June 28, 2020
Michael D'Eath interview
Michael D’Eath is the President of the American harmonica organisation SPAH. He tells us what SPAH is all about and the many benefits it brings to its members.
The SPAH convention is one of the biggest events on the harmonica calendar, and this year it will be online. Allowing more international artists to be utilised, and providing the opportunity for people around the world to take part in the convention, which takes place from Aug 12-15 2020.
Select the Chapter Markers tab above to select different sections of the podcast (website version only).
SPAH website:
https://www.spah.org
SPAH 2020 online convention:
https://www.spah.org/content.asp?contentid=138&fbclid=IwAR0AWfRlCCFEoan9lMhJln4bXH2NY7texiH9hgskc0XFX5ekUwfrr1Xlx9Y
SPAH donations page:
https://www.spah.org/content.asp?contentid=156
SPAH Facebook site:
https://www.facebook.com/SPAH63/
Archive material:
SPAH Archive website:
https://archive.org/details/SPAH-archive
Roger Trobridge's Archivist website: the first 20 years of SPAH:
http://www.the-archivist.co.uk/spah-the-first-20-years/
HarmonicaUK (formerly National Harmonica League), Lockdown sessions, including info on Chromatic Weekend: July 25/26 2020:
https://www.harmonicauk.com/lockdown-sessions/
Michael's band, Him & Her:
https://www.himandhertx.com
Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com
Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB
Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ
Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/
01:20 - Michael's name
02:09 - English roots and move to US
03:40 - What got Michael started on harmonica
05:31 - Michael’s band: Him & Her
07:54 - What got Michael interested in chromatic playing
10:01 - What started Michael’s SPAH involvement
11:07 - Joined SPAH board
13:08 - The role of SPAH, including history
15:30 - SPAH shift to emphasise diatonic more
16:43 - Peter Madcat Ruth
18:23 - National Harmonica League UK and Chromatic weekend
19:21 - Chromatic harmonica
21:46 - Place of diatonic harmonica in SPAH
26:17 - Benefits of being a SPAH member
31:31 - Online SPAH convention of 2020
34:40 - SPAH online convention seminars
35:50 - Slideshows during breaks will include archive material
36:28 - Concerts in the evenings
38:14 - All performers and presenters are getting paid, donations requested
40:14 - Hope to run jam sessions after concerts
42:18 - Any plans for SPAH to run more activities online?
44:40 - Professional company will run Zoom sessions
46:32 - SPAH scholarship programme involvement
49:35 - What harmonicas does Michael play
51:24 - Favourite key of harmonica
53:19 - Alternative tunings
53:42 - Overblows
54:14 - Embouchre
54:47 - Amps and mics
56:18 - Effects pedals
57:07 - Last word on the upcoming convention
WEBVTT
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Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the Happy Hour Harmonica podcast.
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Please be sure to subscribe and check out the Spotify playlist.
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Another word to my sponsor, the Lone Wolf Blues Company, makers of effects pedals, microphones and more, designed for harmonica.
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Remember, when you want control of your tone, you want Lone Wolf.
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Michael Dieff joins me today.
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As well as playing in his own band, Him and Her, Michael is the president of the American harmonica organization, SPAR.
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He tells us what SPAR is all about and the many benefits it brings to its members.
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The SPAR convention is one of the biggest events on the harmonica calendar, and this year it will be online, allowing more international artists to be utilized and providing the opportunity for people around the world to take part in the convention, which takes place from August 12th to 15th, 2020.
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So hello, Michael DF, and welcome to the podcast.
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Hey, thanks, Neil.
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I appreciate it.
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Good to be here.
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Michael, for those who don't know, is the president of SPAR.
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So we're here partly to talk about SPAR today, but we'll start with Michael.
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So I've got to start with your name, first of all, Michael.
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Michael DF.
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You must have got some really cool as a youngster with that name.
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Yes, absolutely.
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Yes.
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Mick the Dead and the Black Death and everything that an English prep school and public school could possibly do to me, they did.
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And I'm totally immune to it.
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And I noticed your wife, Brenda Freed, she hasn't taken the name on.
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Yeah, well, she, you know, being a perennial performer, she was touring in Europe before we met, actually, 20 years ago.
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And she was smart enough to keep her name because, you know, it's well known.
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And we don't call things by my last name.
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We use hers.
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So we have Be Freed Music as an example, not, you know, death music.
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You know, it'd be okay if I was, you know, if I was a heavy metal band or something, but it doesn't work very well for a folk and blues and jazz guy.
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Well, we'll pick up on a bit of your history now and how that led you to become the president of...
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bar.
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So you're originally from England.
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I was born in South London, Kingston, and lived most of my first 19 years in the south of England and then ended up in Winchester for a little while and then Cambridge for a little while and discovered computers in the early 1970s in London and ended up working on some of the largest computers.
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And I had no intention of doing that.
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I was going to be an engineer and went to Cambridge to do that.
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But before I went up there, I discovered that I really enjoyed writing software.
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And by the time I got to Cambridge, I decided that that's what I really wanted to do.
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And Cambridge didn't know how to spell the word, let alone how to teach anything about it.
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And so I left Cambridge after a year and got a place at a university in Houston called Rice University.
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I spent one semester there and took a leave of absence and never went back.
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Started my first company in Houston in 1975 at the age of 21 and basically did startups and sort of entrepreneur entrepreneurial things for 45 years and I'm still living in Texas now in what is called the Texas Hill Country, which is unlike anything you'll see in the movies for the most part.
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It's hills and we have a house about 2,000 feet, which I would have called a mountain if I was still living in the UK because there wasn't anything close to that where I grew up.
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So I've spent all but five of the last 47 years
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in Texas.
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Yeah.
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So talking about your own harmonica playing initially.
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So I think you took it up a little bit later in life.
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So what was your history of picking up the harmonica?
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I grew up singing in choirs and madrigals and playing piano and that sort of thing.
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You know, the respectable stuff.
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And came over here and was mostly a listener.
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I actually had listened to a lot of American music in the UK before I came over here.
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In the mid-90s, a friend of mine was fighting cancer and had throat cancer.
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And we started playing music.
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He was a guitar player and had been a harmonica player and a singer.
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He did an awful lot of instrumental work.
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And so I couldn't sing, obviously, in those moments.
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for those songs.
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And so he said, well, why don't you try this and handed me a harmonica.
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I still actually have that one in my studio right through the window there.
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So I started playing harp and it was interestingly, a lot of things like Django Reinhardt, a lot of minor key stuff.
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And it took me about two years to figure out that just because I was playing a C harp didn't mean I was playing in G.
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I was actually playing in D minor.
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So I learned to play third position probably before I learned to play second, all by ear.
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And then I started taking lessons.
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So I've been playing about 25 years.
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So you didn't have any particular harmonical influences and you sort of learned it yourself by playing with a guitar player, did you?
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Yeah, but playing, we actually had a small group.
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We had a mandolin, guitar, banjo, and then me.
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And, you know, two of us sang and then the rest of us played.
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And we actually did some recording at that time.
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But I mean, mine were mostly John Mayall, you know, Lennon, you know, and obviously I had heard a lot of harmonica playing, but it really, you know, it wasn't sort of like, I was more immersed in things like the Grateful Dead and Jeff Snare playing and jazz than I was in any particular instrument.
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You know, I was immersed in music as a, as a whole not as any particular instrument.
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I never really thought of myself as a player until that time.
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More recently, was it, you have a band now called Him and Her with your wife, Brenda Freed.
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Yeah, so Brenda has been performing and been involved in music all her life.
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She actually has a master's degree in music education and music therapy.
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And so she's done it a very long time and played it.
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I mean, I've got posters on the wall here where she's playing on the bill with Ralph McTell and Jackie McShea.
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So we met in the late 1990s and got together, got married actually in Edinburgh 20 years ago this year.
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I started going to listen to them playing and I was careful to ask her guitar player if it was okay if I played with them because I figured that was at least fair.
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And so I started playing with them and then I started taking lessons and then I met the harmonica community in Austin, Texas through an organization called Hoot, Harmonica Organization of Texas.
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And that started me down this path that ultimately has led me to spa.
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And so going back to your band, Him and Her, you released a few CDs.
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One of the songs on the Texas Woman album is, I think, the High on the Mountain.
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Yeah.
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We're fortunate enough, one of the nice things about working in the technology community and particularly the entrepreneurial community is it was rather good to us financially.
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And so we now live on this wonderful open space and I was able to build a recording studio up here.
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And so that album, Him and Her Do Texas Women, is a collection of 12 songs all by female Texas songwriters.
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So we've done three albums as a group.
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We actually perform now as a trio with another guitar player called Jonathan Lee, who's a fabulous player and has brought us into music.
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We're doing some Stevie Wonder stuff, some Jeff Beck, some...
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Frank Zappa on harmonica.
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I don't know if I'm the only person who's played Frank Zappa on harmonica, but it's a challenge, I'll tell you that.
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Having a good time with it.
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So we're continuing to explore new avenues in addition to sort of the songwriter genre that Brendan and I had spent 20 years working with.
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Yeah, so you play chromatic harmonica as well, don't you?
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Yeah.
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You like to play diatonic and chromatic then?
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Yeah, I started playing chromatic actually very early on.
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Got a little frustrated with it because I really didn't understand what I was doing.
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And then as a result of taking the lessons that I did and then the Kerrville Folk Festival with which I have a longstanding relationship and was actually my nonprofit experience.
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I was chairman of that organization for, was it four years, I think, and involved with them as a board member for eight years prior to joining the spa They have had a harmonica workshop there for about 15 years.
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Rob Roy Parnell, who is quite well known in the United States, he and his brother are both fine, fine musicians and part of a musical family that grew up in Texas.
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He has been the director of that organization.
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And so I've had the luxury of taking lessons from blues players like Gary Primitch.
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piano plays
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from wonderful people like Norton Buffalo that we all miss so much.
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Norton was probably one of the first people that I watched him play rock chromatic.
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And it really started giving me the opportunity to sort of think about how to do it.
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I play a lot of different keys.
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I use the chromatic.
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I play it in third position.
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I play it in first and fifth, occasionally in fourth position.
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And then obviously I have a C64 in addition to the various keys of 48.
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And that's, by the way, that's how I get to play Frank Zappa.
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Yes.
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So you mentioned there that you were involved with the organization of the Kerrville Folk Festival.
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So is that what led you on to becoming involved with SPAR?
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Yeah, a little bit.
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As I mentioned earlier, I found the harmonica community that had been started by a good friend of mine now, Tom Stevens, called Hoot, and it was Hoot, Texas.
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And there are several Hoots in Texas.
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And each one of them are separate organizations, but it is basically a nonprofit organization that meets monthly and provides education and performance opportunities.
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We did a number of fundraisers.
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We brought in people like Peter McCatruth to do an evening of class with Gary Primich.
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And so I joined Tom and Dan Rupa, who's a major part of the SPA organization, has been playing guitar and enjoying himself at SPA for longer than I have.
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The three of us actually ran that organization for three years before I was invited to join the Kerrville Folk Festival board.
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And so my involvement with Kerrville, because of the fact that we had the harmonica workshop there, Winslow Yerxa, who was then current president, came down to teach.
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And I met Winslow and he said, maybe you'd be interested in getting involved in spa on the board.
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And I'd been to spa since it came to Dallas in the early 2000s.
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And then again later, I said, well, I'm committed here.
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This is a full-time volunteer effort to keep this 49-year-old festival on its legs.
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And so we made that transition while I was there.
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Joe Felisco came down and asked me the same thing, Mad Cat.
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And those three are pretty much responsible as my eight-year tenure.
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I termed out, we had three-term limit at the Folk Festival Foundation.
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And so I joined Winslow's board as secretary and then was encouraged to throw my head in the ring to be president now five years ago and have been, you know, that's an elected position.
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And so I've now been elected twice and my tenure will expire again next year and we'll see what happens.
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But have a wonderful team of people helping us run the organization.
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Yeah.
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So you're in your second term of a possible three.
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So yeah, you may be carrying on for a few more years yet in the role if you were to be reelected.
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We'll see how that plays out.
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I would love to, and I will always encourage other people to step forward.
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If somebody said, I want to do this, I will be the first one to say, okay, come on, let me help you.
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We recently made a change at vice president, Jerry Deal, who was secretary, has just joined as vice president after five years.
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Mike Runyon, a fabulous Chromatic Player helped us a lot over that first five years and has stepped back as he's still very much involved, but not on the board.
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I'm the first one to encourage other people, but I have had a number of people who've asked me to continue to do it.
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And Jerry and I have both talked about it and we're prepared to do it if we are so asked.
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But we would love for somebody else to step in and start working with us.
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And we continue to look for succession.
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Getting on to SPAW itself now.
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So SPAW, for those who don't know, is the Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica, founded in 1963 by Earl Collins, Gordon Mitchell, and Richard Harris.
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So it's been around now for almost 60 years.
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So yeah, so what do you see the role of SPAW in today's harmonica community?
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One of the first things we did after I sort of got the team together is we, because we're a geographically distributed organization, None of us live in the same town.
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And so we meet by phone and we see each other once a year at a convention, except this year, obviously, for obvious reasons.
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And one of the things that I started doing at the end of the convention was saying, let's take the core group of the board and let's sit down and think about what it is that we want to do and who are we.
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And so if you think about what preservation and advancement of the harmonica, and you sort of do a little bit of a scientific thought about what does that mean, right?
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So what are we preserving?
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We're preserving the instruments, so the chords, the basses, and indeed the archives.
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And in fact, Jerry Deal, our vice president, is now seems to be catching the archivist bug.
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Sadly, we lost Manfred Weevers about a year and a half ago.
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who had been our archivist for many, many years, but he did a wonderful job.
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And Jerry has now inherited all of those materials and also has a basement full of really interesting harmonicas and microphones.
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And so we're about preserving the instrument and the music that is being played.
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So from the harmonic hats to the old blues music, To the styles of playing, the trio, Spa was, until, oh gosh, 20 years ago, was very much about the chromatic and the trio.
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So bass chord and chromatic, as opposed to those long-haired blues players.
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Yeah, I was wondering about that because I had Peter Madcat-Roof on a few episodes ago.
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So he was the first person to win the Player of the Year award as a diatonic player in the late 90s, wasn't he?
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So I think that was starting to be the shift away from the emphasis on the chromatic and, as you say, the orchestral harmonica there.
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So has that been a deliberate ploy to move that away from those a little bit to, well, to cover both, I guess, including the diatonic, which is probably much more popular these days than the chromatic, yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, the transition had happened by the time I got involved in the board.
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I mean, and in fact, at this point, in some ways it is, we are focused as much, it is getting harder to get trios to come and play.
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Many of the trio players are, you know, in their 60s, 70s and 80s as well.
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So part of our preservation has to be getting young people, first of all, involved with the instrument, not just, you know, for a year, but for their lives and keep them involved.
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in the community.
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So we sort of know they might be out there, but actually coming to spa and participating.
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And secondly, encouraging them to pick up the bass or the chord or the chromatic, playing not necessarily the old music, but playing the new music.
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And so we'll do things like one time Mad Cat played and we said, would you mind having a bass and chord behind you instead of a bass guitar and a rhythm guitar?
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And so he played with a bass and chord player behind him instead of, and played the same songs he was going to play.
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uh, Mac at is, you know, one of my very good friends.
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And, and, and I think is, you know, in terms of somebody that shows what the diatonic can be in terms of, and his love of the instrument and the way he, you know, he puts it across, you know, as I said, he was instrumental in me, uh, in me taking on this role.
00:17:11.076 --> 00:17:22.666
And I, you know, you can see if you've talked, as you've talked to him, why he was a really good transitional kind of, you know, having, having played in the jazz community, you know, it's hard to argue his credentials.
00:17:23.488 --> 00:17:25.269
Um, I mean, and people he's played with.
00:17:25.309 --> 00:17:29.556
And he was playing the same music, but with a diatonic.
00:17:30.136 --> 00:17:32.461
And so he was a great sort of transitional person.
00:17:32.520 --> 00:17:43.637
So at this point, we are as much reaching back to the trios, whether or not those instruments are playing the old music or whether we're playing new music with those old instruments.
00:17:44.057 --> 00:17:46.142
I'm pleased to say that we do have...
00:17:46.594 --> 00:17:55.261
Occasionally, we have a scholarship program at SPA, and occasionally we will get scholars, some of whom are playing on main stage now, who are playing bass and chord on stage with us.
00:17:55.741 --> 00:18:00.625
And I'm pleased to say we actually have two of our scholars who are going to be playing during SPA week this year.
00:18:00.645 --> 00:18:07.511
So the part of what we try to do is encourage the use of those older instruments, either in new context or playing the old music.
00:18:07.571 --> 00:18:20.865
So sometimes we'll pair one of our older chromatic players with a young backing band, and sometimes we've got a 20 and 30-year-old group playing harmonica music from the 30s and 40s.
00:18:21.244 --> 00:18:22.646
So it's all of the above.
00:18:23.207 --> 00:18:32.376
I'm involved with the National Harmonica League, as it was called, in the UK, which is possibly a stranger name than the Society for Presentation of Harmonica.
00:18:34.199 --> 00:18:38.262
So the National Harmonica League in the UK is a similar sort of club in the UK base.
00:18:38.482 --> 00:18:40.025
And I help run a chromatic weekend.
00:18:40.045 --> 00:18:45.049
So we've got a similar thing, you know, kind of helping keeping the chromatic relevant.
00:18:45.111 --> 00:19:17.861
And obviously, the diatonic is more popular these days and so certainly the more orchestral instruments aren't not many people playing those so the bass and the chords and things but um the chromatic still reasonably popular and at least people use that to play some blues as well so yeah very much interested myself in helping keep that going in the chromatic weekend we do and we will certainly get on to the spa online convention but we're uh we're planning to do a sort of use of a chromatic weekend right around this year each year and we're actually going to do an online sort of weekend at the end of july to replace that so a similar sort of idea is obviously see what's happening with the spa convention.
00:19:18.178 --> 00:19:19.378
Keep me posted about that.
00:19:19.419 --> 00:19:20.279
I'd love to listen in.
00:19:20.359 --> 00:19:35.712
The more I play chromatic, the more I realize how versatile an instrument it is, particularly if you allow yourself to buy in the keys of G and A and some of the others where you can play in some of the other keys.
00:19:35.732 --> 00:19:42.199
It gives you the ability to play some of the jazz standards in a way that they might more reasonably be intended.
00:19:42.898 --> 00:19:50.557
Some of the chromatics have the ability to do a fair amount of bending in addition to using the button And the button gives you some of the wonderful...
00:19:50.577 --> 00:19:52.568
I mean, just listen to Stevie Wonder.
00:19:52.911 --> 00:19:53.574
You know, it's like...
00:19:54.465 --> 00:19:55.846
Yeah, I think you make a very good point.
00:19:55.886 --> 00:20:02.353
I think a lot of people have the opinion of the chromatic that it's quite old-fashioned, the music that you hear some of those guys play.
00:20:02.792 --> 00:20:04.934
But of course, you hear some of the great players.
00:20:04.954 --> 00:20:13.843
You've got Antonio Sereno playing some great music that's very exciting to listen to, getting away from that more old-fashioned type of music, which maybe some people associate with the chromatic.
00:20:14.482 --> 00:20:16.105
Well, and I think that's really important.
00:20:16.144 --> 00:20:17.846
I mentioned that about Norton Buffalo.
00:20:18.146 --> 00:20:20.288
He was one of the people that I listened to.
00:20:20.868 --> 00:20:22.650
He played with Steve Miller for 35 years.
00:20:22.711 --> 00:20:24.432
He was a big part of that sound.
00:20:24.432 --> 00:20:52.869
the steve miller band sound but i heard him play you know his own music and and some of his wife's italian music as well just listening to how he was using that chromatic and that's a totally different sort of feel And you've got all the chord stuff in there.
00:20:52.910 --> 00:20:58.602
If you've got the right key harmonica, if you're playing an A minor and you pick up a G, third position falls right out there.
00:20:58.981 --> 00:21:02.409
You've got the button to give you all those half steps and more.
00:21:03.009 --> 00:21:10.325
And so I actually taught things like Serenade to a Cuckoo, which is an old Roland Kirk song that was made famous by Jethro Tull.
00:21:11.170 --> 00:21:19.101
And I taught it last year at Kerrville, and I taught it on diatonic and chromatic in E minor so that you could play it on a C chromatic, and we have people doing both.
00:21:19.622 --> 00:21:23.126
I'm trying to sort of say, look, there's a lot more you can do with that instrument.
00:21:23.426 --> 00:21:30.457
Using it in the way that is being used by those kinds of players like Antonio and Stevie Wonder and like Norton did for many, many years.
00:21:31.077 --> 00:21:36.164
If you're not doing that as a blues or jazz player, you're missing an opportunity to really have some fun.
00:21:36.526 --> 00:21:36.605
Yeah.
00:21:36.769 --> 00:21:41.184
Yeah, well, I think as spa and harmonica players, we love all harmonicas, yeah?
00:21:41.528 --> 00:21:42.051
Yeah, that's
00:21:42.092 --> 00:21:42.212
right.
00:21:42.465 --> 00:21:50.053
Going back to that role of, you know, of what sport, I mean, it's not just about the chromatic and it's not just about the bass and chords and, you know, it's orchestral.
00:21:50.472 --> 00:21:53.955
So it is about the diatonics too as well, which again is more popular now.
00:21:54.076 --> 00:21:57.659
So what about the preservation of the diatonic?
00:21:57.699 --> 00:21:59.881
Do you feel that's being, you know, needed in the same way?
00:22:00.501 --> 00:22:06.967
I mean, I think the music and the instrument seem to be in very good health if I judge it by what's going on here.
00:22:07.488 --> 00:22:10.931
We have a tremendous number of diatonic players.
00:22:11.351 --> 00:22:51.133
My wife and I go out to a place in Kerrville every year and we gave 300 of them away and taught kids how to play you know one song and we had groups of five and ten kids walking away playing you know and by the way I should acknowledge Hohner's support of giving us all the harmonicas so we can do that it's an inexpensive instrument and you can learn to play a tune the supply is much broader part of that is cost part of that is because that people hear they hear people playing it on you know whether it's country or blues or jazz people like Will Scarlett and the And then more recently, Howard Levy and others have done in terms of teaching people how to do overblow and playing a lot more notes on the instrument.
00:22:51.713 --> 00:22:53.035
We get a tremendous breadth.
00:22:53.615 --> 00:22:57.039
Part of our challenge in four days is covering all the bases, right?
00:22:57.059 --> 00:23:09.613
It's covering all the trio stuff and having enough of sort of the old style music and then also having jazz and blues and country and gospel and doing all of that over a period of four and a half days in a convention.
00:23:09.712 --> 00:23:13.336
It turns out we've sort of finished figured out how to do that.
00:23:13.758 --> 00:23:18.201
Our challenge at this point is supporting the diversity in every axis, if you will.
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