Shop Notes Blog
The first flute that I ever played was something that I ordered out of the back of a catalog as a gift. This was in 1995. The flute was a simple Native American style flute made by someone called Coyote Oldman. At that time I knew nothing of who this might be, and while I had heard recordings of Native American flute music by R. Carlos Nakai, I didn’t know of anyone who made such flutes. So when I saw the ad I had to check it out.
What I later came to find out was that Coyote Oldman was the stage name for a musician and flute maker named Michael Graham Allen, one of the most influential popularizers of the Native American flute during its Renaissance (which really got going in the late 80’s and peaked in the early 2000’s). Not only did he have great influence on a generation of flute makers who followed him, but along the way he (and some other early experimenters) also popularized what at the time were being called “Anasazi” flutes—replicas of some of the artifacts created by the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest. As with the Native American style flutes, Michael re-imagined them in a way that made them more accessible, and he also recorded with these flutes. The music was beautiful and otherworldly. But he isn’t just a musician and flute maker, but also a great visual artist, experimenter and inventor who rarely treads the same artistic ground twice. Somewhere along the way he began decorating his flutes, creating instruments that were also stunning works of art, capturing the imagination of players and developing an iconic style that no one has ever imitated (though I know a bunch of us wanted to!). In the course of my nearly thirty year career making flutes, I’ve never found anything that I thought remotely as cool as his creations.
I used to look at examples of his work and wonder how he did it—they look like nothing I’ve seen before—and the artist in me was forever scratching my head and wanting to solve the puzzle.
Years went by, and in 2018 I met Michael at the World Flute Society convention in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We were both vendors (and he was also performing). In between events, when the vendor area was quiet, we would wander among the displays talking shop and visiting. I got to spend some time talking with Michael and discovered we had a lot in common, and his familiarity with my own work was deeply flattering. We had both wanted to be painters before we became flute makers, and we found a common impulse to always experiment and try new things. Plus we are both a couple of hermits who tend to hide in the woods!
Anyway, more years went by and I’ve recently found myself wanting to bring more art to my own flutes, and I was determined to figure out how Michael did what he did. Not to simply replicate it, but to use it as a jumping off point for my own experiments. Plus I just had a lot of professional curiosity about his method. But I also didn’t want to tread on his toes, artistically. So before I was going to make any attempt at this, I wanted to get his permission first, so I called him up. I won’t share our rather epic conversation, but Michael was far from being proprietary about his art, and he was pleased and flattered that I wanted to try to figure it out, and he encouraged me to take the journey. He did warn me that it was not something that was teachable and it was “really hard”. There had been a lot of innovation along the way to make it possible, and wasn’t a simple ABC process at all. However, like most artists he is a great believer in primal discovery, knowing the value of figuring things out without being told how to do it, and that is something I resonate with, having taught myself flute making from the very beginning. So with his blessing, I set about trying to figure it out.
The story of how I figured it out will remain untold, but sheer luck played a large part. But I finally cracked the mystery and found out that he was not exaggerating—it is really hard! It can be a frustrating process that stretches patience and often goes wrong—no wonder he couldn’t teach it. It really is a learn-by-doing sort of thing and it’s quite risky to the flute—a fair few don’t survive the process and the designs are completely unpredictable. It is a type of loosely controlled chaos, more like a weather event than a design decision! But when it works, the results are spectacular.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, so that makes these a tribute to an iconic flute maker whose work has impacted many lives, and whose artistic vision has fired my own imagination for many years. Thank you, Michael.
Published Tuesday, September 29, 2026