Word: fluted
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PROJECTIONS (Verve Folkways). This newly successful Manhattan quintet is known as the Blues Project. But they project more than the blues in their second album, veering toward jazz in Flute Thing, trying out Oriental effects in Steve's Song, and every so often forsaking music of any kind for a cacophony of electronic chortles, whinnies, plunks and sizzles...
...faith (from Christian to Mohammedan), and the nature of his jazz, turning to such Middle Eastern instruments as the rebab and the arghool. Now he's headed farther east with The Chuen Blues, played on a three-stringed Chinese lute, and Kyoto Blues, on a Taiwan bamboo flute...
...patter song, the rock'n'roll parody. The melodies were just not striking enough to break out from their cliches and be heard. Tight, overly simple little tunes, accompanied by only a piano, drums, and a brief, aborted oboe (last year's show had the advantage of a charming flute and steady bass behind the songs), they were too thin to matter much. One song, "What Sort of Man," written by Sharon Stokes, started to move towards a little more richness and subtletly, but ended two minutes too soon...
...technical sides of the production mirror the best and worst features of the acting. The incidental music syncopates Bach flute sonatas with jazz instrumentation a la Swingle Singers. Mixed with Roberts' brightly patterned sets and costumes (Charles Keating plays Valentine's feigned mad scene in a giant purple paisley robe and a huge hat like the top of a party favor), the music induces a pleasurable sense of swingingly elegant decadence...
Michael Tschudin wrote the un-Alban-Bergian but thoroughly appropriate score. He played it on piano and organ, accompanied by a beautiful blonde flute player from Juilliard reputed to be his girlfriend...