Bolling Suite
Improving on perfection: reimagining Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Trio by Gareth McLearnon
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t can be said, perhaps even hoped, that in our creative endeavours, the search for improvement, for progress, for wringing that last drop of emotion, that slight improvement in tone, that elusive perfect diminuendo into nothingness is never-ending. The well-worn, and maybe overused cliché ‘if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it’ has little place in the arts. As performers and creative people, the moment that we settle for ‘it’ll do’ is inevitably a sad one. For one man, his wish to augment and reinterpret a certain piece of the flute repertoire began on the very day he first heard it, as an undergraduate student of Minnesota State University in 1975. The student was the pianist, composer, arranger and GRAMMY nominee Steve Barta; the piece was Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Trio – performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal with Bolling himself on piano. Like so many new connections these days, I first encountered Steve through Facebook. One of my responsibilities as European Artist-in-Residence for the Wm. S. Haynes Flute Co. is looking after the company’s social media threads. Always seeking to promote my fellow Haynes artists, I was interested to feature the work of the legendary jazz flautist Hubert Laws. I saw that there was a new and interesting project that he was involved in with Steve, and once I had listened to a few of the snippets that had been shared online, my appetite was sufficiently whetted to get in touch to find out more. This being a modern-day encounter, I arranged an interview with Steve via Skype with me in South London, and he in his home in Colorado Springs. We began speaking about the original 1975 Rampal recording. “I listened to it all the time” Steve enthused. “It was a really new, exciting genre – probably one of the very first big successes in the Classical-Jazz crossover genre. I loved the writing, I loved the playing, but always felt like it needed different treatment.” As well as seeing possibilities in the writing and arrangement of the piece, it seemed to Steve that the sophistication of technique, the polished delivery of the consummate flûtiste of the day, although wonderful, wasn’t quite ringing true – or perhaps not true enough. Jazz flute was a rougher, more raw, occasionally more boisterous, but equally frequently more vulnerable art-form than that of the refined eloquence of the concert performer. Steve has had quite a prolific output as a composer/ performer since his career took off in the 1980’s, with fifteen albums and six music publications under his belt. He has
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Haynes Artist Hubert Laws
written extensively for flute – possibly as a result of this first beloved encounter with the Bolling Suite – and it was in his album Blue River (1995) when he first worked with the worldrenowned jazz flautist Herbie Mann. With Mann, he learned first-hand from one of the best in the business about the sound world and distinctive vocabulary of great jazz flute playing. Steve had hoped to continue working with Herbie Mann for his 2003 album Another Life – Brazil – but tragically Mann was quickly declining in health, and managed to record only the title track of the album before passing away in July of that year. Needing another jazz flute player to complete the record, Steve got in touch with Hubert Laws, and what Barta describes as a ‘fast friendship’ was born. “He’s a delight. Easy, a consummate musician, a great guy to work with, to play with, to hang out with, to go out to dinner with – just perfect.” Steve continued to work with Laws in 2010 in a music educational jazz project Jumpin Jazz Kids and so when it came to choosing a flute player