page_title: Jean-Pierre Rampal
section_title: Celebrity
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Pierre Rampal / Biography / Celebrity
caption_attribution_description: photo dedicated to Hans Adler who arranged three acclaimed Southern Africa musical tours
context_page_description: Jean-Pierre Louis Rampal was a French flautist. He has been personally "credited with returning to the flute the popularity as a solo classical instrument it had not held since the 18th century."
context_section_description: Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Rampal remained especially popular in the US and Japan (where he had first toured in 1964). He toured America annually, performing at every leading venue—from Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall to the Hollywood Bowl—and was a regular presence at the Mostly Mozart Festival at the Lincoln Center in New York. At his busiest, he performed between 150 and 200 concerts a year.
  His range extended well beyond the orthodox: alongside the outpouring of classical recordings, he recorded Catalan and Scottish folk songs, Indian Music with sitarist Ravi Shankar, and, accompanied by the distinguished French harpist Lily Laskine, an album of Japanese folk melodies that was named album of the year in Japan, where he became adored by a new generation of budding flute-players. He also recorded Scott Joplin rags and Gershwin, and collaborated with French jazz pianist Claude Bolling. The Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano (1975), written by Bolling especially for Rampal, went to the top of the US Billboard charts and remained there for ten years. This raised his profile with the American public even further and led, in January 1981, to a TV appearance on Jim Henson's The Muppet Show, where he played "Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark" with Miss Piggy—and, suitably attired, "Ease on Down the Road" in a scene loosely based on the folktale of the Pied Piper.
  Back on the classical stage, he was not afraid to be, as he put it, "a bit of a ham"; when performing Scott Joplin's Ragtime Dance and Stomp as a concert hall encore, for example, he provided extra percussion by stamping his feet rhythmically on stage in time to the music.
  Meanwhile, Bolling and Rampal came together again for Bolling's Picnic Suite (1980) with guitarist Alexander Lagoya, the Suite No. 2 for Flute and Jazz Piano (1987), and also to perform the instrumental theme song "Goodbye For Now" by Stephen Sondheim for Reds, Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning 1981 movie about the Communist revolution in Russia. His reputation as a celebrity soloist in America became such that, as Esquire reported, one critic dubbed him "the Alexander of the flute, with no new worlds to conquer." Following a performance of Mozart's Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra with the New York Philharmonic in 1976, New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote "Mr. Rampal, with his effortless long line, his sweet and pure tone and his sensitive musicianship, is of course one of the great flutists in history." Throughout these years of mounting celebrity, Rampal continued to research and edit sheet-music editions of flute works for publishing houses including Georges Billaudot in Paris and the International Music Company in the US.
caption: Rampal with Veyron-Lacroix 1959, photo dedicated on the first of three acclaimed Southern Africa musical tours organised by Hans Adler. [1]
exif: {"Image Make": "Brother", "Image Model": "MFC-J6510DW", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "100", "Image YResolution": "100", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Microsoft Windows Photo Viewer 6.1.7600.16385", "Image DateTime": "2013:09:12 18:06:33", "Image HostComputer": "Apple Mac OS X", "Image ExifOffset": "2324", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1510", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1135", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}