Season 1

Jason Ricci joins me on episode 93 (and on episode 94) In part one: Jason tells us how he started out in a punk band, with his bandmates suggesting he take up the harmonica. Of course, he took to it quickly, to become quite p...

Erland Westerstrom joins me on episode 92. Erland is from Sweden, where he studied Swedish folk music on the harmonica at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, with Filip Jers as one of his teachers there. Erland released ...

Tom Halchak joins me on episode 91. Tom tells us how he grew his successful company, Blue Moon Harmonicas, started in 2009. Tom started out selling custom combs, and then covers in different materials and colours. Tom went on...

Tom Ellis joins me (again) on episode 90. This is part two of the Paul Butterfield retrospective where Tom takes us even deeper into Paul’s career and talks us through more of his incredible output. About how Butter, while pa...

Mike Stevens joins me on episode 89. Mike is a Canadian who made his name playing Bluegrass harmonica, performing with some of the biggest names in Bluegrass and playing at The Grand Old Opry over 300 times. Mike toured with ...

Jim Hughes joins me (again) on episode 88. Jim is a chromatic player who was last interviewed on the podcast in October 2020, back on episode 26. He is now at the grand age of 93 years young, and he shares the wisdom he has d...

Paul Harrington joins me on episode 87. Paul has a long and illustrious recording career, having had great success on the vibrant session scene in Dallas where he recorded on many commercials. He also played on the hit song T...

Marcos Coll joins me on episode 86. Marcos is a Spaniard who has been living in Berlin for the last twenty years. Marcos rose to fame at a young age on the Spanish blues scene playing with the Tonky Blues Band before forming ...

Ed Hopwood joins me on episode 85. Ed is from the UK where he started out playing drums and he shares some tips on how to bring some rhythm into our harmonica playing. Ed loves early styles of harmonica and performs a range g...

Hendrik Meurkens joins me on episode 84. Hendrik is a German chromatic player who has been living in New York since the early 1990s. Toots Thielemans was Hendrik’s inspiration to take up the chromatic and he performed a live ...

Annie Raines joins me on episode 83. Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player. Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly ...

Steve Guyger joins me on episode 82. Steve is from the Philadelphia area of the US and he absorbed the blues harmonica players when he first got into playing, with John Lee Williamson a big early inspiration. Steve was also g...

Ben Bouman joins me on episode 81. Ben is a Dutch blues player who always strives for originality in his playing, partly inspired by his admiration for the playing of Paul deLay. Ben’s current band is The Marble Tones, who to...

Todd Parrot joins me on episode 80. Todd is a gospel harmonica player who was inspired to play harmonica after first hearing it in church. He went on to join the church band and has gone on to develop a heavenly tone on the i...

Rocky Lok joins me on episode 79. Rocky lives in Hong Kong, where there is a vibrant harmonica scene. Harmonica is taught in many schools there, which is how Rocky got started playing himself almost 50 years ago. He went on t...

Marko Jovanovic joins me on episode 78. Marko is a German player with Serbian roots, from where he developed an interest in playing Balkan music on the harmonica, returning to the region to team up with several acts to releas...

Rob Paparozzi joins me on episode 77. Rob is based around the New York area where he started out playing in blues bands before quickly adding the chromatic to his harp arsenal. He took lessons with Robert Bonfiglio and then h...

Will Pound joins me on episode 76. Will first started playing harmonica age 10 to help with his breathing after he underwent two major heart operations as a child. Since then he has rose to fame on the English folk scene, bei...

Laurent Maur joins me on episode 75. Laurent is a jazz chromatic player from France. He first started learning diatonic before moving on to the chromatic to pursue his love of jazz music. He had some lessons with the French c...

Richard Hunter joins me on episode 74. Richard has immersed himself in harmonica ever since he first picked it up at age 15 and has been pushing the boundaries of the instrument ever since. His first release was a solo acoust...

Adam Gussow joins me on episode 73. Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there. Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They f...

Paul Reddick joins me on episode 72. Paul is a singer, songwriter and harmonica player based in Toronto, Canada. He rose to prominence with his band: Paul Reddick and the Sidemen in the 1990s. Paul describes himself as not a ...

Juzzie Smith joins me on episode 71. Juzzie is an Australian who has a one-man band act with the harmonica pivotal to the sound. He has had over 200 million views of his online videos, starting out when a passer-by recorded h...

Ricky Cool joins me on episode 70. Ricky hails from the Birmingham area of the UK, and drew great inspiration asa teenager from the American folk festivals which brought some harmonica greats to the city. Under his alter ego ...