Pianist, Mark Eisenman, needs no introduction to Canadian jazz audiences or musicians. Indeed, as a longstanding and active participant in the jazz community in this country, Mark has unquestionably established himself as one of its elite members...

Cutting my teeth playing jazz flute was very difficult because, as much as one practises, there is no substitute for playing with experienced players. Jazz musicians do not suffer fools gladly, and novices may not be treated kindly, so my advice to anyone who wishes to play standards and light jazz is to first hone your skills using ‘Band in a Box’ software.

There are many Great Dates and Good Numbers for Jazz Flute. Here is a selection ranging from 1958 through to 2009, ranging from some great classics to modern masterpieces. We even include some great Jazz Oboe tracks. Yes, Jazz Oboe - If you think jazz flute recordings are hard to find, feel sorry for jazz oboe lovers!...

Something Old: Over the course of 20 issues of Flute Focus I have had the pleasure of listening to and exploring many great music CDs - Check out my old reviews... Something New: From Italy comes a fabulous quartet led by young Stefano Leonardi on flute and alto flute. Something Borrowed, Something Blue...

A tribute to David (Fathead) Newman by Peter Westbrook 
Saxophonist and flutist David ‘Fathead’ Newman was best known as a star soloist with the Ray Charles band, but his multi-faceted career was much more than that. Forrest Dylan Bryant, writing at All About Jazz, summed it up well: “When David ‘Fathead’ Newman picks up his weathered tenor saxophone and begins to blow, he doesn’t compel you to listen with a towering tone or crazy acrobatics. He does it by connecting with his music on a human level, embodying a depth of feeling that suffuses the atmosphere of the room. You can’t help but breathe it in.”

In the Native American flute community, there are three primary approaches to playing - playing from the heart, rote learning, and by reading a form of music notation called TABlature. While one may also read regular music notation using the Native American flute, TABlature is easier since the fingering system remains constant regardless of what flute key is utilized...

One of the most popular figures in Native American mythology is Kokopelli, a demigod who is illustrated in pictographs (images that are painted or drawn on rock surfaces) and petroglyphs (images that are etched or chiseled into the surface) dating from 200 AD. Often depicted in rock art as a phallically-illustrated male, Kokopelli also manifests with a hunched back, carrying a flute, a cane, or a staff. Sometimes he is drawn with a clubbed foot. Interestingly, Kokopelli is sometimes depicted as a bug with antennae. Not all of these attributes are always present in Kokopelli illustrations.

The Native American flute has an interesting body of mythology, with stories detailing the flute’s origination, how it was used to teach life-lessons, its role in bringing prosperity to the people and their crops, and the peoples’ responsibility to give back through the playing of the flute. There are varying versions of similar stories within tribal communities, often with details being changed to make them more relevant to the individual societal, environmental, and psychological structure.

Regardless of what instrument you purchase, keeping it aesthetically beautiful and safe from potential physical hazards is paramount to its beauty and physical longevity. There is nothing worse than finding a deep scratch or a glaring dent on your instrument. After you have chosen a Native American flute from a reputable maker, attentive care of that investment is important because it is made out of wood, a natural, sensitive material. Proper care and maintenance is necessary to keep it playing its optimal best.

Irish music is an oral tradition, one with a rich history, a complex vocabulary and many subtle variations.
In another digression from the ornamentation topic that has been occupying many recent columns, I would like to touch on an issue that has been plaguing many of my students recently, the mind.  

Why do we need computers? In the days before computer based audio it was easy to slow down the tapes and reels that music was recorded on and play it slower, however, this lowered the pitch and made it a difficult exercise as you could hear more clearly but you had to transpose what you heard back into the correct key.

We have been exploring ornamentation in all its forms in Irish flute music. It is time to look at some famous players and dissect their playing to give you an insight into their style, starting with one of my favourite players, Harry Bradley. Harry Bradley is a well known flute player from Belfast, now living in Galway in the west of Ireland. Highly accomplished himself, he has played with many well known musicians and has recorded two solo CDs as well as numerous recording with bands and duets.

Dear Flute Colleagues, I am pleased to announce the European premiere of my Sonata for Flute and Percussion. To help promote future performances, I have made the music available free for download on my webpage. I hope you will help me spread the word about this piece and would be delighted to learn of any plans to perform it...

In this article, I want to describe some of the different projects with which I have been involved. I hope to inspire you flutists out there to get more bang out of your playing; by encouraging you to play more, as much as you can, to keep on learning new things, and, of course, to share those treasures with the ones around you. Over the years, I have been involved in many different styles of music – it turns out, the flute is quite versatile! I have helped to form many groups, as well as found myself joining: woodwind quintets, jazz trios, a rock/rap fusion group, a Puerto-Rican Salsa Band, a Brazilian samba trio, a bluegrass group, a beatnik poetry/music fusion guerrilla street posse (San Francisco is a wild town!), and many more.

Before the long flight home from New York, there was one last flautist I had to meet. Greg Pattillo (www .pattillostyle.com or www.myspace.com/pattillostyle) literally took the flute world by storm, in quite a short space of time, since loading his home videos onto YouTube. Known as the ‘beatboxing flute player’, Greg has gone from working in a grocery store to becoming a world famous flute player and representative of BRIO! flutes.

Composer, performer and improviser Robert Dick has maintained a prominent profile as one of the flute world’s most influential innovators over the last few decades, pushing the boundaries to the point of expanding the flute’s vocabulary and technical possibilities. My week with Robert was immensely rewarding. Not only did I attend flute lessons, but also a recording session with him and his pianist partner Ursel Schlict. We discussed compositional and improvisational techniques, and he showed me his writing tool kit – I had no idea that all the fingerings in his publication The Other Flute were originally written by hand!

Because of all the possibilities embracing the new media formats can afford, even though this event may now seem like “old news”, I thought I would wait until Flute Focus went on-line to give my report on this most interesting and important biennial event,  The International Piccolo Symposium.....

Playing the piccolo, the one deviant instrument in the section, the little flute whose history is withheld, is it any wonder that piccolo players can experience feelings of marginalization or at least isolation?

It is common knowledge that many flutists dislike the piccolo and avoid having to play it. In most bands, the piccolo as the singular, ‘No-place-hide-instrument’ is located ironically next to the second flutes, the section most likely obscured by the overall mass of sound. Similarly, in the symphony, the piccolo is routinely situated to the left of the second flute, and behind and to the right of multiple second violins.

Can I have a piccolo lesson please? Yes, of course, but why? I suppose a ‘one-off’ piccolo lesson can be useful when preparing for an orchestral audition to boost confidence, but I often find that flute players who aspire to play the piccolo could simply apply their expert flute knowledge to their piccolo playing and save the money to buy CDs of the repertoire they are preparing!

Plummer’s care in her own studies and her demonstrated insider knowledge in this article is comprehensive. I was sorry however to read her quotations from Cecil Forsyth’s Orchestration, (1914) for his piccolo entries are damagingly critical, and may I say, dated. Comments such as “It can just be played by the instrument and, one may add, tolerated by the audience,” “the disabilities of the Piccolo in the way of tone-colour,” “a sort of thin, feeble disembodied voice,” and “if pitched too high approach dangerously near to the scream of a steam-whistle” are hardly conducive to eliciting creative or positive piccolo writing by a next generation of composers.