Morning Star

There are certain recordings that give off the ambience of a late-night session with several mad geniuses who are addicted to sounds gathered around a mixing board, and this is one of them. Tom Mauchahty-Ware is a Native American musician who is involved in several genres. This recording is centered around his music for the traditional Indian flute. And although basically an album of solo flute pieces, the mixing board allows the composer to build up several layers of background sound effects as well as utilizing some mesmerizing percussion. The album was produced in the studios of the Oklahoma School of Journalism, whose students also helped out in recording the babbling brooks, chirping birds, and what-not that make up the environmental orchestral backdrop for some of the pieces. Many of the pieces work very well. The opening track, "Crazy Horse Song," is striking, the flute laying down a solemn theme full of haunting breath tones amidst the occasional ominous entrance of a gourd rattle, rain-stick, or shaken deer toes. Drummer Millard Clark provides a slow drum beat on other parts of the recording that may be mixed back a bit far. The mixing process was obviously the source of much creative energy, perhaps climaxing in the detailed "Legend of the Tone-Bawt," in which Mauchahty-Ware tells the traditional tale of how the spirits gave the flute to the musician as a gift. This superb production, complete with sound effects, percussion, flute, and voice, is a nice companion piece to the 1941 Library of Congress recording by Bela Cozad entitled "Kiowa Story of the Flute." Cozad, an ancestor of Mauchahty-Ware and quite the influence on the traditional Indian flute in general, tells the same story in his original recording. The difference between the Cozad performance, done in his home by traveling ethnomusicologists, and this modern production involving the artist in a much more hands-on use of the recording medium, is in itself an interesting chronicle in the changes in the way Native American music is created and documented in the century. The genre of Indian flute music remains a bit limited in dimension, nonetheless, as most of the recordings available tend to stick to the same format, usually slow pieces with echo and sound effects. Although the accomplished studio creativity makes this is one of the better productions of this type of music, the participants still bumble into some obvious traps. The most obvious one is the problem of recording birds as a background to flute music. What winds up happening is the birds "nuke" the flute, so to speak. There is so much more interesting melodic and rhythmic ideas in what the birds are doing than what the flute player is capable of, the listener may wind up just feeling sorry for Mauchahty-Ware.