Improvised flute solo featured as one of the movements of the album Blue Boyé (1977). The eight sections of Blue Boyé are notated in Music Manuscript Notebook 1 (MMN1), with the titles “First Blues,” “Second Blues,” etc. One page of the notebook features the title “Fourth Blues: Uttered Flute” in a decorative compartment, without any musical notation. That title likely corresponds to “Antecedent” on Blue Boyé.
Found on: Blue Boyé.
From Marty Ehrlich: The frame Hemphill drew around “Fourth Blues: Uttered Flute” decorates and ritualizes it, if you will. Hemphill had a unique voice on flute and made extensive use of singing, uttering, growling, and talking into the flute, techniques that I believe were part of his longstanding creative engagement with African retentions. Two more examples of his distinctive and virtuosic flute vocabulary appear on “Home Boy Tootin’ at the Dogstar” on Blue Boyé, and in his opening to “The Painter” on Dogon A.D. (1972).