Eric Rigler

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Eric Rigler is known throughout the music industry as "the most recorded bagpiper of all time". He has been playing all forms of bagpipes and Irish Whistles since he was a child, performing solo, with bagpipe bands and other musical groups. It has been said that if one hears bagpipes in a movie or on television, it is most likely to be Eric Rigler. His playing was recently featured in a commercial for Titleist Golf and episodes of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel.

He has been featured playing Great Highland bagpipes, Scottish smallpipes, Uilleann pipes and whistles on numerous movie soundtracks, including Titanic, Million Dollar Baby, Road to Perdition, Braveheart, Cinderella Man, Austin Powers:The Spy Who Shagged Me and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He can also be regularly heard playing whistles and Uilleann pipes on the NBC show Crossing Jordan, and a version of his tune "Reels Part Two: My Love Is In America" was used as the theme song during the first season (found on the Bad Haggis CD 'Trip'). In Titanic, the tune "Hymn To The Sea" (written by James Horner) featured Rigler on the Great Highland Bagpipes.

Rigler played "Amazing Grace" at former President Ronald Reagan's funeral in 2004.

Rigler has performed with numerous musicians of many different styles, most famously with Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser and Skyedance, a band featuring some of the best Celtic musicians in the world. His work can be heard on CDs by Ben Harper, Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart, Josh Groban, Phil Collins, Rubén Blades, The Battlefield Band and many other musicians.

Rigler plays pipes and whistles in the Celtic rock band Bad Haggis, based in Southern California. He occasionally performs with the L.A. Scots Pipe Band of Los Angeles, California. Rigler wrote the tune "The B-52", which is now performed by the L.A. Scots and many other top level bagpipe bands throughout the world, in both public performances and in competition.

[edit] External links

• badhaggis.com The band's regularly updated homepage.
• yahoo.com More information about the movie history of Eric Rigler and Bad Haggis