Many, many years ago, I overheard my friend Ruthie (whatever happened to Ruthie?) say
Breath is the difference between man and laws.
Well, that certainly sounded deep, but what did it mean?
Then she added
Or Rampal.
Oh! She meant Herbie Mann, Hugh Laws, and Jean-Pierre Rampal. Ruthie played the flute.
I was thinking of this because I heard Jonathan Schwartz play Rampal. Rampal was wonderful of course. It’s the breath.
As a young flute-player, I was a total Rampal freak, until I heard from a brilliant young flute player that Rampal uniformly hit on all his young female students. “The man with the golden flute, indeed!” I huffed. (Yes, I did talk like that as a teen. I got better, mostly.)
It’s a shame that Rampal was such an inappropriate horn-dog, but if we eliminated inappropriate horn-dogs from our music collections, who would be left to listen to?