The Brandon Pops: Whistling to a Different Tune

Stand within arm’s length of Joel Brandon, study him closely, watch every move he makes, and you still won’t believe your ears. This has to be a trick. No one could produce that kind of sound without using a musical instrument.

Brandon will tell you that his body is a musical instrument, thank you very much, and he only calls what he does whistling because he has no better word to describe it.

“I haven’t been able to name it, to give it its proper due,” he says with a trace of frustration. “When I say ‘whistling,’ the average person will say: “Aw, OK. I’ve heard whistling.’ ”

But they haven’t heard whistling the way Brandon does it, unless they’ve caught him on television, in a pops concert with a symphony orchestra or jamming with jazz ensembles.

Brandon, 48, of Studio City, has won every national and international whistling contest he has entered, except for those that disqualified him when judges were convinced that he was using some kind of hidden device.

His is a familiar story of talent that melts the stars, yet never attracts enough bookings to make a living. He has supported himself with day jobs: chef, telephone installer, postal clerk, jeweler.

He has whistled his way to “The Tonight Show” and “Good Morning, America” and into San Francisco’s Giants Stadium, where he did the National Anthem. The Pittsburgh Symphony’s managing director calls him “a virtuoso whistler who has an extraordinarily beautiful tone and strong musical sensibilities”--qualities that earned him standing ovations in the Steel City. The artistic director of the Colorado Symphony says his technique “is dazzling and his volume and breath control is unbelievable.”

“I can do three octaves--just as much as a regular instrument,” Brandon says. “Don’t get me wrong. I can’t match the physical technique of some instruments. But I am in the ballpark.”

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Brandon whistles backward, the same way he started as a 7-year-old kid on Chicago’s South Side.

“I inhaled instead of blowing out,” he says. “I was trying to get whatever sound I could come up with. I put my lips up. I got this little sound, and it startled me. I said, ‘Oh, wow. I don’t think I’ve heard that before.’ ”

He became fixated on whistling a single note, “driving my family nuts.” But that one note led to a deepening interest in music. A high score on a musical aptitude test led him to take up the flute.

“It was a kind of natural thing, because I had the sounds in my head and the concepts were there,” he says. “The flute helped my whistling, and the whistling helped my flute.”

The scales and arpeggios he learned on the flute quickly were incorporated into the whistling. The flute made him more conscious of intervals in his whistling “so that when you get to the end of a piece, you’re still in tune,” he says, bursting into laughter.

He began doing glissandi--slurred notes--in his whistling, and marvels even now at his discipline over the four years it took him to painstakingly develop a staccato technique.

His reputation as a flutist began to grow around Chicago, but only a precious few were admitted to the tight circle who knew about his whistling.

“I kept it to myself and to my close friends. But I still studied. . . . I reached a point where people said this is something you shouldn’t take lightly.”

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After several semesters at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Brandon “fell by the wayside,” drawn to the money to be made writing and arranging in recording studios.

But about 15 years ago, a trumpet-player friend urged him to use his whistling on a club date.

“The response was so tremendous it almost made me feel ashamed to play the flute,” Brandon says.

He once played Tokyo while Stevie Wonder was there, and a mutual friend introduced them. He whistled for Wonder, who was generous in his compliments. But he later asked Brandon’s friend: “What was he really doing?”

Brandon’s inhaling technique “pops” each note, as he puts it, giving it the sound of a musical instrument.

“This is not normal whistling,” he says. “To do this, I use my tongue, my palate and I don’t know what else. It’s not just my lips.”

For the past several years, Brandon has appeared regularly with Newton Wayland, principal pops conductor of the Vancouver Symphony and guest conductor with symphony orchestras in Houston, Oakland, Denver and South Bend, Ind.

When he first heard Brandon, Wayland said, he found the experience “a bit of a shock--a very pleasant shock, because he makes a great sound. He purses his lips in this unusual way. The sound and his look almost made me laugh from astonishment.”

In their pop concerts, Wayland says, he and Brandon “always do a classical piece--either Handel or Bach--to show he has classical chops.”

Brandon is just as much at home riffing through Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring” or Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”

He unleashes a torrent of laughter recalling how he and drummer Billy Higgins--improvising with a box on a bar stool--”tore up the place” during a set in a San Francisco club.

Downbeat magazine named him “talent deserving of wider recognition” four years ago, and Brandon plays Los Angeles jazz clubs as often as he can. Later this month he will appear at the World Stage jazz gallery in Crenshaw’s Leimert Park.

A few weeks ago he appeared with jazz pianist Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra at Los Angeles’ Dublin Avenue Elementary School.

After the performance, he says, “several kids came up to see if I had something in my mouth.”

Brandon knows his “instrument” is unique to him, something he may not be able to pass along.

“I want more exposure for what I do,” he says, “because I want the kids to take it as seriously as I do. When I go, this goes.”