An Interview with Gheorghe Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute and Film Soundtrack Hero

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
— from “A Musical Instrument,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anyone who spent time watching American television in off-peak hours for stretches of the 1980s and ‘90s likely has a handful of commercials burned forever in their memory. Few made impressions as deep as those for music collections that offered a few tantalizing seconds of songs as a rolling tracklist for the full collection rolled in the background. Most were for familiar names. But one commercial more or less introduced a name to viewers in the United States: Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute.

Zamfir, viewers were told, had “sold more than 20 million records around the world” and now they, too, could enjoy his work via the two-disc collection Zamfir Plays the World’s Most Beautiful Melodies. The spots alternated between dreamy stock footage and images of Zamfir in performance with his pan flute, “that magical instrument with the unforgettable sound.” “Relax,” the ad commands, “as Zamfir sweeps you away to a world of haunting, tranquil beauty.” Said world, we were to conclude, could best be accessed by way of pan flute-driven, easy listening music in which compositions by Mozart, Chopin played side-by-side with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “The Rose.”

The collection sold well — the ads ran forever and spawned a sequel — but they’re not fully representative of Zamfir’s larger contribution to the world of music and, especially for our purposes, film.

Consider this: If you’re watching a movie and Zamfir pops up on the soundtrack, you’re probably watching a pretty great movie, most likely a masterpiece of one kind or another, even if the films to which Zamfir made contributions have little in common. Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Karate Kid, Once Upon a Time in America, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 would not be the movies we know without Zamfir and his pan flute. And it’s through a series of quirks of history that we even know about Zamfir at all.

Gheorghe Zamfir was born near Bucharest, Romania in 1941. His father enrolled him in a music school at the age of 14 where Zamfir planned