Season 1

Grant Dermody, Ross Garren and Pete Dammann join me on episode 120 for a retrospective on Paul DeLay. Paul is a harmonica player who may go under the radar for some but his unique approach to both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica, as well as his powerful vocals and his insightful and humorous s…

Yeore Kim joins me on episode 119. Yeore is from South Korea, where she first picked up the tremolo harmonica at the age of six. Her mother is a piano teacher, so she also learnt piano and other instruments, including trumpet, before focusing on the chromatic harmonica from age 18. Yeore has releas…

David Barrett joins me on episode 118. David is based in San Jose, California, where he took lessons from Gary Smith from age 16, in addition to learning from great harmonica recordings. He started teaching harmonica himself from age 18 and has become one of the foremost harmonica educators around,…

Yvonnick Prene joins me on episode 117. Yvonnick was born in France and has been resident in New York for seventeen years after first moving to the city to study at the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music. He started out playing blues and jazz on the diatonic and took lessons with some of …

Isabella Krapf joins me on episode 116. Isabella is from Vienna, Austria, where she started teaching and performing concerts in her late teens and has had a career in the harmonica ever since. Isabella is a collector of harmonicas and puts on exhibitions. She played a part in keeping the Seydel fac…

Pat Missin joins me on episode 115. Pat’s knowledge about the harmonica is unsurpassed, with his website at patmissin.com, a definitive source of information for over twenty years. He gives us an insight into some of this knowledge, starting with how free reed instruments were the predecessor of th…

Seth Shumate joins me on episode 114. Seth is an Old Timey and pre-war harmonica player originally from Arkansas, now living in Tennessee. Seth has deeply researched the early history of the harmonica and has written an Old Time Harmonica Handbook which contains lots of great information, as well a…

Andre Godoy Coelho (and Brendan Power) join me on episode 113. Andre is a Brazilian who relocated to Portugal in 2018, performing and recording two albums with the Rio Grande band in Sao Paulo, before recording a recent album in a duo in Portugal. Andre quickly became interested in harmonica custom…

Harmonica group Svang join me on episode 112. Svang are a harmonica quartet from Finland, who have been performing and recording for over twenty years now. They first formed in 2003 when Jouko was teaching at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and suggested forming a harmonica group with two of his s…

Episode 111 is part 2 of the ten minute question, from the remaining podcast guests up until this point. As per the last episode, I’ll say the name of each guest before they respond to the question: “if you had 10 minutes to ...

Something a little different for episode 110 (and also episode 111 so I can keep the length around the one hour mark). The next two episodes are a compilation of all the ten minute question answers from the series so far, in ...

Clint Hoover joins me on episode 109. Clint is originally from Minneapolis and has spent a life immersed in music and the harmonica. He’s reached great heights on both the chromatic and the diatonic. Early on he also studied guitar and saxophone and attended a jazz course in New York City where he …

Roly Platt joins me on episode 108. Roly is a Canadian player who has recorded countless sessions over his 45 year career. He started out playing in a country band which set the scene for him playing a diverse range of genres throughout that time. Roly has recorded 1700 individual session cuts, wit…

Yotam Ben-Or joins me on episode 107. Yotam is a chromatic player who attended the Tel-Aviv Music Conservatory, making a name for himself on the Israeli music scene before winning a scholarship to study at The New School for Jazz in New York, age 21. Although predominately a jazz player, Yotam is k…

Eddie Martin joins me on episode 106. Eddie has been described as the ambassador of British Blues, having released seventeen albums over his near fifty year career, with many of the songs self-penned by Eddie. He started out as a one-man band, but also performs as part of his own bands too. In eith…

Paul Barry joins me again on episode 105, for another look at the life and career of the great William Clarke. Paul has now released his biography: Blowin’ Like Hell: The William Clarke Story, writing it from insights he gain...

Mike Turk joins me on episode 104. Mike is a Boston-based player who started out playing blues harmonica, inspired by the great Paul Butterfield, before becoming interested in playing jazz on the chromatic. He recorded some session work in New York and recorded through the 1970s with various artist…

Konstantin Reinfeld joins me on episode 103. Konstantin is a German who comes from the overblow school of harmonica, studying music at a conservatory and taking lessons from Howard Levy as part of his early development. He released a jazz album at age 18, with two more albums to follow before relea…

Christian Marsh joins me on episode 102. Christian is an Australian who plays both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica. Starting out playing diatonic, Christian drew inspiration from players such as Norton Buffalo and Charlie McCoy, absorbing as much harmonica as he could lay his hands on . He pic…

Tom Ellis interviews Neil Warren on episode 101. Neil started out playing blues harmonica in his hometown of Blackburn (with it’s 4000 holes). He progressed into learning jazz, taking jazz chromatic lessons for several years, and then folk music. Neil currently plays in two bands around his local a…

Episode 100 is a retrospective on the greatest ever blues harmonica player, Marion Walter Jacobs, aka Little Walter. Little Walter was born in 1930, probably, and started playing harmonica age 8. He was busking on the streets...

Dennis Gruenling joins me on episode 99. Dennis is originally from the New York area, where he began his love affair with record collecting, listening to a wide range of music, from country to rhythm and blues and beyond before it all came together when he heard his first harmonica on the great Har…

Michael Pettersen And James Waldron join me on episode 98. In this episode we talk about the iconic Green Bullet microphone, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2024. Michael is the Director of Corporate History at Shure microphones , and he tells us about the early design of the mic, what…

Vitor Lopes joins me on episode 97. He is a Brazilian chromatic player who specialises in Choro music. Vitor tells us about the history of the harmonica in Brazil, starting out when Hohner opened a factory there in 1923, which later became the Hering factory. The availability of harmonicas in Brazi…