Post by The Watcher on May 18, 2005 22:20:56 GMT -5
HOW TO PLAY THE FLUTE
I am probably both the first and the last person to ask about learning to play the flute. Not because I don't take seriously the many requests for advice, but because, although fairly widely recognised as an interesting but self-taught fumbler, I have neither the vocabulary nor the skills to be able to pass on what I have discovered for myself. But since you ask…….
I began with the instrument in 1967 when I had just turned twenty, and at a time when my guitar playing had become a bit stale and unfulfilling. Also, we had at that time decided to find a really good guitarist and with the interest shown by Mick Abrahams in joining the group (then the John Evan Band), it seemed like the perfect time for me to learn another instrument as well as concentrate on the not-too-good vocals with which I was stuck since no one else could sing at all!
So, after fiddling around with the Irish tin whistle and the blues harmonica, I took the fateful plunge and part-exchanged my Fender Stratocaster (purchased a couple of years before from a certain hard-up Lemmy, later of Motorhead, but at the time with Reverend Black and the Rocking Vicars).
The choice of a new Shure Bros. professional microphone was easy: what was more difficult was to find another instrument to at least make up the difference in the part-exchange, since the shop owner wasn't too keen on giving me cash. The notion that violin or cello might prove possible was quickly swept away when I confirmed that, having no frets on the fingerboard, both might be a tad tricky to play in tune. The saxophone looked dauntingly big and complicated and anyway, we already had two sax players in the band at the time. Then, my Jackdaw eyes caught sight of a shiny silver flute hanging on the wall. This proved too much to resist. It seemed at once to combine the portability and compactness of the mouth harp but with the greater potential for playing in different keys and all scales.
(I think chromatic is the musical term.)
And so I became the proud owner of a Selmer Gold Seal concert flute in C and joined the other guys in the van to head off to some awful pub gig in the north of England. Sadly, while everybody else, or so it seemed, was able to get a note or two out of the wretched thing, I could not, for the life of me, produce so much as a twitter and put the new acquisition away for the next few weeks in acute embarrassment.
Towards the end of that year, we were due to head south to Luton to meet up with Mick who was set to join the Evan band, but the reality of the commitment was already proving too much for some band members. First the two sax players announced that they would not stay, and then John Evan and Barrie Barlow decided that they too had had enough. That left Glenn Cornick and me to team up with Mick and his regular drummer Clive Bunker in a group which, although calling itself the John Evan Band, merely grasped the opportunity to take advantage of the few gigs which had been arranged by our new London-based agent Chris Wright.
Our first few rehearsals were taking us down the path of blues based improvisation and a repertoire mostly of things which Mick had played for a while, giving me the chance to chime in with some elementary huffing and puffing on the flute which Mick, to his credit but ultimate undoing, encouraged. I figured out (or so I thought) where to put my fingers on the instrument since Theobald Boehm's ergonomic excellence of design left few alternatives. (I found them).
By trial and error I hacked out the riffs and simple improvisations which echoed my limited guitar technique, which earlier had posed no immediate threat to Eric Clapton's burgeoning career. But the major crossroads (O.K., O.K.) was about to loom large.
Jeffrey Hammond, my chum from the early days of the John Evan Band in Blackpool was, by now, also in London studying fine art at the Central College Of Art And Design, and had acquired a liking for Jazz, and a few L.P.'s to go with it. Notable amongst these were an album by Roland Kirk, the sax and flute player, and Ornette Coleman. Of the two, Kirk had the simpler and to me, more useful approach: punchy melodies and gutsy, bluesy, improvisation which sent me walking home from Jeffrey's bed-sit near Archway, North London, one night with the strains of "Serenade to a Cuckoo" ringing in my ears.
The next day, after a few minutes of trying, I managed the first few bars of the verse and found the courage to take the idea to Mick as a fully fledged flute instrumental for me to attempt on stage. The simultaneous singing and playing which Roland Kirk employed had already come naturally to me: I had used this approach before as a guitarist and to an extent on the tin whistle and mouth harp, as well as flute, knowing that such "scat-singing" techniques were legendary in the traditions of both Blues and Jazz.
The reinforcement of my tentative flute tone by singing the note in unison gave me confidence and, ultimately, the bravery to trade phrases with the guitar and drums and to lay down the basis of the style which started to make an impact on our listeners in the early months of 1968 when we gratefully took on a residency at London's famous "Marquee Club" in Wardour Street. John Gee, the manager of the club, was a Jazz buff and saw in me, I suppose, the more sensitive fledgling musician of which he approved; more so than, perhaps, the loud and aggressive guitarists who would rock the Marquee in a fashion less subtle than in its initial days as a Jazz club.
It was to honour his support and encouragement on a personal level that I wrote and recorded the not very good, but well-intentioned "One For John Gee" later that year.
While the double act resulting from Mick and I having a more or less equal role in the early days of Tull proved popular, the impact of the flute, from a media point of view, gave the band an identity which offered something unique in a developing British music scene populated by guitar heroes. From a musical perspective however, it was sometimes an uphill battle, struggling to be heard above the exciting clamour of the blues and rock guitar-driven music which formed the backbone of early Tull.
When Mick left the band in December of '68 to be replaced by Martin Barre, it offered me the chance to broaden my flute playing by moving out of the blues form and towards the use of a more eclectic mix of influences, some half-formed from childhood memories, some, more recently adopted from Classical music, Asian music and the more adventurous peer group progressive pop and rock work of the time.
Curiously, Mick's departure also re-awakened the guitar player in me; not only acoustic and electric guitars but mandolin, bouzouki, balalaika and almost anything with strings (and frets) attached! But that's another story.
The Bach piece "Bouree" became my next flute party piece on stage, after hearing it repeated over and over from the bed-sitbelow mine in Kentish Town where an English student was attempting to learn Classical guitar in his spare time.
Although, as I recall, it was the harmonica playing which prompted my tendency to stand on one leg during solos, the press put the one-legged bit together with the novelty of my flute playing to come up with an "image" for me. Although I self-consciously resisted this to begin with, it soon came to provide an enduring visual focus for the band and I had to remember to dutifully comply, at least when the photographers were snapping.
For the next twenty, or so, years, I continued with my home-grown style of playing. This, unfortunately, embodied many incorrect fingerings and dubious harmonics requiring constant changes to embouchure and angle of breath stream to compensate as far as possible for the tuning discrepancies induced . Playing some passages quietly was a problem: to get the note to sound at all sometimes required brute force and a more subtle performance seemed often beyond my capabilities.
I began to regard my flute-playing reputation as an impediment, rather than an asset, and the chore of integrating my performance with the complex and often forceful band arrangements, tended to become frustrating.
When my daughter, Gael, was coerced (as little girls often are) into taking up an instrument at school, I suggested boldly that the Tuba was too big; Violin and Cello too difficult; Saxophone too expensive and that I might just have a perfectly acceptable old flute which she could borrow, quite cheaply, for the year or two required.
A month or so later, on hearing the customary struggle to play some perfectly easy passage of infantile musical mediocrity, I offered with benign and lordly patience, a few tips on how to perform the said novice piece.
I am probably both the first and the last person to ask about learning to play the flute. Not because I don't take seriously the many requests for advice, but because, although fairly widely recognised as an interesting but self-taught fumbler, I have neither the vocabulary nor the skills to be able to pass on what I have discovered for myself. But since you ask…….
I began with the instrument in 1967 when I had just turned twenty, and at a time when my guitar playing had become a bit stale and unfulfilling. Also, we had at that time decided to find a really good guitarist and with the interest shown by Mick Abrahams in joining the group (then the John Evan Band), it seemed like the perfect time for me to learn another instrument as well as concentrate on the not-too-good vocals with which I was stuck since no one else could sing at all!
So, after fiddling around with the Irish tin whistle and the blues harmonica, I took the fateful plunge and part-exchanged my Fender Stratocaster (purchased a couple of years before from a certain hard-up Lemmy, later of Motorhead, but at the time with Reverend Black and the Rocking Vicars).
The choice of a new Shure Bros. professional microphone was easy: what was more difficult was to find another instrument to at least make up the difference in the part-exchange, since the shop owner wasn't too keen on giving me cash. The notion that violin or cello might prove possible was quickly swept away when I confirmed that, having no frets on the fingerboard, both might be a tad tricky to play in tune. The saxophone looked dauntingly big and complicated and anyway, we already had two sax players in the band at the time. Then, my Jackdaw eyes caught sight of a shiny silver flute hanging on the wall. This proved too much to resist. It seemed at once to combine the portability and compactness of the mouth harp but with the greater potential for playing in different keys and all scales.
(I think chromatic is the musical term.)
And so I became the proud owner of a Selmer Gold Seal concert flute in C and joined the other guys in the van to head off to some awful pub gig in the north of England. Sadly, while everybody else, or so it seemed, was able to get a note or two out of the wretched thing, I could not, for the life of me, produce so much as a twitter and put the new acquisition away for the next few weeks in acute embarrassment.
Towards the end of that year, we were due to head south to Luton to meet up with Mick who was set to join the Evan band, but the reality of the commitment was already proving too much for some band members. First the two sax players announced that they would not stay, and then John Evan and Barrie Barlow decided that they too had had enough. That left Glenn Cornick and me to team up with Mick and his regular drummer Clive Bunker in a group which, although calling itself the John Evan Band, merely grasped the opportunity to take advantage of the few gigs which had been arranged by our new London-based agent Chris Wright.
Our first few rehearsals were taking us down the path of blues based improvisation and a repertoire mostly of things which Mick had played for a while, giving me the chance to chime in with some elementary huffing and puffing on the flute which Mick, to his credit but ultimate undoing, encouraged. I figured out (or so I thought) where to put my fingers on the instrument since Theobald Boehm's ergonomic excellence of design left few alternatives. (I found them).
By trial and error I hacked out the riffs and simple improvisations which echoed my limited guitar technique, which earlier had posed no immediate threat to Eric Clapton's burgeoning career. But the major crossroads (O.K., O.K.) was about to loom large.
Jeffrey Hammond, my chum from the early days of the John Evan Band in Blackpool was, by now, also in London studying fine art at the Central College Of Art And Design, and had acquired a liking for Jazz, and a few L.P.'s to go with it. Notable amongst these were an album by Roland Kirk, the sax and flute player, and Ornette Coleman. Of the two, Kirk had the simpler and to me, more useful approach: punchy melodies and gutsy, bluesy, improvisation which sent me walking home from Jeffrey's bed-sit near Archway, North London, one night with the strains of "Serenade to a Cuckoo" ringing in my ears.
The next day, after a few minutes of trying, I managed the first few bars of the verse and found the courage to take the idea to Mick as a fully fledged flute instrumental for me to attempt on stage. The simultaneous singing and playing which Roland Kirk employed had already come naturally to me: I had used this approach before as a guitarist and to an extent on the tin whistle and mouth harp, as well as flute, knowing that such "scat-singing" techniques were legendary in the traditions of both Blues and Jazz.
The reinforcement of my tentative flute tone by singing the note in unison gave me confidence and, ultimately, the bravery to trade phrases with the guitar and drums and to lay down the basis of the style which started to make an impact on our listeners in the early months of 1968 when we gratefully took on a residency at London's famous "Marquee Club" in Wardour Street. John Gee, the manager of the club, was a Jazz buff and saw in me, I suppose, the more sensitive fledgling musician of which he approved; more so than, perhaps, the loud and aggressive guitarists who would rock the Marquee in a fashion less subtle than in its initial days as a Jazz club.
It was to honour his support and encouragement on a personal level that I wrote and recorded the not very good, but well-intentioned "One For John Gee" later that year.
While the double act resulting from Mick and I having a more or less equal role in the early days of Tull proved popular, the impact of the flute, from a media point of view, gave the band an identity which offered something unique in a developing British music scene populated by guitar heroes. From a musical perspective however, it was sometimes an uphill battle, struggling to be heard above the exciting clamour of the blues and rock guitar-driven music which formed the backbone of early Tull.
When Mick left the band in December of '68 to be replaced by Martin Barre, it offered me the chance to broaden my flute playing by moving out of the blues form and towards the use of a more eclectic mix of influences, some half-formed from childhood memories, some, more recently adopted from Classical music, Asian music and the more adventurous peer group progressive pop and rock work of the time.
Curiously, Mick's departure also re-awakened the guitar player in me; not only acoustic and electric guitars but mandolin, bouzouki, balalaika and almost anything with strings (and frets) attached! But that's another story.
The Bach piece "Bouree" became my next flute party piece on stage, after hearing it repeated over and over from the bed-sitbelow mine in Kentish Town where an English student was attempting to learn Classical guitar in his spare time.
Although, as I recall, it was the harmonica playing which prompted my tendency to stand on one leg during solos, the press put the one-legged bit together with the novelty of my flute playing to come up with an "image" for me. Although I self-consciously resisted this to begin with, it soon came to provide an enduring visual focus for the band and I had to remember to dutifully comply, at least when the photographers were snapping.
For the next twenty, or so, years, I continued with my home-grown style of playing. This, unfortunately, embodied many incorrect fingerings and dubious harmonics requiring constant changes to embouchure and angle of breath stream to compensate as far as possible for the tuning discrepancies induced . Playing some passages quietly was a problem: to get the note to sound at all sometimes required brute force and a more subtle performance seemed often beyond my capabilities.
I began to regard my flute-playing reputation as an impediment, rather than an asset, and the chore of integrating my performance with the complex and often forceful band arrangements, tended to become frustrating.
When my daughter, Gael, was coerced (as little girls often are) into taking up an instrument at school, I suggested boldly that the Tuba was too big; Violin and Cello too difficult; Saxophone too expensive and that I might just have a perfectly acceptable old flute which she could borrow, quite cheaply, for the year or two required.
A month or so later, on hearing the customary struggle to play some perfectly easy passage of infantile musical mediocrity, I offered with benign and lordly patience, a few tips on how to perform the said novice piece.
