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Andrea Brachfeld

A flutist who is diversified in her music as well as in her life.

About Me

In 2016, flutist Andrea Brachfeld did something few serious jazz composers do. She took the entire year off as a writer to reflect, meditate, and basically get deeper as an artist. “I wanted my work to come from a place that had nothing to do with ego,” says this committed spiritual seeker, who is ever in pursuit of “the energy you feel when your mind stops thinking and what you hear links to your heart.”

That may sound pretty new agey. But judging by her exhilarating new album of originals, If Not Now, When?, other jazz composers may want to try the same thing. “All this music just came to me,” she says.

On an instrument most often sought for its breathy beauty, Brachfeld boasts what the late New York Times critic John S. Wilson described as a “vigorously dark, gutty quality.” It’s no wonder that the first jazz flutist to turn her head was free jazz pioneer Eric Dolphy. In her music, that energy she described can pour out to bruising effect.

“If you want to play jazz, you have to be able to get the articulation of Charlie Parker, to make the instrument sound like a trumpet or saxophone,” says Brachfeld. “With a lot of flute players, I don’t hear those articulations.”

If Not Now, When? was produced by Andrea and her longtime collaborator Bill O’Connell, whose deep- in-the-keys lyricism at the piano and gut instincts as an arranger suit her to a T. For this project, Brachfeld said, Bill initiated a new approach. “You write the melodies and I’ll write the harmony” she recalls discussing with O’Connell, an expression of great mutual trust.

When she first brought in her pulsating song, “Steppin,’” she had four or five parts in mind. O’Connell suggested they just do the first part and then “play.” The eight-bar melody breaks into high- stepping improvisations before settling into a shifty groove with bassist Harvie S, longtime duo partner of Sheila Jordan, and drummer Jason Tiemann.

Not until the session was nearly over did Brachfeld pull from her bag of compositions “Anima Mea,” which she describes as “a simple folk tune with sheets of sound.” No problem: “Bill harmonized it within five minutes” and the quartet whipped it into a kind of McCoy Tyner homage.

“The great thing about Bill is wherever I go musically, he comes with me, and sometimes gets where I’m going before I do,” says Brachfeld, pointing to the open improvising on “Deeply I Live” as an example of that.

She knew from start to finish that this music was special. “Every note,” she says, “felt good in my body.”

Andrea Brachfeld was born on May 3, 1954 in Utica, New York. She began playing piano at age six and flute at 10. Escaping what she called a “challenging family situation,” she would play her flute outside their 30th-floor apartment in New York City. “The concrete stairway had these great acoustics,” she says. “I created sounds that were soothing to me. There were no restrictions on what I could do. Before I knew what I was doing, I was improvising.”

In 1969, she enrolled at the High School of Music & Art on West 135th Street. For Bible class, she and Noel Pointer set the Rose of Sharon, what Jesus calls himself in the Song of Solomon, to music. Her teacher liked it so much that she performed it on an early cable TV channel with classmate Pointer on violin and Michael Klein, now an acclaimed poet, on piano and voice as part of an effort to save the funding for Music & Art.

At 16, Andrea got her first jazz gig, playing her own pieces with her quartet at an “All Night Soul” presentation at St. Peter’s Church. She attended Saturday morning Jazzmobile workshops, where Jimmy Heath was one of her flute instructors. At the Jazz Interactions program on Thursdays, another legend, Yusef Lateef, introduced her to Eastern music and other ethnic sounds.

In 1974, Brachfeld received Jazz Interactions’ Louis Armstrong Award for outstanding jazz student. Honors of a different sort came when Frank Foster invited her to play with his band, including Elvin Jones, at the Village Vanguard. “That was scary,” she says with a laugh.

She went on to study flute at the Manhattan School of Music, where her teachers included Harold Bennett and Andrew Loyla. She also studied privately with Hubert Laws, Eddie Daniels, and George Coleman during that time, and her fellow students included Kenny Kirkland, Fred Hersch, and Angela Bofill. “I tried playing saxophones in the course of my early career, but I didn’t like what they did to my sound,” she says.

After sitting in with Lloyd McNeil, fellow flutist who also studied with Eric Dolphy, at the Tin Palace in the Bowery in 1974, she met Mauricio Smith who connected her to Tipica New York, a Charanga band —“the beginning of my Afro-Cuban musical influence.” She worked with various name bands and got to sit in with a trio of immortals: Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, and Machito.

In 1976, Brachfeld recorded with the legendary band Charanga ’76, which catapulted her into fame as the first woman to play flute with a Charanga band in the United States.

Brachfeld recorded her first album, Andrea, in 1978. Produced by Puente percussionist José Madera, which boasted a stellar lineup including Barry Rodgers and Bobby Rodriguez. It was a nice debut. “It was a great experience recording with these luminaries,” she says. The band, and most of the songs, were arranged by the producer. But Brachfeld did compose many of the songs, along with John Andrews.

A year later, having been approached by millionaire Renato Capriles, she accepted an invitation to perform in Venezuela. She went for a month and stayed for two and a half years. Leading her own group, she opened for such luminaries as Gary Burton, Chick Corea, and Paco de Lucia.

Married and pregnant, she returned home to New York in 1981, not the greatest time for jazz. The Wynton Marsalis revolution was still a year away. She devoted herself to her family and attended graduate school, acquiring a Master’s in Education while balancing her career in music by performing locally. For nearly 25 years, she taught ESL and bilingual education while maintaining a local profile as a musician.

In 1998, when her daughter was 15, Brachfeld approached celebrated jazz flutist Dave Valentin, another of her high school classmates, with material she had written. She asked him if he wanted to record any of it. “His response was, ‘I want you to record it,’” she says. That she did, acting as her own producer on the Latin-tinged Remembered Dreams (2002). Released on the San Francisco label Spirit Nectar, it featured bassist Lincoln Goines and drummer Kim Plainfield, who also helped her produce the record.

Her next album, Back With Sweet Passion (2003, Latin Cool), was a Charanga Jazz affair attended by such notables as salsa greats Oscar Hernandez and Alfredo de la Fé. That recording was followed by Beyond Standards (2006, Consolidated Artists), a co-led effort with Latin percussionist Chembo Corniel which also featured Steve Turre. One of pianist Hilton Ruiz’s final projects, it includes among its “standards with a twist” a galvanizing treatment of John Coltrane’s “Transition” and a lovely bolero version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge.”

Then came Into the World: A Musical Offering (2008, Shaneye), on which standout guest artists including longtime Dizzy Gillespie pianist Mike Longo, bassist extraordinaire Paul West, and trumpeter Brian Lynch who joined Brachfeld’s Phoenix Rising ensemble.

Following a bout with focal dystonia, a condition she described as “an emotional energy blockage” that affected her hands, Brachfeld recorded a solo album of healing music under the spiritual name Kala Devi. Songs from the Divine: Spiritual Flute Music for Yoga and Meditation (2009, Shaneye) which features her on flutes and synthesizer.

Brachfeld raised her commercial profile with Lady of the Island (2014, ZOHO Music), which returned her to her first love, bebop. With contributions from O’Connell, Wycliffe Gordon, and Wallace Roney, in whose Orchestra “Universe” she played an integral role, the album mixes originals with inventive covers of Herbie Hancock, Duke Ellington, and Freddie Hubbard.

Another strong jazz statement, Lotus Blossom (2015, Jazzheads), came next. That album, featuring bass eminence Rufus Reid, drummer Winard Harper, and singer Nancy Harms, ranges in exciting fashion from Billy Strayhorn’s title song to her early influence Herbie Mann’s “Memphis Underground.”

That year, Brachfeld was named jazz’s best flutist by Hot House Magazine. Her numerous other honors include Latin Jazz USA’s Chico O’Farrill Lifetime Achievement Award, but by now she had many more roles to fill than musician. “My energy from that point on has been dedicated to marketing and promotion as well as composing, playing, and recording my music,” she says.

In If Not Now, When?, Brachfeld refined her approach to composing. “The way I composed all of the songs was like taking a huge block of marble and chopping away until I got the image inside the marble,” she says. “It was about seeing what melodies came out and working on them until they felt right.”

A grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for the CD— “a wonderful affirmation”—assured her she was on the right path. So did numerous opportunities to perform at the Havana Jazz Festival, perform and teach master classes in Croatia, and otherwise make her presence felt on jazz’s world stage.

“In the end,” she says, “it’s all about your voice, your journey to find your voice. It’s about the inner work you do in finding your voice, on a spiritual and personal level. It’s about finding out who we are and translating it into the music.”

Just how well the personal and the spiritual can work together is revealed on the closing rendition of “Amazing Grace,” the album’s one non-original. Brachfeld’s improvising is bold and beautiful, a statement of belief not only in heavenly authority but human creativity as well. How sweet the sound, indeed.

Here's the latest info on Andrea's newest release:

Critically acclaimed flutist Andrea Brachfeld pays tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim on her newest recording and debut release for Origin records, Brazilian Whispers, out January 17, 2020. Inspired by the Brazilian music scene in New York City where she has resided for five decades, Brachfeld's ninth recording as a leader showcases her virtuosity as a player and composer over the course of 11 tracks. She puts her spin on Jobim classics “Water of March”, “Girl From Ipanema” and “Ligia”, among others, and demonstrates her compositional prowess on three Brazilian-spirited original songs that were co-written with frequent collaborator Bill O'Connell: “Espaço Aberto”, “Sonhos e Cores” and ”Triste e Solitaria”. With Brazilian Whispers, Brachfeld solidifies her place in the modern jazz pantheon and proves why she is “one of the most important voices in the history of the contemporary flute” , Raul da Gama, Latinjazznet. Andrea's current project, “Evolution” will be released on Origin Records on May 20, 2022. The music is a combination of new compositions written during the pandemic, and new arrangements of three pieces of music that Andrea was drawn to for their quality of sensitivity to three separate cultures; The Middle Eastern, African; specifically the Baka Forest People, and the Native American of Canada. Her bandmates, Bill O' Connell, Harvie S, and Jason Tiemann accompany her on this project.

UPDATE

Her latest recording “Evolution” was released in May, 2022 featuring Bill O’ Connell, Harvie S, and Jason Tiemann, on Origin Records. It has received rave reviews and continues to be on the Jazzweek charts .

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My Jazz Story

I love jazz because it makes me feel alive and connected to the source and everyone else! I was first exposed to jazz by listening to Eric Dolphy- Out to Lunch. I met Jimmy Heath at Jazzmobile at age 16. He's been an inspiration ever since. The best show I ever attended was Chick at the BlueNote with Steve Gadd, Eddie Gomez, Michael Brecker. The first jazz record I bought was Hubert Laws. My advice to new listeners... listen.

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