Swing it!

Whistle
1

Hoagy Carmichael Band 1944
Scroll to 35.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fs4vI2XnQJ4

2

Kind of cool, sounds like he’s overblowing half the time, the notes nearly breaking. I’m sure it was intentional but it doesn’t sound very good to me tone-wise. Great jazz playing of course.

You just can’t overdrive the whistle like you can the flute.

3

Thanks for the post. I never noticed this before. It reminds me of Quela, which I really like.

4

hey that was cool! the guy plays jazz well, whoever he was.

5

The Hoagy C. item comes up every few years but I’ll bite this time:

Sweet Sue - Django Reinhardt, Les Lieber (whistle) and others

Les Lieber died a few months ago, aged 106. He played the jazz whistle to the end.

6

I played in Gypsy jazz bands for years and have played Sweet Sue a thousand times, but I’d never heard that whistle version. Very cool.

Have to wonder how much of the Quela stuff came from american jazz.

7

From what I’ve read, kwela and marabi music evolved in the segregated culture of South Africa under similar (Jim Crow ~ Apartheid) conditions as to those that gave birth to jazz in the US. Wikipedia indicates that marabi did indeed have links to jazz and that kwela evolved from marabi. And, naturally, music being what it is, it could not be contained in the ghettos of its birth, and eventually put SA on the musical map.