Neuse River Flute Circle

Native American Flute Players in and around Raleigh, NC

April Meeting at Royal Bean 4/26/08

Flute Folks,  It’s time for a laid back NRFC gathering again. Let’s meet at the Royal Bean Cafe. (We have met there before) We’ll set up a mike for you Fluties who want to play – but no pressure to play. It will be a great time to come talk with other players about flute playing technique.Bring along a Native Flute CD or two for show and tell. We always want to hear about new flute artists & good music.

The last time we were at the Royal Bean, some of us went downstairs to the under-building parking deck to play. The acoustics are great down there! You ought to come and check out that sound!
Hope to see a bunch of you on the 26th

What:    Neuse River Flute Circle April gathering
When:   Saturday, April 26th  – 10:30 a.m.- noonish + (as usual)
Where: Royal Bean Café located directly across from the main entrance to Meredith College at 3801 Hillsborough St. in Raleigh (behind Ben and Jerry’s)

John Kincheloe         

 

Duke Powwow - March 29

The DUKE Powwow is coming up and here are the final details!
The Duke Native American Student Alliance (NASA) will bring a traditional powwow back to Duke’s campus this spring, celebrating the many traditions of Native American peoples. All members of the Duke, Durham, and NC communities are welcome.   The Neuse River Flute Circle has been invited to set-up and perform and our flutemakers are welcome to display and sell flutes that day.  Chris Bowman, from the American Indian Company, is also planning to have a set-up there as well.  After our previous trips to Duke, Jessi Bardill and the NASA are looking forward to having us back.  Registration is 11-11:30am and the Grand Entry is at noon, and the dancing ends at 5pm.  There will be traditional singing, drumming and dancing, with other segments featuring a Native women’s singing group from UNC and flute music by the Neuse River Flute Circle.     

There will be a monitor at the Allen Building parking lot, so just tell them you are with the powwow and they will let you park.   If you need to unload anything they will let you pull through the Chapel Circle to drop off.  There will be signs to the parking and signs from the parking to the site.  If you follow the directions on the link to Duke Chapel, we’ll be on the quad right next to it.  We will need to register upon arrival so they know we are there, then they’ll walk us to or point out our setup locat ion and they will have taped a sign on the table. 
Links to maps and directions: 

http://maps.duke.edu/parking.php?pid=P044&bid=7753 

http://maps.duke.edu/parking.php?pid=P003&bid=7753


 

NOTE:  The weather forecast now for Saturday is not good!  It looks to be cold (50’s) and possibly wet, neither are good for playing the flute outdoors.  If you are coming, dress warm and prepare for rain.  We have requested to play early if possible and have told them that all of us would probably not be there the entire time.
We’ll give it a go and see what happens.  Let me know if you have any questions!

March Circle Gathering on 3-08-08

Our next gathering will be March 8th from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. or so. This time we will get a chance to learn about some online resources for finding and creating sheet music for our flutes. (Thanks, Gantt!)

We will meet at Meredith College in the Science and Mathematics Building, Room 162.

Here are links to a map and some directions:

http://www.meredith.edu/about/campus-map.htm
http://www.meredith.edu/about/directions.htm

We’ll also have plenty of time to share information about upcoming flute events & to play some good songs. Having a problem with your flutes? Got a technique question? Bring your questions on the 8th! We’ll have some morning munchies on hand. 

Hope we see you then…

Keep making the music!

John Kincheloe

February and March NRFC Gathering Dates

Flute Dudes and Dudettes,   In our never-ending pursuit of variety in our Flute Circle meetings, we have settled on something totally different for February. Tooters and non-tooters alike should really enjoy this: on Sunday, February 24 from 1 - 3 p.m., we will gather at the Holshouser Building at the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh. (Some of us know that round building as the “Village of Yesteryear.”)  There will be a “Native American Art Show & Sale” going on that day from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. The dealer, Buddy Wheet,  who brings this show to Raleigh, comes from Albuquerque, NM, where he finds a lot of great Pueblo and Navajo jewelry, pottery, and wood carvings. I’m sure we will be in for a treat when we meet there.

Admission is free, and Buddy has given us permission to play our flutes there — as much as we want. He always has plenty of tribal music CDs for sale, and he loves the music of the Native American Flute. We will have a mike and a speaker set up for anyone who wants to play a bit. So come to play if you want. Come to browse. And come to hang out with your fellow fluties. New players: this will be a great time to ask questions of Circle members about your playing. We’ll have a very informal meeting that day.

Looking ahead to March, you may want to pencil in a meeting on the 8th of March. That will be a gathering at Meredith College, where we are hoping Gantt will school us in online resources for creating easy-to-use sheet music for the Native American Flute. Gantt has created several pieces of sheet music that are published online. Now he’s gonna show us how to do it! We will also spend some good time just swapping flute news & playing for ourselves for a change. 

So here it is again:

February meeting
When: Sunday (yes, Sunday), February 24 from 1-3 (come earlier if you want)
Where: Holshouser Building, State Fairgrounds in Raleigh
What: We enjoy the “Native American Art Show & Sale” and we get together, talk flutes, and some may want to play a little.

March Meeting
When: Saturday (yes, Saturday), March 8 from 10-noonish
Where: Meredith College (room details to follow)
What: We learn about online resources for creating sheet music for our flutes; we also hang out, talk, swap flute tips & info.

How does that sound? Drop me a line sometime, and tell me about what you’d like to do at an upcoming Circle gathering. It’s your Circle! Tell us what you’d like us to be doing!

John Kincheloe  

January Meeting at NC Museum of History!

Flute Circlers,   At last I have heard from the NC Museum of History! They are getting back from holiday vacations & they have made a decision. We will be playing at the NC Museum of History on Saturday, January 12, 2008. We will meet at the museum at 9:30 a.m. at their little cafe’ in the lobby. They say it will be open for coffee & eats. When we arrive we can talk a bit about what we will play and who will play. (And we can generally talk about the flute stuff Santa brought us…)  Then we will head out to the main lobby area to play from 10-12 noon or so. Many folks will be coming in on that Saturday because it is the next to the last day of the show!   People will ask us questions about the instruments and the songs, I am sure.  It will be great fun & a good time to educate folks about the instruments. It will be pretty laid back & not very formal. We’ll take turns playing and talking with each other.

And we will get free admission to the exhibit of the John White watercolors from 1585 of NC Indians, flora and fauna. We need to give them a head count. To get admission to the museum show on that day I need to get a head count of who will be there.  Please send me an email telling me if you will be there. If I don’t hear from you, there will not be a complimentary ticket for you! Please send email to both of my email addresses: mcclinto@meredith.edu and kincheloej@meredith.edu     That way I will be sure to get your reply.

Looking forward to seeing (and hearing) you on the 12th,

John Kincheloe 

A Report on Our NRFC Workshop with R. Carlos Nakai

December 1, 2007 the Neuse River Flute Circle was fortunate to host a workshop featuring R. Carlos Nakai. Four Flute Circles from North and South Carolina were represented at the event that ran about 2 1/2 hours. Our presenter told us about how he encountered the Native American Flute several years after an automobile accident cut short his career of playing classical trumpet. He gave us a good sense of his approach to music and the philosophy in which his playing is embedded. He encouraged us to listen and be responsive to sounds in our world and to music. He encouraged us to get back to a childlike willingness to attempt new musical things and to make music without fear of judgment. He talked about breathing while playing & about dealing with stage fright. He spent some time after the session talking about Nakai tablature - the system of musical notation he developed for the Native American Flute. In the course of things, Nakai asked some of us to play, and at times he played a little, but for the most part, the workshop was about ideas. At the end of his presentation, he offered his classic Five Word Workshop:  “Just Play the Damn Flute!” The flute and playing the music should come first — ahead of tablature & traditional music study!  ”Paint a picture for the world,” he said, “with the flute as your paintbrush!”  As we learn to express our humanity through the Native American Flute, the flute itself is always the best teacher.    

John Kincheloe

 

Introductory Flute Class Offered Early in 2008

Jon Norris and John Kincheloe will be teaching a five-session introduction to the Plains Flute (aka Native American-style Flute, the double chambered flageolet, etc.) starting Tuesday, January 29, 2008. It will run for five consecutive Tuesday nights , 7-9 p.m. The course is being offered though Meredith College’s Community Outreach program. Classes will cover the history of the flute, it’s construction, how to play the instrument, and a variety of musical sources for fluteplayers. It should be a good overview for folks just starting with the instrument. Contact Anne Henderson at Meredith College to hold a place in the class. HendersonA@meredith.edu

John Kincheloe
kincheloej@meredith.edu

Flute Music at NC Museum of History Through Jan 13

Here’s some information that some of you may not have gotten. There is a very interesting exhibition at the NC Museum in downtown Raleigh that will run through Jan. 13. Once in a generation the British Museum brings out all of John White’s original watercolor paintings done in 1585 of North Carolina Indians — the Coastal Algonquian peoples of Secotan and Pomeiooc. We have all seen these images reproduced in museums and books. These images are amazing snapshops of Indian life before European contact changed traditional lifeways forever. See:   http://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/lostcolony/site/about.html

 

As you wander through the exhibition you will begin hearing some rivercane flute music in the ambient sound audiotrack that is playing in the space. NRFC member John Kincheloe contributed that music — done on three different rivercane flutes — as a way to remind museum visitors that when the first Europeans came to North America, they were greeted by people who came to the shores playing flutes. We NA Flute players today are exploring a very ancient musical tradition. We are really playing the oldies!

The museum also used John’s NA Flute music on the downloadable audiotour. These background songs were recorded at the museum on flutes made by Hawk Littlejohn, and NRFC members David O’Neal and Jon Norris.   (Stops 3, 8,9, & 10 are good samples) http://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/lostcolony/site/about.html#audiotour  

 

Raleigh Concert with R. Carlos Nakai & Keola Beamer

Get your tickets now for the Tribal Voices concert featuring R. Carlos Nakai and Keola Beamer: November 30, at the Meymandi Concert Hall in Raleigh.

From the Pinecone website: 

“Native Voices brings together two legendary musicians from America’s indigenous peoples-Native American flutist R. Carlos Nakai and Hawaiian slack key guitar virtuoso Keola Beamer -touring together for the first time to promote their collaborative CD, Our Beloved Land, on Canyon Records. R. Carlos Nakai, the world’s premier performer of the traditional cedarwood flute, journeyed to Hawai’i where he spent time fitting the haunting melodies of his flute into the soulful songs and brilliant arrangements of Keola Beamer, the world’s most revered living slack key guitarist. The result is a dramatic new music that seamlessly blends traditional elements of both American Indian and Polynesian Island styles: original songs, traditional Navajo-Ute and Hawaiian chanting, and music played on slack key guitar, Native American cedarwood flute, and the Hawaiian nose flute. Supporting the duo will be John Kolivas on bass and Moanalani Beamer (Keola’s wife) on whistle and several ancient Hawaiian percussive instruments. Moanalani, a master dancer, will also perform hula and other traditional Polynesian dances to the musical arrangements.”

Sounds really interesting! Lots of us in the NRFC are going and are planning to have dinner before the show.  Contact John if you want to join us.  Order tickets at      www.pinecone.org

John Kincheloe   kincheloej@meredith.edu

 

Next Page »