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A Moment's Inspiration

from In The Great Outdoors by Allen Bruce Ray

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This is a solo flute song, which again is a note-for-note recreation of an improvised solo from 2009. The inspiration that is referred to in the title was the result of finding a tunnel with a particularly glorious ambiance that I subsequently used to record many, many videos.

The original improvisation was done on a Laughing Crow F# minor flute in Western cedar. However, the mahogany F# flute used here has a different origin, which might be controversial for some. Read on...

I was given this instrument as well as a high D minor flute as a gift after hosting a Native American-style flute workshop in Zhucheng, Shandong Province, China back in 2018 (yes, pre-pandemic). The host company was/is called Ugur, which is a Turkish word that means "good luck" or "fortune" (NOT to be confused with the Uyghurs ethnic group!) Ugur holds seasonal workshops for handpan, West African drums, and Native American-style flutes, all of which it also produces. Several times a year, they had been inviting players of these instruments from all over the world to hold workshops in China. Back when I had Facebook, their young representative, Lily, was one of my friends, and one October day she contacted me with an invitation to fly there from Korea to instruct music teachers from all over China how to play the Native American-style flute. I surmised that they chose me because I was conveniently close; it's a mere 70-minute flight from Incheon, Korea to Tsingtao in Shandong. Having never actually done any such workshops, I was more than a little dubious as to how this would go. However, I am a teacher by profession, so I took this on as a pleasant challenge. Long story short, I was completely surprised to find it a truly WONDERFUL experience, and all of the people involved could not have been nicer or more receptive. The actual workshop was quite a cacophony, but it was a FUN sort of cacophony. It may sound corny, but it was not unlike meeting a large group of long-lost friends all gathered in the same small space.

Okay, now for the possibly controversial part: Ugur is manufacturing their "Native American" flutes for sale inside China. Through a translator (Lily), I had a polite but serious discussion with the maker about the use of the term "Native American" and how the U.S. Department of the Interior has laws regarding arts and crafts created by those who can legitimately claim that ancestry. My comment was that "Native American-STYLE" would at least be an acknowledgment that these instruments were not created by any indigenous peoples in the Americas. Whether or not they follow through with that remains to be seen, but they certainly understood the issue and seemed receptive to my suggestion.

As for the F# minor flute, it's, um, similar in design to High Spirits flutes (and I picked up and played an actual High Spirits D minor Condor flute that just happened to be in the workshop area.) That said, the Ugur flute is in fact a very well-crafted instrument. It plays effortlessly and has spot-on intonation and a pleasingly well-balanced sound, so I'm happy to use it for this and one other tune on the current album.

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from In The Great Outdoors, released December 2, 2022

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Allen Bruce Ray Chuncheon Si, South Korea

Bruce has been serenading enraptured audiences of birds, trees, & insects and bouncing sounds around the mountains and inner walls of various concrete tunnels, mostly in South Korea, ever since the Native American flute first beckoned him in 2007. Oh yes, and he also plays to fellow human beings all around the world via YouTube. ... more

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