Herbie Mann - Dippermouth
This is the second preplanned post for April, because I'm in New York dealing with the aftermath of a family tragedy and am not sure when I will be able to return.
This post commemorates the 95th birthday of flautist Herbie Mann, which I will use to tell a Flute Story. No, not The Magic Flute.... but close.
Once upon a time I moved to the Bay Area in 1993, way back before the internet induced people into a state of antisocial-media moronitude from which our species may never recover.
About 16 months after I got there and began to establish a foothold that would see me call it my home for almost 30 years, I brought my younger brother out to SF to see if he might like it as a possible place to live.
So out he came, getting work at a moving company and starting to try to establish himself, similar to me just a year into my experience in what was already high-priced, but which became the most expensive place to live in the US.
He didn't last long in The Bay -- it just cost too much -- but in the few months he was there with us we had some great times.
One of these adventures involved a flute I had found on the BART train one afternoon, which went unclaimed at the Lost & Found and eventually came back to me in its little case.
Several friends and my brother decided one day to take a trip up to the Russian River, north of SF, and I took the flute along, struggling as I has been to even get a musical tone out of it without passing out from oxygen deprivation.
My brother, a super savant able to have any musical instrument on Earth -- no, that is not an exaggeration, I mean ANY musical instrument on the face of the planet -- ready to go in front of 10,000 paying concertgoers after a couple of hours messing around with it, promptly assembled it, recognized its sideways clarinet fingering.... and in the time it took us to get to Guerneville and the river, was playing the thing perfectly along to the songs on the car radio.
We spent the rest of the day being serenaded on a rented boat, in the middle of the Russian River, by some pretty impressive live flute music.
I don't remember whatever happened to that flute, and my brother returned to NY soon after, never to return to that part of the world.
He was soon enticed into, and essentially destroyed by, a religious cult and became compromised by a deepening mental illness, and last Friday, 30 years after he left SF, he took his own life.
So I am back in NY dealing with the aftermath, most principally the fallout effect on my already-frail 83 year old mother, with whom my brother lived and in whose condominium apartment he died.
I thought it appropriate to dedicate this post I had been assembling when this awful event occurred, full of flute fantasia as it is, to him.
Herbie Mann
Solomon's Mines
Herbie Mann Funks the Seventies
01 (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
02 New Orleans
03 Summer Strut
04 Toot Stick
05 Memphis Underground
06 Pick Up the Pieces
07 Memphis Two-Step
08 Something In the Air
09 Rhythmatism
10 Turtle Bay
11 O Meu Amor Chorou (Cry of Love)
12 Watermelon Man
13 Family Affair
14 Ooh Baby (edit)
15 Respect Yourself
16 Hi-Jack
18 Dippermouth
19 Hey Pocky A-Way
20 Blind Willy
21 Comin' Home Baby
22 The Butterfly In a Stone Garden
23 Cajun Moon (feat. Cissy Houston)
24 Paradise Music
25 Come Together
26 Push Push
27 So Get It While You Can
28 Hold On, I'm Comin'
29 Spirit In the Dark
30 Mediterranean
31 Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty
32 Do It Again
33 Superman
34 Bird In a Silver Cage (edit)
35 High Above the Andes
36 The Turtle and the Frog
37 Can You Dig It
38 Asa Branca (feat. Cissy Houston)
39 Chain of Fools (edit)
Total time: 3:57:04
disc breaks go after Tracks 14 & 26
compendium of Herbie Mann's funkiest flute fantasias from the 1970s
assembled, edited and remastered by EN, April 2025
1.36 GB FLAC/direct link
I dunno when I am coming back, and won't until I feel my mom is ok to leave there, but I wanted to use the opportunity of the birthday of flute deity Herbert Jay Solomon -- Herbie Mann, born this day in 1930, to us -- to let everyone reading this know how fondly I remember Jeff, my master musician brother who lived from 1971 to 2025, and was as naturally gifted as anyone I'll ever talk about on here, but just never found a way to put that galaxy-class, unquantifiably tremendous talent into the wider world.--J.
4.16.1930 - 7.1.2003
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