AaronFW wrote:
Sneaky.
It looks like you’ve taken down the audio now? I did not listen to it originally since I am a novice musician and assumed others would have had better guesses than anything I could have. Or maybe I did not have time and was reading on my phone (I’ve forgotten which, or maybe it was a combination).
Though I do have an interest in flutes of all cultures.
Can you tell us about the flute? How long is it, it is hard to tell scale by the picture. Who made it, or where did it come from?
Why are you playing it like a “blues fife”? What is the inspiration for that, do you know others who do similarly?
(I did some graduate work in ethno-arts and cultural anthropology, so all the possible details are interesting to me.)
The flute was made as a standard E bass bansuri (note the large size of the holes relative to the shaft length; also consider that, though you can't tell visually of course, it is tuned according to an untempered diatonic scale). The length is about 31 inches. I believe the maker is a man named Jeff Whittier.
Why am I playing it like a blues fife? Well, I'm playing it like a blues fife about as much as a guitar player plays a guitar like a diddley bow. I initially theorized that it was possible that larger, longer pieces of bamboo would be conducive for "liberating" the percussive characteristics I recognized in the smaller, shriller fifes used in the fife and drum blues tradition (perhaps interestingly, if you reference the history of the bansuri in India, you'll find that a very similar thing happened---larger, longer pieces of bamboo allowed flutes, previously considered to be exclusively "folk" instruments in India, to become "usable" in Hindustani raga based classical music). As far as I'm aware, I'm the first/only one to try this, especially to the extent that I'm treating the instrument almost like a three-dimensional, harmonically "competent" snare drum surface. Sharde Thomas (the granddaughter of the famous blues fife player, Otha Turner) continues to maintain the tradition of her grandfather, but, of course, in order to do this, she uses very small pieces of river cane. I would recommend you check her out (she's been able to achieve a very sweet, smooth timbre) if you're interested. But again, I don't know of any others who have broken into what I've been trying to develop.
Yes, I took the audio down. I mainly just wanted to get some "objective" input as to how the timbre and harmonic behavior of the instrument (when engaged with the techniques I've been developing) is being interpreted by an "impartial" audience. Since not very many people responded to or seemed interested in the original post, I assumed there wasn't too much of a point in keeping it up, though I could be wrong.