JAZZ REVIEW : Art Farmer’s Hybrid Sound

We’ve already heard the fluegelhorn. We all know the trumpet. The time has now arrived to greet the flumpet.

This hybrid horn is the recently adopted, specially manufactured plaything of Art Farmer, who opened an engagement Tuesday at Catalina Bar & Grill that extends through Sunday. Long torn between the mellow sound of the fluegelhorn and the brilliance of the trumpet, he found a manufacturer who developed the new instrument.

The flumpet (a switch to a more graceful name, Farmer says, is under consideration) managed to merge these requirements. On the slower tempos it tends toward the fluegel sound. At a rapid clip and in the higher range it takes on a trumpet coloration. Either way, it’s an ideal vehicle for the personal brand of lyricism with which Farmer has long been identified.

With a repertoire that stretches from Kern to Coltrane, Farmer showed his mastery of the new horn. It is also capable of a splendid muted sound, as he demonstrated on Benny Golson’s “Sad to Say,” performed as a duo with pianist Mike Wofford.

Wofford was accorded his own interlude in mid-set, bringing his remarkable technique and stylistic elegance to “You Stepped Out of a Dream.” His teammates were the always dependable Roy McCurdy on drums and the limber bassist Bob Magnusson, who soloed spiritedly--both plucking and bowing.

Farmer ended his set with “Cherokee Sketches,” a jaunty variation on “Cherokee,” written by a friend back home in Vienna, where the flumpeter has lived for 23 years.