Talk:R. Carlos Nakai/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 14:56, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take this one. A fine article on a splendid musician; I don't think I'll have more than the most minor of comments to make.

~~"a number of" is used 5 times. Sometimes here it means "Some of"; other times ("a number of collaborations") it means nothing at all.~~
Fixed, added detail in one place.

On his notation (Nakai tablature), "learn a different finger position for every note" is a bit surprising: don't musicians always have to do that? Some flutes can be overblown, i.e. blow harder and get a second note: but I doubt you mean anything to do with that here. Perhaps it needs explaining differently.
I suspect it's extra verbiage that crept into the source that I simply reproduced. Removed.

The only album instrument mentioned is flute, but he also plays things like the bone whistle, and (searches...) there's even a mention of him at Eagle-bone whistle! Definitely deserves a mention, citation, and Wikilink! It seems he ran a workshop for the Western National Parks to make replicas of such whistles, too.
Added.

~~"five Native American flute players": why is "R. Carlos Nakai" spelt out in full here?~~
No reason. Fixed.

Northern Arizona University: he was an alumnus without a degree, and then (scroll down...!) they gave him an honorary one later? Remarkable and perhaps worth spelling out in full, a singular honor. Actually how was he drafted in the middle of a degree? I'd imagined they waited for you to finish.
He wasn't an alumnus without a degree though...he returned to finish his Bachelor's. The trouble with the draft thing is that sources are confused about it; I really dug deep, and couldn't find more detail...it's possible he volunteered to pre-empt a draft, but if so, the sources don't say.

Cedar flute, Nakai tablature ... would both make useful and attractive images if such can be found. There is this on Commons, I suppose we could in desperation use a cropped detail but it ought to be possible to photograph one ...
~~Hmmm...I'm not the biggest fan of that photo; it's terrible resolution. At the moment, photographing a cedar flute isn't an option for me; I'll keep an eye out, though.~~

Wow that's quite a Discography, no idea there were so many albums. Perhaps we could have a little bit of review of Changes in particular, or of his work more generally? Not sure if you feel that Echoes is a suitable source, it looks all right to me and it covers five of his albums.
I'm not too sure of Echoes as a source for analysis; it's probably okay for factual information. I'll take a look to see what I can find, though a lot of information about the discography is already in career or legacy (it's placed in career because for reasons unknown, most biographies of his stop discussing his personal life after his musical career took off). Also I'm none too happy about putting comments about individual albums in the discography section unless sources are doing the highlighting; so I've added reviewers comments about the Gold albums in the recognition section. Will that do?

Yes, that's fine.

~~(Why is Dancing into Silence redlinked, are you writing that article?)~~
Not immediately; but it meets NALBUM#4 (has won a Grammy), so it seems like a reasonable redlink to have, per WP:REDLINK. I generally prefer to link clearly notable subjects that lack articles.

~~Which 2 albums reached Gold? The paragraph half-implies it's the two discussed...~~
Added.