Filipino-Vietnamese Canadian a born bagpiper
Viet-phi Vo, 604.709.8709 (available after 4 p.m. on weekdays); viet-phi_vo@hotmail.com
Stuart Colcleugh, PAMR, 778.782.3210, colcleugh@sfu.ca
He’s Filipino by birth, half Vietnamese by heritage and Canadian by citizenship, but there’s nothing remotely Scottish about Viet-phi Vo.
So it’s surprising he would even be interested in the bagpipes—let alone become the fastest-learning piper they’ve ever seen at the Robert Malcolm Memorial (RMM) Pipe Band.
The RMM band is the junior “farm team” of the six-time and current world champion Simon Fraser University Pipe Band. Both bands will be playing at SFU’s annual Robbie Burns Day dinner and silent auction at Coquitlam’s Executive Plaza Hotel on Friday, Jan. 22.
“Viet-phi is a real prodigy,” says RMM manager Rob MacNeil, himself an accomplished SFU band piper.
“Normally, it takes up to three years for piping students to move from the Beginner 1 class to Beginner 2, Beginner Pipes and then the Robert Malcolm Level 4 band. Viet phi did the whole thing in four months.”
The Burnaby Mountain Secondary grade 12 student has been playing bass trombone for six years, most recently with the school band and as a sea cadet member of the B.C. Regional Cadet Honour Band.
And it was at an honour-band function in Nanaimo last spring that he was first introduced to the pipes by the three bagpipers he roomed with.
“They were practicing a lot and I thought, hey, that’s pretty cool. Why don’t I try doing that?”
But Vo didn’t just try the pipes. An avid model maker, he actually built his own set using instructions from the Internet. He’s currently making a set of bellows-blown Highland smallpipes and a set of concert or low whistles—all from PVC tubing.
Vo’s piping prowess is an inspiration to his younger brother Phi-viet, who is a drummer in the band, and a source of pride to his parents Phi-viet Sr. and mother Edel Vo, who is pursuing master’s degree in education at SFU.
As for his lack of Scottish genes, Vo just laughs, but he admits his friends find his fascination with the pipes amusing.
“They say ‘how did that happen?’ It is kind of random.”
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Photo available online at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfupamr/4293051843/