Mann is the guy Will Ferrell and friends likely had in mind when they conceived the infamous Ron Burgundy jazz flute sequence in Anchorman. Voting was dominated by rivals Sam Most, who was a technical innovator, and Herbie Mann, a populist who was probably jazz flute’s most high-profile promoter for decades.

In 1956 jazz bible DownBeat magazine added flute for the first time to its annual polls of best instrumentalists. Flutists Bud Shank (who would later improvise the pivotal flute solo on the Mamas and the Papas’ “ California Dreamin’ ”), Buddy Collette, Frank Weiss, and James Moody started to make their marks. Shifts in style also helped, with “Latin jazz” trends opening up some space for piping sounds, as did the “ exotica” fantasias of artists like Martin Denny and Les Baxter and the “cool” jazz of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and others. The flute’s fortunes began to turn with improved amplification and recording technology through the 1940s and ’50s. The flute’s scarcity might have begun for practical reasons, but it was self-reinforcing, leaving it stigmatized as a classical instrument for squares. Through the 1930s, the best-known flute player in jazz was Wayman Carver, who played with the popular Benny Carter and Chick Webb bands, but like most jazz flutists for decades to come, he was mainly a sax player who added some flute now and then as a treat. The earliest known jazz flute solo on record was by Cuban musician Alberto Socarras, on 1927’s “ Shootin’ the Pistol” by the Clarence Williams band, but you have to strain to hear it, demonstrating the problem. In an orchestra that includes a whole woodwind section, the massed power of many flute players can make itself heard, but in the smaller ensembles and soloist-emphasizing arrangements typical of most jazz, a flute just couldn’t cut through the louder instruments. In fact, despite being such an old instrument, it was a latecomer to 20 th-century pop music, both live and recorded, because its delicacy of sound worked against it.

The flute’s fate in pop tends to fluctuate that way, through phases of ubiquity and then long fallow periods.

Blue dream catchers