just 13. I was hallucinating - and when I went back to Spain nobody believed me. You couldn't talk about pipes in the 1980s - people would smile and go `ha,ha, go back the cows, to the mountains' . . ."
But the Irish contact had been soldered. Nunez played his first gig with the Chieftains at the age of 18. Since then, he has gone on all their American, Japanese and Australian tours. It's certainly mutually beneficial - apart from expenses, he says: "I never take money from the Chieftains, because they are like big masters."
It's the same crack with O'Flynn. "Liam is another master, so I do that for pleasure."
Mind you, he's on BMG, the Chieftains' label, and has his own band including his brother, Xurxo - "like George in Irish, Seoirse" and a couple of regulars from Paco de Lucia's sextet. Meanwhile, Gaels such as Paddy Keenan, Frankie Gavin and Sharon Shannon often guest with them - and, according to himself, the Irish get paid.
Nunez also studied Scottish piping, another profound influence. But only in recent years did he rediscover the Galician pipers from old 78 recordings. "I met one guy Ricardo Portela, probably the best piper who came back from Venezuala with all the old styles. He was like Sean Keane, working a lot with groups of four notes in jigs - dadadadak! - or people like Willie Clancy."
Trying to figure out traditional Galician piping, I was helped by Liam McNulty of Na Piobaire Uileann who gave me a recording of European pipers (Asturians, Bretons, Bulgarians, as well as our own Mick O'Brien), a great showcase of ornament and speed which included the Galician Xesus Vaamonde, with his multiple trills and semi-tone runs - radically different from Nunez's style.
THE latest guestimate is that there are now about 17,000 Galician pipers. Brian Vallely of the Armagh Piper's Club, which imports pipers for its annual William Kennedy weekend, says: "The Galicians do have a genuine complex dance music, but like a lot of European stuff that's been moribund for a long time, it's sprouted in all sorts of new-fangled directions. They're soon going to get an attack of purism - it's only waiting to happen, there's been the first stirrings already."
Nunez responds: "Well, there are many different styles. In the mountains it was always more like Liam O Flynn, very simple, very elegant, and the tuning of the instrument was more flat, B flat. In the south or near the sea, it's in D or Csharp - it sounds more baroque, very fast, very lively, a lot of ornament and vibrato, a lot of everything - you can feel the Latin style, even in the vibrato of some pipers, it's like an Italian tenor. The Latin piper is always looking for fiesta, for girls, it's like the gypsies . . ."
And what about himself, a bachelor gaitero who spends so much time on the road? The smouldery 45-degree grin again swaggers into life. "I have it like the legend of the pipers in Galicia, that he is like the Latin lover of the Galician music, with many different women. That is the legend anyway, and I'm just a traditional musician . . ."
Ladies, you have been informed.