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Playing the piper

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

It was just that interviews took time, and time was scarce — he’d recently spent 18 hours tuning a troublesome instrument. Best leave it for the weekend, see if he could turn the corner.
By the time we got to County Clare, everything made sense. A sullen octopus of leather, ebony, boxwood and metal lay on Wooff’s knee. Strapping himself in, the bag wheezed and groaned, bloating uncomfortably. Its birth had been awkward, raucous even, but at least it now sounded like music. “One could look at it and say, ‘What takes such a long time?’ ” he said. “But it just does.”
Hailing from Lewisham in South London, making pipes for a quarter of a century, this is a man at the peak of his profession. Handmade to the last, devilish detail, his product is world renowned, his waiting list extends into retirement.
It’s not hard to see why. Ordered in 1997, the set on his knee was bound for San Francisco.
“The climate there is different, damper than Southern California,” Wooff said. “Reeds can open or tighten depending on the humidity, you see. He’s certainly been waiting a long time. Now I’ve got to get it to work.”
Brian McNamara, a celebrated South Leitrim piper, sketches the magic. “Imagine a block of wood and a sheet of metal and then look at the finished instrument,” he said. “A lot of pipers aspire to owning a golden set from the 1800s. Geoff isn’t just replicating those; he’s adding finesse and an incredible attention to detail. I wouldn’t want any other set in the world.”
Wooff is a Huguenot name, traceable to Flemish weavers who journeyed to Britain in the 1700s, but his mother’s people were Irish. It shows. Wooff’s first instrument was a recorder, at age 6. Planxty and the Bothy Band formed a childhood soundtrack. At 16, he began a formal engineering apprenticeship. By his mid-20s, he had worked as a machinist and draftsman, adding concertina and tin whistle to his repertoire on the London folk club scene in the 1970s.
One couldn’t script a better preamble. “The uilleann pipemaker is making one thing out of a lot of different materials, as opposed to a tailor or a potter, who is making lots of things out of one material,” he said. “For me, it perfectly mixes the skills that I learned as a child. The only difficulty was getting an instrument.”
His problem was a familiar one. At the time, despite an illustrious history, the uilleann pipes were fast becoming victims of their own complexity. The Taylor brothers made efforts in American auditoriums in the early 20th century; S

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