Dec. 20, 2024

Winslow Yerxa interview

Winslow Yerxa interview

Winslow Yerxa joins me on episode 126. Winslow is originally from Canada, now living in San Francisco. He started out playing blues harmonica before becoming interested in the traditional music of French Canada and British origins, among others. Winslow plays in harmonica ensembles and produces his own compositions using a wide variety of harmonicas, including the diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, the Pentaharp, XB40 and the recent Gamechanger harmonica. Winslow created the Harmonica Information ...

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Season 1 Diatonic Harmonica Blues Harmonica Group Harmonica Traditional Harmonica

Winslow Yerxa joins me on episode 126.
Winslow is originally from Canada, now living in San Francisco. He started out playing blues harmonica before becoming interested in the traditional music of French Canada and British origins, among others. Winslow plays in harmonica ensembles and produces his own compositions using a wide variety of harmonicas, including the diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, the Pentaharp, XB40 and the recent Gamechanger harmonica.
Winslow created the Harmonica Information Publication (HIP) magazine in the 1990s, with much of the publishing and writing done by himself. This led on to him writing Harmonica For Dummies and Blues Harmonica For Dummies.
Winslow was also the President of SPAH from 2012 to 2015.

Links:
Winslow’s website:
https://winslowyerxa.com/

Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WinslowYerxaHarmonica/

Bandcamp:
https://winslowyerxa.bandcamp.com/

The HIP magazine:
https://winslowyerxa.com/articles/hip-the-harmonica-information-publication/

Videos:
Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@winslowyerxa8505

Tommy Reilly playing Chez Helene TV theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da6dW7aV7D0

The Rounder’s Rag:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKZmcSAanc4

Spanish Changes with Tuula Tossavainen Cotter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30BatYKOOC0

JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger harmonica:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0NM1mxtzHw


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
--------------------------------
Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

Support the show

01:38 - Winslow is from Canada, where his family has been since 1784, with the Yerxa name descending from the Netherlands

02:35 - Now lives in San Francisco

02:55 - First heard the harmonica from the blues rock bands of the 1960s

03:48 - Went to music school and moved to San Francisco, joining the band 'Cool Breeze' which used African and Caribbean rhythms

04:03 - Heard Scottish and French Canadian music and joined the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers club, playing harmonica with them

05:29 - This club helped developed Winslow’s playing of traditional music, how to read from notation and which harmonicas to use

06:01 - Recorded the album Harmonica: Northern Traditions Reimagined album in 2006, of traditional tunes

07:26 - Studied voice at music college (there were no options to study harmonica)

07:42 - Started out playing blues harmonica, after converting from playing an electric kazoo

09:37 - The Tony Glover Blues Harmonica book was an early source of learning about the different blues harmonica players, but that book had some inaccuracies

10:14 - Received first Marine Band as a Christmas present aged 15

10:27 - Was always interested to learn more about harmonicas, and that has led on to gathering the knowledge that he has gone on to share widely with the harmonica community

10:55 - Picked up playing the harmonica quickly and listened to great players as part of learning, including chromatic players

11:49 - Learnt diatonic and chromatic at the same time

12:01 - Initially learnt third position blues on chromatic

12:25 - The great tonal varieties of Larry Adler

12:54 - Winslow was a child when he first heard Tommy Reilly playing, the theme on a Canadian children’s TV show called Chez Hélène

14:09 - SPAH, founded in 1963 in Detroit. The founders of SPAH were largely employees of the Ford motor company. SPAH was initially focused on the chromatic harmonica

14:31 - Different harmonica clubs still exist in the US and the chromatic versus diatonic SPAH wars

16:02 - Winslow takes part in a number of harmonica ensembles

16:50 - Sophisticated pieces for harmonica bands are available

17:32 - Usually plays chromatic in the harmonica bands, and occasionally some bass and chord

17:53 - Winslow was the President of SPAH from 2012-2015 and what that involved, including the yearly conventions and the SPAH magazine

19:05 - How Winslow became President of SPAH

20:58 - SPAH convention is still well attended despite the impact of Covid on in-person get togethers

21:17 - Winslow is still involved with SPAH, on the youth and entertainment committees

22:13 - Harmonica UK and the name change from the National Harmonica League and the UK magazine

23:12 - Winslow is the author of the books: Harmonica for Dummies and Blues Harmonica for Dummies

24:26 - The Dummies series involves very intensive writing, with involvement from the editing team in both writing and hands-on editing

25:56 - Harmonica For Dummies is written for diatonic, covering different styles

26:35 - Lots of online resources for learning now, meaning learning from books is less appealing

27:20 - Floated the idea of a Chromatic Harmonica For Dummies book but publisher didn’t think it would sell enough

27:53 - How to monetise online content, and successful examples such as Liam Ward, Tomlin Leckie, Ronnie Shellist and Jason Ricci

28:36 - Published the Harmonica Information Publication magazine from 1992-1997

28:37 - Winslow does have a good YouTube channel of harmonica content

29:19 - The initial idea for the magazine came from transcriptions Winslow had made of Toots Thielemans solos, and was in discussion with Toots about creating an instructional book with Toots

30:17 - Put the out HIP magazine by himself at first in an attempt to keep harmonica pedagogy from being part of an existing echo chamber that kept repeating the same articles by the same few writers

31:07 - The HIP magazines are available to buy from Winslow’s website

31:23 - Might publish the Toots Thielemans interviews that he did

31:58 - Winslow was a strong contributor to early harmonica forums, such as the harp-l email forum (founded in 1992 by Chris Pierce at Western Kentucky University)

33:06 - Composes songs which he releases via YouTube and Bandcamp, using lots of different types of harmonica

34:43 - Creates videos, often with narration over the top

35:35 - There It Stood song is played in 6th position

36:03 - Made recordings with violinist Tuula Tossavainen Cotter that included both jazz and traditional music

37:27 - Has made a series of YouTube videos on the JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger harmonica, which comes in three different tunings

37:47 - The blue JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger tuning explained

38:32 - The yellow JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger tuning explained

39:09 - The red JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger tuning explained

41:54 - Plays lots of different types of harmonica, with the JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger adding to that list

42:20 - The XB40 and harmonica players wanting the same form factor

43:25 - The Hohner Pentaharp

43:55 - More on the XB40

45:28 - Teaches harmonica online and in-person and also taught at the Berkeley Jazzschool in California

46:12 - Ran the Harmonica Collective camp with Jason Ricci, with the last one being run in 2018

48:10 - Ten minute question

49:47 - Uses special tunings and is interested in the chords they can produce

50:08 - No favoured brand of harmonica, as wants to remain impartial as an online reviewer and why doesn’t endorse any brand

51:11 - Uses overblows and learnt about the in the 1970s from Will Scarlett and the arrival of Howard Levy

52:13 - Toots Thielemans recorded overblows in the 1960s

52:35 - Alternative tunings can get you the missing notes but still sometimes nice to get the sound of an overblow

52:44 - Roland van Straaten use of overblows

53:34 - Embouchre: tongue blocking and puckering and corner switching, and briefly experimented with u-blocking

55:06 - Amps: has a clean amp and a Digitech pedal

55:47 - Mics: uses a vocal mic such as the Shure SM58, and recently bought a Blowsmeaway Ultimate SM57

56:26 - Adds effects post-production when recording

56:48 - Future plans include more YouTube videos and instructional material

57:07 - Videos of the ‘Bunch O Guys’ recordings made at SPAH in 1997 with Joe Filisko, Dennis Gruenling, Larry Eisenberg and Chris Michalek, among others

WEBVTT

00:00:00.034 --> 00:00:02.496
Winslow Yerxa joins me on episode 126.

00:00:02.918 --> 00:00:07.102
Winslow is originally from Canada, now living in San Francisco.

00:00:07.123 --> 00:00:14.932
He started out playing blues harmonica before becoming interested in the traditional music of French Canada and British origins, amongst others.

00:00:15.973 --> 00:00:25.684
Winslow plays in harmonica ensembles and produces his own compositions, the diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, the pentaharp XB40 and the recent game-changer harmonica.

00:00:26.690 --> 00:00:34.884
Winslow created the harmonica information publication Hip magazine in the 1990s with much of the publishing and writing done by himself.

00:00:35.405 --> 00:00:39.170
This led on to him writing Harmonica for Dummies and Blues Harmonica for Dummies.

00:00:40.313 --> 00:00:43.218
Winslow was also the president of Spar from 2012 to 2015.

00:00:45.826 --> 00:00:48.310
This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas.

00:00:48.731 --> 00:00:58.091
Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas.

00:01:25.058 --> 00:01:30.275
Well, hello Neil, and thank you for having me.

00:01:30.786 --> 00:01:32.647
It's a pleasure to get you on, Winslow.

00:01:32.707 --> 00:01:34.629
So let's start off with your name.

00:01:34.668 --> 00:01:36.230
It's an interesting surname.

00:01:36.271 --> 00:01:37.371
So where's that come from?

00:01:37.471 --> 00:01:38.513
Where are your roots from?

00:01:39.052 --> 00:01:51.524
Well, my family's been in Canada since 1784, but they started out on the island of Texel, which is off the northern coast of Holland, where people speak a language known as Frisian.

00:01:51.903 --> 00:02:09.020
And I had an ancestor who, in 1742, came aboard a ship that landed in what is now New York, which was at that time New Holland, a Dutch colony, And for the next century or so, under British rule almost immediately, they slowly transitioned from speaking Dutch to speaking English.

00:02:09.420 --> 00:02:18.850
By the time the Revolutionary War had concluded, the ancestor who was born as Johannes Yerxa was now John Yerxa, spelled Y-E-R-X-A.

00:02:19.072 --> 00:02:20.633
They re-spelled it for English speakers.

00:02:21.033 --> 00:02:22.675
The only letter they kept was R.

00:02:23.575 --> 00:02:24.717
Everything else changed.

00:02:25.237 --> 00:02:34.836
But even though it's spelled perfectly phonetically, it still confuses people, and they always second-guess the pronunciation and have wildly imaginative ideas about where it might have come from.

00:02:35.437 --> 00:02:35.818
So great.

00:02:35.858 --> 00:02:40.050
So as you say there, you've got Canadian roots, but now you're living in San Francisco, yeah?

00:02:40.512 --> 00:02:41.193
Yes, that's correct.

00:02:41.538 --> 00:02:45.921
I think your Canadian heritage there has played a big part in the music you play.

00:02:46.122 --> 00:02:52.707
So tell us about how you got into playing the harmonica and how your living in Canada influenced the sort of music you were interested in.

00:02:53.508 --> 00:02:55.610
Well, a lot of that happened after the fact.

00:02:55.950 --> 00:03:06.639
Now, like with so many people who take up the harmonica, and this has been true for several decades, I started out hearing, well, for me it was actually British blues rock.

00:03:07.060 --> 00:03:11.463
Bands like Cream, Spencer Davis Group, later on the Rolling Stones.

00:03:11.503 --> 00:03:15.251
You heard little bits of blues harmonica in a rock context.

00:03:15.431 --> 00:03:19.920
And then, of course, I heard John Mayall, who was much more definitely blues.

00:03:33.762 --> 00:03:37.066
although a lot of his guitarists went on to become famous rock guitarists.

00:03:37.945 --> 00:03:44.674
And then I found people like Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite and then all of the wonderful original blues harmonica players.

00:03:45.193 --> 00:03:48.578
And then I branched out from there because I started getting interested in jazz.

00:03:48.598 --> 00:03:49.498
I went to music school.

00:03:49.838 --> 00:03:52.943
I moved to San Francisco because my wife was from here.

00:03:53.223 --> 00:03:59.348
Started playing in a band that played original music based on African and Caribbean rhythms.

00:04:00.225 --> 00:04:02.788
And during that period, I wasn't playing harmonica at all, hardly.

00:04:03.408 --> 00:04:10.375
But then I started to hear Scottish and some French Canadian music, and it resonated with me.

00:04:10.414 --> 00:04:11.395
It felt like home.

00:04:11.855 --> 00:04:27.108
And so I started to explore that and joined a local club called the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers and really dove deeply into both the French Canadian and Scottish repertoire, along with associated repertoires from Scandinavia, Ireland, and other places.

00:04:27.629 --> 00:04:29.451
So I came at it sort of side-long.

00:04:29.531 --> 00:04:30.192
It was more like a...

00:04:30.192 --> 00:04:31.478
So this

00:04:35.240 --> 00:04:37.531
fiddle group, you were playing harmonica with them, were you?

00:04:38.017 --> 00:04:46.747
Yes, this was a group started by Alistair Fraser, who's a Scotsman and probably one of the world's premier traditional Scottish violinists.

00:04:47.408 --> 00:04:53.074
And he started going to the various traditional music camps, and the Celtic music tended to be Irish-focused.

00:04:53.435 --> 00:04:55.036
And he thought, well, gee, I'm a Scotsman.

00:04:55.416 --> 00:04:57.778
Why not do something about Scottish music?

00:04:57.879 --> 00:05:00.382
And so he started this club about 40 years ago.

00:05:00.882 --> 00:05:02.545
And they meet monthly.

00:05:02.584 --> 00:05:05.307
They have an ever-growing book of tunes.

00:05:05.887 --> 00:05:07.310
And he started a teaching camp.

00:05:07.810 --> 00:05:10.995
Now he has, I think, four or five of them in different parts of the world.

00:05:11.298 --> 00:05:16.882
where people would show up with their instruments, mostly violins, and learn tunes by ear primarily.

00:05:17.223 --> 00:05:28.413
And he would often have guest teachers from a variety of traditions, the Cape Breton tradition in Canada, Irish players, Scandinavian players, later on French-Canadian players.

00:05:29.093 --> 00:05:34.598
So that was a real atmosphere in which to develop my knowledge and playing of that music.

00:05:34.637 --> 00:05:38.661
And at first it was a very steep climb because there were no other harmonica players.

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I had to figure out how to adapt the harmonica to This music, which is very different from playing blues or jazz or even popular music.

00:05:46.269 --> 00:05:48.954
And so that was a real learning experience for me.

00:05:48.994 --> 00:05:51.276
I had to learn to read from the dots, as they say.

00:05:51.336 --> 00:05:52.458
They have everything notated.

00:05:53.259 --> 00:05:56.584
And what kind of harmonica to use, what key of harmonica to use.

00:05:56.624 --> 00:06:00.968
And I went through a lot of different phases of working those things out.

00:06:01.911 --> 00:06:08.139
And I ended up recording an album's worth, actually I have some additional stuff, of Canadian traditional music.

00:06:10.562 --> 00:06:10.781
piano plays

00:06:22.338 --> 00:06:30.853
Canadian traditional music has a lot of input from Scottish, a lot of input from Irish, a lot of input from French, and also native input.

00:06:31.394 --> 00:06:43.264
And where the French-Canadian and Native traditions merge is a really interesting place because they share certain rhythmic tendencies to play in inconsistent meters.

00:06:43.343 --> 00:06:45.725
In other words, something might be in two until it isn't.

00:06:46.206 --> 00:06:46.968
Then it's in three.

00:06:46.987 --> 00:06:48.389
Then it's in two again.

00:06:48.689 --> 00:06:49.589
Then it's in five.

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And it flows very naturally.

00:06:51.872 --> 00:06:55.995
You may not even notice these shifting metrical patterns.

00:06:56.596 --> 00:07:03.023
So those recordings reflect my investigations into that and it kind of inject my own ideas into it as well.

00:07:03.584 --> 00:07:07.291
Is this your 2006 album, The Northern Traditions Reimagined?

00:07:07.572 --> 00:07:08.033
Yes, it is.

00:07:23.105 --> 00:07:27.776
Going back then to your music development, so you say you went to music college.

00:07:28.577 --> 00:07:29.500
What were you studying there?

00:07:29.540 --> 00:07:32.064
Was that a different instrument or in harmonica?

00:07:33.166 --> 00:07:35.593
Well, of course, harmonica was not a taught subject.

00:07:36.093 --> 00:07:41.685
Now, I was studying composition and arranging, but in order to have an instrumental major, which was required, I studied voice.

00:07:42.242 --> 00:07:45.024
And then you started playing blues harmonica.

00:07:45.884 --> 00:07:52.110
I heard an interesting story that you had a sort of electric kazoo, and that's kind of what drew you to the harmonica.

00:07:52.130 --> 00:07:52.870
Tell us that story.

00:07:53.451 --> 00:07:54.673
Like many players of my

00:07:54.733 --> 00:08:05.221
generation, I started playing in garage bands or basement bands, you know, just kids getting together in a recreational space and banging out music in whatever fashion they could.

00:08:05.262 --> 00:08:25.776
This was the period when I was hearing bands like Cream and so forth, and there would be some little harmonica part that would And my mother had worked as a telephone operator before our marriage, and she had this set of high-impedance headphones, which didn't use speaker cones, paper speaker cones like we know in standard speakers.

00:08:26.317 --> 00:08:28.221
Instead, there were metal discs attached.

00:08:28.322 --> 00:08:31.665
mounted over electromagnets with an earpiece screwing them down.

00:08:32.184 --> 00:08:37.370
So if I bent the discs a little bit, screwed them on not too tightly, I would get a kazoo-like effect.

00:08:37.830 --> 00:08:50.120
And because they were higher impedance, you could plug them into a guitar amplifier, and so I would hold this thing close to my mouth, pretty much cupping it almost like one would a harmonica, and hum these simple harmonica parts.

00:08:50.961 --> 00:08:54.465
But eventually I started feeling a little silly about that, and I thought, well, maybe I should get a harmonica.

00:08:54.924 --> 00:08:59.428
So I asked a guy I knew at school, Harry Kalinsky, what I should You don't get a C harp.

00:08:59.469 --> 00:08:59.870
That's good.

00:09:00.169 --> 00:09:02.851
What I didn't tell him was I was trying to play a tune in the key of E.

00:09:03.212 --> 00:09:04.734
It was Cream's version of Spoonful.

00:09:05.235 --> 00:09:08.918
And the two notes of the harmonica solo were simply the notes E and G.

00:09:09.359 --> 00:09:13.241
And that works fine just blowing and drawing on hole two of a C harmonica.

00:09:13.582 --> 00:09:16.044
But the chords sounded weird in the context of E.

00:09:16.125 --> 00:09:17.826
So I didn't know what to make of that.

00:09:18.147 --> 00:09:21.830
And I actually mapped out all 12 keys of diatonic harmonica.

00:09:21.870 --> 00:09:22.711
I knew how to do that.

00:09:22.730 --> 00:09:25.254
And I looked at an A harmonica and I thought, hmm.

00:09:25.889 --> 00:09:31.057
That looks pretty good, but I can't bend that G sharp and draw seven down to a G.

00:09:31.498 --> 00:09:33.139
You know, I knew about bending, too, at that point.

00:09:33.900 --> 00:09:34.902
So that can't be right.

00:09:36.244 --> 00:09:44.936
So I rejected the right solution until I walked into a music store and mentioned this to one of the employees who said, oh, there's this thing called cross harp in our second position.

00:09:45.517 --> 00:09:49.142
Oh, and by the way, there's this book by this guy named Tony Glover called Blue's Harp.

00:09:49.505 --> 00:09:51.388
The only book available back then, yeah.

00:09:51.408 --> 00:09:52.227
Pretty much, yeah.

00:09:52.327 --> 00:09:57.072
I mean, there were other books for chromatic and things that had been published 30 years ago, a lot of them British.

00:09:57.572 --> 00:09:58.394
And so I got that.

00:09:58.494 --> 00:10:02.878
And I didn't really learn to play from that as much as I learned about the players.

00:10:03.597 --> 00:10:08.381
Because a lot of what Tony had in terms of what harp was being played on a particular cut, he had wrong.

00:10:08.923 --> 00:10:14.047
But that didn't deter me because I was figuring things out anyway on my own.

00:10:14.548 --> 00:10:20.355
And that year in my Christmas stocking, because this was close to that time, there was a marine band in A.

00:10:20.395 --> 00:10:27.245
My mother had been listening or Santa Claus had been listening I suppose and it all kind of proceeded from there.

00:10:28.066 --> 00:10:28.466
Great.

00:10:28.566 --> 00:10:37.533
So it sounded like you knew a lot about harmonicas early on, or at least very interested to look into, you know, the layouts of the notes or some of the things you've touched on there.

00:10:37.594 --> 00:10:41.658
So this has led you on to being very, you know, one of the most knowledgeable people around, right?

00:10:41.677 --> 00:10:43.879
We're getting to the great things you've done in that area.

00:10:43.919 --> 00:10:48.244
But you were obviously very interested early on and how it, you know, worked under the hood, as they say.

00:10:48.823 --> 00:10:50.004
Yeah, I didn't know much about

00:10:50.044 --> 00:10:53.268
how reeds worked or why bending had, you know, limits on different notes.

00:10:53.307 --> 00:10:54.288
That came much later.

00:10:54.769 --> 00:10:59.573
But I was one of the people who was lucky in that I could get singing quite easily.

00:10:59.594 --> 00:11:01.696
I learned how to bend fairly early.

00:11:01.735 --> 00:11:06.020
And these are the two greatest mysteries for most beginning players.

00:11:06.801 --> 00:11:07.822
How do I get a single note?

00:11:07.883 --> 00:11:08.743
How do I bend notes?

00:11:09.264 --> 00:11:10.966
Those sorts of things came easily to me.

00:11:11.405 --> 00:11:16.711
The other thing that I'm sort of thankful for is that I had great models, and not just in blues.

00:11:17.533 --> 00:11:22.097
I heard the really great players fairly early on, and I knew what a good sound was.

00:11:22.138 --> 00:11:25.721
I knew what a good phrase sounded like just by hearing what was being played.

00:11:26.101 --> 00:11:27.503
It was also true on chromatic, though.

00:11:27.864 --> 00:11:34.059
And it Again, this gets more into the British realm of people like Tommy Riley and Larry Adler, and much later, Toots Tielemans.

00:11:34.600 --> 00:11:36.566
So I heard great chromatic tone.

00:11:37.106 --> 00:11:40.655
And my mother had the idea that, oh, gee, he's interested in harmonica.

00:11:41.378 --> 00:11:44.062
And the chromatic, I mean, that's the really good kind.

00:11:44.964 --> 00:11:49.633
So off we went to the music store and got me a chromatic harmonica.

00:11:49.673 --> 00:11:51.696
So I played diatonic and chromatic.

00:11:51.897 --> 00:11:57.868
I learned them almost simultaneously, although I didn't get as deep into chromatic as I did into the diatonic initially.

00:11:58.128 --> 00:11:59.070
That took a while longer.

00:11:59.649 --> 00:12:04.793
And at this stage, were you mainly playing blues, or when you got the chromatic, what were you trying to do on that?

00:12:05.434 --> 00:12:06.855
Initially, I was just playing

00:12:06.895 --> 00:12:18.466
third position blues, and it was tongue-blocked and all of the various tongue effects, because I was taking it from Little Walter and from his techniques, and he rarely strayed from doing that in his playing.

00:12:18.787 --> 00:12:24.932
But at the same time, hearing people like Tommy Riley and Larry Adler led me to know there's a whole lot more this can do.

00:12:25.491 --> 00:12:33.159
I remember hearing on the radio Adler playing Blues in the Night, and Adler It was astonishing to me the variety of tonal colors.

00:12:33.440 --> 00:12:34.861
Now he sounds like a flute.

00:12:35.241 --> 00:12:50.217
Now he sounds like a trumpet or some other thing.

00:12:51.318 --> 00:12:53.662
So I really knew there was a lot of potential there.

00:12:54.690 --> 00:12:57.371
Interestingly, as a child, I heard Riley and didn't know it.

00:12:57.412 --> 00:13:05.879
He had a production company that produced library music, the sort of music you can license to use with your industrial film or whatever it happens to be.

00:13:06.340 --> 00:13:16.668
And there was a children's program called Chez Hélène, where a woman, Hélène Bayarchand, who was actually a very respected folk singer and folklorist, the theme music was played by Tommy Riley.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:13:24.655 --> 00:13:36.408
And years later, after growing up and getting curious about that music, again part of my exploration of my Canadian roots from here in California, I finally found the music.

00:13:36.769 --> 00:13:39.312
And I immediately recognized Tommy's playing.

00:13:39.392 --> 00:13:40.332
It was unmistakable.

00:13:40.793 --> 00:13:42.595
And it turned out that it was indeed him.

00:13:42.955 --> 00:13:47.940
So I'd been hearing Riley and extremely good chromatic techniques since childhood and just didn't know it.

00:13:48.240 --> 00:13:50.020
Of course, Riley's Canadian, isn't

00:13:50.042 --> 00:13:50.101
he?

00:13:50.142 --> 00:13:51.763
And he moved over to Britain.

00:13:52.263 --> 00:13:52.563
Right.

00:13:52.884 --> 00:13:57.388
He was among some Canadian musicians who ended up settling in the UK after the war.

00:13:57.827 --> 00:14:02.152
The other one being Robert Farnham, the great conductor and arranger and composer.

00:14:02.712 --> 00:14:05.335
And of course, interesting that Larry Adler also went to the UK.

00:14:05.375 --> 00:14:06.576
So the chromatics...

00:14:06.735 --> 00:14:16.485
seem to have got drawn to to the uk and yet spa which you were heavily involved with and then were there present for some time uh initially was a you know more focus on the chromatic wasn't in the early days

00:14:16.866 --> 00:14:52.370
well it was and it reflected again the musical backgrounds and tastes of the people who founded that in 1963 most of them were employees of the ford motor company back when automobile manufacturing was very much centered in detroit which is where the club started there have been and still are harmonica clubs all over the united states that tend to be very local and often have whimsical names like the Peoria Pocket Piano Puffers or something like that, but the name Spa Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica is far more farsighted in its view, and it grew to be a national organization.

00:14:52.750 --> 00:15:00.822
Now, the players of that generation were admirers of the great harmonica bands like the Harmonicats and the Borominovich Harmonica Rascals.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:15:06.114 --> 00:15:13.927
and of chromatic soloists like Adler.

00:15:14.467 --> 00:15:20.658
So that reflected their view of what a harmonica club should be and also, of course, what the harmonica should be.

00:15:21.259 --> 00:15:26.830
And in those generations, there was the idea that the chromatic harmonica reflected progress.

00:15:27.265 --> 00:15:29.488
The diatonic, that's old-fashioned stuff.

00:15:30.028 --> 00:15:38.397
So when players of my generation came along into that organization, it was like, why do these kids want to go backwards in time and in progress?

00:15:38.876 --> 00:15:48.525
And of course, our generation had very much been influenced indirectly by blues and roots music through blues, through rock and roll, through country, through all of those sorts of musics.

00:15:49.187 --> 00:15:52.029
And the diatonic was really the main instrument there.

00:15:52.509 --> 00:15:54.972
And that caused a lot of conflict for a while.

00:15:55.472 --> 00:15:56.094
And eventually...

00:15:56.546 --> 00:16:12.333
It's gotten to the point where really the diatonic has taken over in harmonica clubs, and chord harmonica and chromatic harmonica and bass harmonica are on the verge of being endangered species, although there's a very strong movement to keep those alive.

00:16:12.533 --> 00:16:18.725
We always make sure to feature harmonica bands and chromatic soloists at the spa conventions.

00:16:19.138 --> 00:16:21.861
And you're in some harmonica bands yourself, haven't you?

00:16:21.881 --> 00:16:25.866
You've featured on a few, yeah, and you played at Spa in some harmonica bands, I think.

00:16:25.886 --> 00:16:26.927
Do you do that every year?

00:16:27.328 --> 00:16:27.870
Yeah, I'm

00:16:27.929 --> 00:16:28.530
part of the

00:16:28.571 --> 00:16:28.791
Tom

00:16:28.850 --> 00:16:37.022
Stryker Big Band, which is an octet and sometimes a nonet, with bass and chord, sometimes two basses, and the rest chromatics, usually.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:16:49.313 --> 00:17:01.124
There's a whole library of wonderful arrangements, very sophisticated ones, that have been written by a variety of arrangers over time for this size of ensemble.

00:17:01.605 --> 00:17:08.750
So we've got some players who range in age from, oh gosh, close to 80 down to, in one case, 20s.

00:17:08.770 --> 00:17:10.251
A couple of cases come to think of it.

00:17:10.833 --> 00:17:13.694
There are younger players taking up the bass and chord and chromatic.

00:17:14.015 --> 00:17:16.798
They're definitely a minority, but they're some very strong players.

00:17:16.857 --> 00:17:22.063
So we really have a wonderful time playing a lot of that music and every year we do do a concert.

00:17:22.363 --> 00:17:22.903
Yeah, fantastic.

00:17:22.923 --> 00:17:25.026
I've had a few harmonica bands on the podcast.

00:17:25.046 --> 00:17:33.836
I've had Fatima Ghana and Swang but both European based so yeah, great to see the harmonica band still going and you're involved with them too.

00:17:33.996 --> 00:17:35.576
So what do you play in the harmonica band?

00:17:35.596 --> 00:17:36.357
Which instruments?

00:17:37.019 --> 00:17:40.102
Generally I'm playing chromatic, usually somewhere down in the stack.

00:17:40.182 --> 00:17:45.448
I seem to have a natural affinity for playing sort of baritone parts and I do play the lower harmonicas.

00:17:45.548 --> 00:17:52.454
I play bass harmonicas some although not in that particular group and I play a little bit of court, just enough to know how to write for it.

00:17:52.915 --> 00:17:54.417
So, getting back to SPA then.

00:17:54.498 --> 00:17:56.759
So, you were the president of SPA.

00:17:56.779 --> 00:17:59.583
We're jumping ahead a little bit in time, I think from 2012 to 2015, yeah?

00:17:59.742 --> 00:18:01.325
Right, yeah.

00:18:01.345 --> 00:18:01.925
It's

00:18:02.506 --> 00:18:03.707
a three-year term.

00:18:04.107 --> 00:18:07.551
So, how did that come about and what did it involve being the president of SPA?

00:18:09.433 --> 00:18:09.773
Well, a lot of

00:18:09.854 --> 00:18:10.755
putting out fires.

00:18:11.154 --> 00:18:12.537
Now, SPA does two things.

00:18:13.238 --> 00:18:24.209
It produces an annual convention that lasts roughly a week somewhere in the United States, usually somewhere in the Midwest, where it's most accessible to people traveling from all points.

00:18:24.869 --> 00:18:27.772
And the other thing it does is put out a quarterly magazine.

00:18:28.413 --> 00:18:36.583
We also have a scholarship program for youth up to the age of 21, and we solicit donations in order to be able to fund those things.

00:18:37.143 --> 00:19:26.976
So being the president, you've got an executive committee, and then all of the people responsible for a variety of things, such as running the convention director while the magazine publisher and editor we've got of course you know treasurer and a membership secretary and then we've got all of the people who do all of the variety of tasks associated with the major activities of the magazine the youth scholarship and the convention itself and how it came about for me well my immediate predecessor tom striker had decided to step down he served two i think it was two terms he and his immediate predecessor paul davies per And indeed, my candidacy was the only time in anyone's memory that there had actually been two candidates.

00:19:27.076 --> 00:19:36.567
Generally, it's sort of, there's a vote, but it's by acclamation because who else wants to step up for an unpaid volunteer position, which is true in most volunteer organizations.

00:19:37.126 --> 00:19:38.228
It's whoever's most willing.

00:19:38.308 --> 00:19:42.093
Well, I wasn't terribly willing because I didn't really want the job all that much.

00:19:42.732 --> 00:19:47.337
I knew what it involved, but they prevailed on me and I said, okay, give me three days.

00:19:48.179 --> 00:19:49.039
And this was at the convention.

00:19:49.039 --> 00:19:52.683
I thought, if it settles with my gut, okay, then I'll do it.

00:19:53.305 --> 00:19:54.925
I accepted the candidacy.

00:19:54.965 --> 00:19:58.569
And then we had a rather contentious back and forth.

00:19:58.630 --> 00:20:00.112
It was a little like American elections.

00:20:00.893 --> 00:20:06.558
And I ended up winning, you know, hugely by a gigantic margin, largely because people knew me.

00:20:07.098 --> 00:20:10.542
So I was able to serve almost in a transitional function.

00:20:11.163 --> 00:20:16.608
And there were a lot of sort of little problems and disruptions going on in the background.

00:20:16.970 --> 00:20:20.914
But I was successfully able to to navigate that period.

00:20:20.954 --> 00:20:30.528
And luckily, one of the people that I had been trying to recruit prior to my accepting of the nomination and who had begged off at the time stepped up.

00:20:31.328 --> 00:20:37.537
And so I had a very good successor in Michael Dieth, who himself is British.

00:20:38.273 --> 00:20:40.376
Yeah, Michael's been on the podcast already, yep.

00:20:41.238 --> 00:20:41.679
Ah, okay.

00:20:42.179 --> 00:20:45.564
And now we have Jerry Diehl in that position.

00:20:45.884 --> 00:20:47.205
And we've got a very strong team.

00:20:47.226 --> 00:20:53.114
And it's one of the things I used to say to people when they said, oh, things are going wonderfully, you know, thank you very much.

00:20:53.153 --> 00:20:55.596
And I'd say, well, I have a very good team in place, because I did.

00:20:56.157 --> 00:20:57.660
And that's continued.

00:20:58.201 --> 00:21:12.151
And when you look at the idea of people joining clubs and actually traveling places, You know, in this virtual world, it's not a given that these things will succeed or persist.

00:21:12.612 --> 00:21:15.796
But SPA remains strong, and I'm really happy to see that.

00:21:15.896 --> 00:21:22.224
And I contributed to that, you know, during my presidency and continue to on the Youth Committee and the Entertainment Committee.

00:21:22.705 --> 00:21:23.727
Yeah, so you're still involved.

00:21:23.747 --> 00:21:25.128
Oh, yeah, very much.

00:21:25.953 --> 00:21:27.394
Yeah, but it's a good point you make.

00:21:27.434 --> 00:21:29.176
I think COVID's changed so many things.

00:21:29.257 --> 00:21:32.380
And one of the things is, you know, making a lot more things online.

00:21:32.420 --> 00:21:35.721
So like you say, people are more willing and happy to do online things now.

00:21:35.741 --> 00:21:38.744
And they've got the equipment at home, right, these days that they didn't have before.

00:21:38.884 --> 00:21:43.849
So yeah, it is more of a challenge, isn't it, to travel hundreds of miles to go and do these things.

00:21:43.890 --> 00:21:44.230
So yeah.

00:21:44.730 --> 00:21:54.338
And yet it's wonderful to be in the company of 500 other harmonica enthusiasts, all hyperventilating together day and night.

00:21:54.378 --> 00:22:00.964
And people are so enthusiastic you can stumble out of your hotel room at any hour of the day or night and somebody is doing something.

00:22:01.645 --> 00:22:05.951
There'll be a little jam session going on or some deep discussion happening.

00:22:06.191 --> 00:22:11.296
So it's a wonderful experience to physically be in the same space with other people who share this

00:22:11.376 --> 00:22:11.596
very

00:22:11.696 --> 00:22:11.916
deep

00:22:12.277 --> 00:22:12.698
interest.

00:22:13.077 --> 00:22:19.765
And we have a similar club in the UK, of course, which was called the National Harmonica League and now they've rebranded themselves to Harmonica UK.

00:22:20.086 --> 00:22:31.959
So I was trying to work out which is the worst name, National Harmonica League or the Society for the preservation and advancement of the harmonica quite unusual names but i'm glad that i'm glad that the us has stuck with spa

00:22:32.538 --> 00:22:57.625
to a canadian nhl means national hockey league so there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance to that but harmonica uk i think is a great name you know and i've been we've been getting the magazine for well going on 30 years so i'm aware of what what's going on and i actually like what's going on with that with the magazine too it's coming out on a regular basis and actually a lot of the american are writing for that.

00:22:57.645 --> 00:22:59.928
I wish they would write a bit more for

00:23:00.148 --> 00:23:02.030
Harmonica Happenings, the spa.

00:23:02.371 --> 00:23:09.519
Yeah, the Harmonica UK team are doing a great job and trying to bring us into the 21st century, which is good to see.

00:23:10.038 --> 00:23:12.981
So let's talk about some of the other amazing things you've done writing.

00:23:13.001 --> 00:23:19.148
So you're very probably best known for writing the Harmonica for Dummies, you know, the famous series of books.

00:23:19.189 --> 00:23:20.609
So you did the one for Harmonica.

00:23:20.651 --> 00:23:23.113
So, you know, there's a lot of Harmonica books, right?

00:23:23.133 --> 00:23:28.618
But that's, you know, it's got a lot of kudos being as part of that dummy series yeah so tell us how that came about

00:23:29.019 --> 00:24:00.252
i actually have to thank and this is an american who has written for for um is it harmonica world the harmonica uk publication yeah rob paparazzi out of new jersey who is a wonderful player and a great singer yeah rob's rob's also been on the podcast right yeah i'm i'm in great company then with all the wonderful colleagues that have appeared anyway john wiley and sons the publisher of the dummy series is located in new jersey headquartered there and And I guess somebody came to one of Rob's shows and asked about the idea of doing a book.

00:24:00.593 --> 00:24:02.275
And he said, oh, you've got to talk to Winslow.

00:24:02.535 --> 00:24:03.096
And so they did.

00:24:03.215 --> 00:24:04.176
So thank you, Rob.

00:24:04.497 --> 00:24:09.863
And I had to prove myself to them by submitting some writing and other similar things.

00:24:10.182 --> 00:24:12.566
And eventually I was approved to do the series.

00:24:13.186 --> 00:24:15.368
I talked to the guy who did the banjo for Dummies.

00:24:15.388 --> 00:24:18.471
And I just got an idea, OK, are these people OK to work with?

00:24:18.712 --> 00:24:19.472
And what should I know?

00:24:19.492 --> 00:24:21.496
And he recommended getting an agent.

00:24:21.536 --> 00:24:21.915
So I did.

00:24:22.497 --> 00:24:25.680
So it came about that I would do this book and then later Blues.

00:24:25.680 --> 00:24:26.641
Harmonica for Dummies.

00:24:26.942 --> 00:24:31.007
It's a very intensive writing process because they edit very intensively.

00:24:31.027 --> 00:24:42.061
You know, you have a project editor, you have an acquisitions editor, and then you also have a technical editor, you know, who will call you out if you're spouting nonsense, I guess.

00:24:42.942 --> 00:24:45.365
And so it's a four-month writing process.

00:24:45.385 --> 00:25:04.031
You have to deliver one quarter of the book each month So it's pretty intensive, and you're getting a lot of editorial feedback as you write, because the idea is that anyone of normal intelligence and education can pick up the book and at any point open it to any page and understand what they're reading.

00:25:04.893 --> 00:25:18.393
And when you get a subject which involves music terminology, that involves harmonica-specific terminology, that involves learning techniques that are progressive, you know, you build one skill on another, That's a pretty tall drink of water.

00:25:19.115 --> 00:25:28.771
And you have to avoid jargon and try to use generally understood terms by most people, as opposed to people who are specifically into music harmonica.

00:25:29.373 --> 00:25:31.317
So it was quite the experience writing that.

00:25:31.336 --> 00:25:36.365
And then, of course, I had to record all of the audio.

00:25:36.385 --> 00:25:36.605
piano plays

00:25:46.402 --> 00:25:56.556
So quite the experience, but it turned out a book that I think has been successful, both in terms of sales and in terms of people actually being helped by reading it.

00:25:57.297 --> 00:26:08.731
I wanted to write something that would take people from absolute beginner to somewhere in the intermediate range, and also not focus on one style, at least in the first book.

00:26:09.032 --> 00:26:15.682
Because one of the things I had noticed, certainly coming to spa conventions, was that not everybody wants to play blues on the diatonic harmonica.

00:26:16.097 --> 00:26:18.721
I mean, I did write the book specifically for diatonic.

00:26:18.740 --> 00:26:23.767
I thought it would be too much ground to cover to go into tremolo or chromatic or any other type of harmonica.

00:26:24.647 --> 00:26:30.375
But I did know that people want to play more than just blues, and so I made it broader.

00:26:30.474 --> 00:26:32.778
There was some blues-specific information.

00:26:33.298 --> 00:26:35.421
And I think it's been helpful to people in general.

00:26:35.961 --> 00:26:43.210
Of course, now there are all sorts of things online, many of them free, and that has definitely impacted the book market in general.

00:26:43.521 --> 00:26:45.048
You know, the internet has changed everything.

00:26:45.570 --> 00:26:49.328
But I'm happy to have done it, and I continue to get royalty checks, so I'm happy about that.

00:26:49.761 --> 00:26:55.666
Like you say, it sounds like you had a real professional publishing team behind you, so I'm sure that really raised the quality level as well, right?

00:26:55.727 --> 00:26:57.709
It sounds like those guys really knew what they were doing.

00:26:58.569 --> 00:26:58.930
Well, you know,

00:26:59.230 --> 00:27:06.016
as I was working on this, I picked up Tony Glover's book again, and I realized he had very good copy editors.

00:27:06.636 --> 00:27:07.497
It was in the background.

00:27:07.698 --> 00:27:15.744
I didn't see that as a teenager reading the book, but as someone who had gone through the process, I saw how well edited that book was.

00:27:16.305 --> 00:27:18.106
And the fact that you don't notice it as a general

00:27:18.166 --> 00:27:19.468
reader is a good sign.

00:27:19.728 --> 00:27:23.592
Any chance of any more Harmonica for Dummies books from your side?

00:27:23.952 --> 00:27:24.833
Well, I had

00:27:24.873 --> 00:27:28.837
floated the idea of doing Chromatic Harmonica for Dummies because people ask for that.

00:27:29.317 --> 00:27:40.230
The problem is that the book market is such that unless you can sell something like 10,000 copies in the first six months, it's not worth the publisher's time to invest in it.

00:27:40.710 --> 00:27:49.480
I mean, I could come out with something independent, I suppose, but I've got so many possible projects in front of me that much as I'd like to do that...

00:27:49.680 --> 00:27:51.064
I don't know if I'll get around to it.

00:27:51.938 --> 00:27:59.825
Yeah, and like you say, the medium these

00:28:00.806 --> 00:28:21.083
days is so spread, isn't it, with all the things available online?

00:28:21.903 --> 00:28:27.630
form like Jason Ricci, who doesn't have any formal course but has hundreds of YouTubes out there.

00:28:27.650 --> 00:28:32.494
And of course, if you get enough views, YouTube will pay you substantial amounts of money.

00:28:33.336 --> 00:28:35.999
And I've been rather lax about getting organized to do

00:28:36.078 --> 00:28:36.880
something like that.

00:28:37.200 --> 00:28:40.763
But you do have a good YouTube channel, too, where you have great content.

00:28:41.825 --> 00:28:43.146
So we'll get on to that shortly.

00:28:43.166 --> 00:28:45.528
I just want to stick on the writing theme.

00:28:45.628 --> 00:29:08.121
So another fantastic thing you did in between 1992 and 1997, you released or you produced created published the harmonica information publication the hip magazine which is a harmonica magazine which you I think pretty much started by yourself and kind of published for yourself at least for the first few publications yeah I did

00:29:08.221 --> 00:29:17.970
yeah I did have guest reviewers to review CDs and things like that in some of the later issues, and that actually came out of another publishing frustration.

00:29:19.090 --> 00:29:20.913
I'd been in contact with Toots Tielemans.

00:29:21.153 --> 00:29:34.644
I'd transcribed a bunch of his solos and initiated conversations with him about working together on a chromatic harmonica instruction book specifically for jazz harmonica, and he kind of sort of ran warm and cold on the idea.

00:29:34.663 --> 00:29:38.086
It never came to fruition, although we developed a pretty good...

00:29:38.768 --> 00:29:44.673
casual relationship, and he actually helped me a lot with my chromatic playing, but in sort of oblique ways.

00:29:45.134 --> 00:29:48.939
But when I approached publishers about this, they said, oh, there's no interest in that.

00:29:48.979 --> 00:29:52.301
Everybody who wants to do that, they'll have figured it out anyway.

00:29:52.603 --> 00:30:10.702
Well, of course, now we have Max Diallo's book with Cher, which is a jazz publishing company, so clearly there was some merit to the idea, but because I was getting these sort of casual rejections, that kind of put the fire in me, and I thought, okay, well, If they don't see it, I can show them.

00:30:12.005 --> 00:30:17.491
And desktop publishing had become a thing, and I had access to it, so I started putting out my little magazine.

00:30:17.531 --> 00:30:33.534
And one of the reasons I did it by myself at first, I don't think I'd seen the NHL publications yet, that came later, but I had seen Harmonica Happenings from Spa, and I had seen the things that Hohner USA put out, and it was always the same writers publishing the same thing individually.

00:30:33.665 --> 00:30:35.567
in every available outlet.

00:30:36.048 --> 00:30:41.132
And it was a view that didn't take into account a lot of what I was seeing.

00:30:41.152 --> 00:30:44.055
And some of this reflected, you know, the generational thing at Spa.

00:30:44.115 --> 00:30:53.722
So I thought, I'm going to do this on my own, and I'm going to do something that isn't what they're doing, and I'm going to shine on areas that they're not focusing on.

00:30:54.023 --> 00:30:55.305
I don't want this echo chamber.

00:30:55.345 --> 00:30:56.226
I want new voices.

00:30:56.746 --> 00:30:58.867
And that turned out to be mine for the most part.

00:30:59.428 --> 00:31:05.817
So I did that for a few years until it just became too hard to sustain while working a day job and everything else I was doing.

00:31:06.118 --> 00:31:07.102
But I'm glad to have done it.

00:31:07.142 --> 00:31:10.089
And so these magazines are still available via your website?

00:31:10.210 --> 00:31:12.016
People can purchase the PDFs, yeah?

00:31:12.356 --> 00:31:12.958
Yes, they can.

00:31:13.278 --> 00:31:14.080
They're still available.

00:31:14.433 --> 00:31:16.635
Did you publish five editions of the

00:31:16.915 --> 00:31:17.336
magazine?

00:31:17.797 --> 00:31:22.721
I did publish five out of the projected six, and I'm still a little bit embarrassed about that.

00:31:23.060 --> 00:31:27.125
Maybe I'll take some of the Toots Tielemans interviews, which I did, and I did, I think, three of them.

00:31:27.345 --> 00:31:28.326
Oh, that'd be amazing, yeah.

00:31:28.685 --> 00:31:35.031
And publish those online as a gift to everyone who didn't get their full six issues.

00:31:35.853 --> 00:31:37.034
Well, no, fantastic effort.

00:31:37.054 --> 00:31:38.634
That must have been a tremendous amount of work.

00:31:38.674 --> 00:31:44.400
As you say, you had a day job as well, so you must have been putting a lot of extra hours into getting those out.

00:31:44.400 --> 00:31:46.388
Yes, yeah, it was a lot of work.

00:31:46.809 --> 00:31:49.742
But that, you know, made you known as a harmonica educator, right?

00:31:49.762 --> 00:31:53.116
I guess that led on for you to doing Harmonica for Dummies, for one thing.

00:31:53.506 --> 00:31:55.106
It did, to a large extent.

00:31:55.146 --> 00:31:57.910
The other thing, of course, was, again, the rise of the internet.

00:31:58.349 --> 00:31:59.971
Of course, now we have things on Facebook.

00:31:59.991 --> 00:32:01.673
We've got all the various things that are going on.

00:32:02.113 --> 00:32:14.023
But initially, it was just a little listserv called HARP-L, or HARP-L, where people send an email to a forum, it appears on the forum, and then people can email replies to the forum.

00:32:14.904 --> 00:32:15.744
And that's still going.

00:32:16.526 --> 00:32:25.713
But it was started at the University of West Kentucky by a guy named Chris Pierce, and subsequently taken over on a volunteer basis by various other people as successors.

00:32:26.355 --> 00:32:28.016
And so I was very active on that.

00:32:28.696 --> 00:32:32.019
And that, I think, helped also with just sort of my reputation as a

00:32:32.079 --> 00:32:33.000
knowledgeable person.

00:32:33.641 --> 00:32:34.000
So great.

00:32:34.040 --> 00:32:35.982
So let's go on a bit more to your playing side.

00:32:36.002 --> 00:32:41.407
We touched on this album that you released in 2006, Harmonica, Northern Traditions Reimagined.

00:32:42.348 --> 00:32:48.775
So on this, lots of traditional music, as you touched on, Scottish and French and other sort of roots music.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:32:56.289 --> 00:33:11.440
Yes, I have.

00:33:16.961 --> 00:33:24.010
So you're sort of composing these songs and you're using all sorts of different types of harmonicas and different tunings.

00:33:24.471 --> 00:33:29.076
So you've got a wide interest in all these different approaches, different genres.

00:33:29.096 --> 00:33:37.468
You're doing some blues, some jazz, obviously we talked about traditional already, some band stuff, even some psychedelic trance music.

00:33:56.226 --> 00:33:57.606
and alternative tuning.

00:33:57.686 --> 00:34:04.192
So, yeah, you've got a wide range of music you're putting out here showing your diversity of interest in the harmonica, yeah?

00:34:04.413 --> 00:34:05.013
Yeah, yeah.

00:34:05.153 --> 00:34:21.708
I mean, I'm sort of a person, I sometimes say I've got eyes like a fly where you've got, you know, 500 images per eye and only the thing is something different appears in each one of those little lenses and so my attention is constantly flitting from one thing to another.

00:34:21.748 --> 00:34:24.570
And that includes styles of music.

00:34:24.931 --> 00:35:05.893
You know, I hear so many things of interest that I explore a lot of different things a lot of different stylistic aspects and you know what can the harmonica do in terms of what the instrument itself does but also what settings can you place it in and do something that's musically worthwhile that's kind of reflected in all of those sorts of things and when I'm doing video I find a tendency to create some sort of a narrative whether it's through images, through actually speaking through a narrative, or through just adding text, or sometimes a story song like the Rounders Rag, where I tell a story in the lyrics, and then I also have a succession of images to illustrate that.

00:35:05.934 --> 00:35:27.655
Shivering wet with no place to go In the middle of the night down on Old Skin Row He'd be thankful for a blanket and a warm pair of shoes And I use a lot of found images, a lot of found video from ancient copyright submissions from over a century ago.

00:35:27.695 --> 00:35:29.619
And there's a lot of fun stuff to be done with that.

00:35:30.260 --> 00:35:32.222
Yeah, I know, some great and really interesting stuff.

00:35:32.262 --> 00:35:34.885
And again, you're using different tunings.

00:35:35.266 --> 00:35:38.490
One of your latest releases is called There It Stood.

00:35:40.092 --> 00:35:40.733
There It Stood

00:35:55.521 --> 00:36:00.568
This is played in sixth position on a B-flat harmonica that's in the key of A.

00:36:00.608 --> 00:36:03.050
So that's an example of the sort of things you're exploring.

00:36:03.130 --> 00:36:06.375
And you've also got some jazz music.

00:36:06.394 --> 00:36:08.637
You've got a sort of jazz outfit playing with, haven't you?

00:36:09.699 --> 00:36:10.920
You're playing with a violin player.

00:36:17.608 --> 00:36:22.813
VIOLIN PLAYS

00:36:23.873 --> 00:36:33.682
That, unfortunately, is no longer possible, being that she's passed to the other side of the veil between the living and the dead.

00:36:34.083 --> 00:36:40.969
But Tula Tossavainen-Kotter was a wonderful violinist who grew up playing Finnish traditional music.

00:36:40.989 --> 00:36:42.951
We met in the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers.

00:36:43.650 --> 00:36:47.193
When we realized what an affinity we had, we started making music together.

00:36:47.775 --> 00:36:56.342
So we were drawing partly on her Finnish tradition, partly on her classical background, and partly on her on more my interest in jazz.

00:36:56.943 --> 00:37:08.159
Some of which dovetailed with the Finnish traditional music, because Toots Tielemans and the Swedish violinist Sven Dasmussen had adapted one of those tunes to a jazz setting.

00:37:08.559 --> 00:37:11.204
And so we did a lot of music together.

00:37:20.034 --> 00:37:24.862
Thank you.

00:37:27.713 --> 00:37:37.722
So we touched on your YouTube channel earlier on, so you've got lots of content, and the thing you've talked about recently is the Troculus, the Game Changer harmonica, which is a diatonic with a slide.

00:37:38.382 --> 00:37:38.884
Well, there are

00:37:38.903 --> 00:37:40.945
actually three different forms of this.

00:37:41.326 --> 00:37:45.969
I mean, they all use the same actual form factor, with different coloured combs to indicate the different tunings.

00:37:46.630 --> 00:37:54.456
The blue one is tuned exactly like a diatonic harmonica, with the slide raising the pitch one semitone, as one would expect from a chromatic harmonica.

00:37:55.277 --> 00:37:56.679
That in itself is not new.

00:37:56.898 --> 00:38:08.702
The original chromatic harmonicas were tuned that way the first things that the ten whole ones that honer came out with as far back as 1910 the starting dates for marketing seemed to vary but that seems to be the earliest date.

00:38:09.784 --> 00:38:15.469
And until 2013, they were still producing that in the Koch 980, but it was kind of leaky.

00:38:15.568 --> 00:38:16.369
It had no valves.

00:38:16.829 --> 00:38:26.438
So the JDR folks came up with a new way of constructing a slide harmonica with this thing with this trapezoidal shape, and it's almost as small as a diatonic.

00:38:26.858 --> 00:38:31.842
The blue comb, yes, is just like a diatonic with a slide that raises the pitches semitone.

00:38:32.304 --> 00:38:36.907
Then they've got a chromatic variant, which is tuned exactly like a standard chromatic harmonica.

00:38:36.947 --> 00:38:37.789
It has a yellow comb.

00:38:38.188 --> 00:38:39.389
Oh, there's a variant on that.

00:38:39.710 --> 00:38:52.403
Those who know the chromatic harmonica will know that you've always got two C's side by side wherever two octaves meet, and that's a way of keeping the blow-draw relationship from shifting the way it does in the top octave of a diatonic harmonica.

00:38:52.724 --> 00:39:02.494
Well, there's a variant on that called C6, where instead of going C-E-G-C and then C-E-G-C in the blow notes, having two C's side by side, it'll go C-E-G-A.

00:39:02.996 --> 00:40:00.344
So you get an extra way of playing A as a blow note instead of a draw note, and likewise for be flat when you press it in the slide but then they've got this red combed version which is quite unlike anything else now there's a variant on standard diatonic tuning where blow three on a C harmonica is G and so is draw two and there's a variant called Paddy Richter which was popularized on the name especially by Brendan Power where the blow notes in the first octave go C E F A so you don't have the duplicated G and you've got that A that's very hard to bend in tune and especially at fast tempos like in Irish music from down from the draw B so slide out okay it's in Patty Richter tuning but when you press the slide in unexpected things happen the goal with this particular tuning was to give you a complete chromatic scale without having to bend over three full octaves.

00:40:01.106 --> 00:40:04.492
Now on a standard chromatic, you need 12 holes for three full octaves.

00:40:04.552 --> 00:40:09.603
The 10-hole chromatic tuned trochilus doesn't have the top two holes.

00:40:10.565 --> 00:40:12.447
It doesn't give you a full three octaves.

00:40:13.030 --> 00:40:20.719
So in order to do that, and be close to standard diatonic tuning, the slide does some unusual things.

00:40:21.559 --> 00:40:23.581
In most holes, it goes up a semitone.

00:40:24.061 --> 00:40:26.483
In hole two, it goes down two semitones.

00:40:27.164 --> 00:40:31.989
In hole three, it goes down three semitones on the draw note.

00:40:32.289 --> 00:40:46.463
And then in hole 10, the blow note goes down a semitone from C to Bs because bending that note down one semitone in hole 10 blow is pretty difficult to achieve in tune let alone at all.

00:40:46.882 --> 00:40:53.969
So you've got a complete chromatic scale throughout three octaves, but with a slide doing rather unusual things in three places.

00:40:54.630 --> 00:41:03.336
And if you're used to playing chromatic and diatonic, it could be pretty confusing, especially in those first three holes, but there are also sorts of cool opportunities.

00:41:03.938 --> 00:41:13.065
And so I've recorded a few things, and I'm still working on some things, that reflect some of the cool things you can do with what that strange tuning can accomplish.

00:41:13.585 --> 00:41:15.568
This is the red tuning.

00:41:15.568 --> 00:41:34.507
Yeah, and there's a song you put out recently called Oceana.

00:41:34.547 --> 00:41:36.409
That's played on the blue one, isn't it?

00:41:36.429 --> 00:41:36.510
It

00:41:36.570 --> 00:41:40.114
is, yeah.

00:41:40.134 --> 00:41:40.253
Oceana

00:41:54.146 --> 00:41:57.548
So is this a favorite of yours, this game changer?

00:41:57.628 --> 00:42:01.773
Is this becoming your main harmonica, or what do you think?

00:42:02.293 --> 00:42:04.335
No, it's not going to become my main harmonica.

00:42:04.355 --> 00:42:09.699
It's definitely something I'm exploring now and will probably remain in my arsenal of harmonicas.

00:42:09.739 --> 00:42:18.067
I'm looking at my desk as we speak, and there are probably 30 different harmonicas of various kinds scattered throughout.

00:42:18.626 --> 00:42:28.878
I mean, there's some diatonics, there's some chromatics, there's an XB-40, which was Hohner's attempt to produce an all-bending harmonica and a very great, it was a wonderful instrument.

00:42:28.938 --> 00:42:33.163
It's unfortunate that it didn't survive in the marketplace.

00:42:33.844 --> 00:42:38.588
Yeah, I had an XB-40 and I interviewed Rick Epping, of course, who was instrumental in that.

00:42:38.648 --> 00:42:43.494
So it is a shame, but you record a song called Windermere on the XB-40, don't you?

00:42:43.815 --> 00:42:44.076
Yes.

00:42:45.697 --> 00:42:45.757
Yes.

00:43:00.961 --> 00:43:07.190
Yeah, so I think he was feeling as if maybe it was just a little bit too big for people and all those bends were maybe a bit confusing.

00:43:07.690 --> 00:43:08.871
Well, and this is

00:43:08.931 --> 00:43:16.922
something that I've noticed, is that diatonic players, in terms of their instrument, whatever their politics might be, are very conservative.

00:43:17.663 --> 00:43:22.630
They want it to be the same size and shape as a standard diatonic, and they want it...

00:43:23.106 --> 00:43:24.786
do the expected things.

00:43:25.367 --> 00:43:30.172
So, for instance, Hohner recently came out with, a couple of years ago, the pentaharp.

00:43:30.592 --> 00:43:32.673
It plays the sixth note, not the five note.

00:43:32.813 --> 00:43:34.655
They didn't call it a hexaharp.

00:43:34.856 --> 00:43:36.077
I guess that didn't sound as good.

00:43:36.577 --> 00:43:38.820
But it plays the sixth note minor blues scale.

00:43:39.139 --> 00:43:41.862
And, of course, that's a radical change in the note layout.

00:43:42.603 --> 00:43:44.664
And players pick it up and go, what?

00:43:45.184 --> 00:43:46.186
This doesn't do what I thought.

00:43:47.126 --> 00:43:47.746
Well, of course not.

00:43:47.827 --> 00:43:48.547
It's something different.

00:43:48.947 --> 00:43:54.813
And I'm very happy to explore those sorts of things, even if I don't end up, you know, making it my main harmonica.

00:43:55.460 --> 00:43:59.728
And the XP-40 had a note layout exactly like a standard diatonic.

00:44:00.188 --> 00:44:03.431
Its form factor is the same as that of a ten-hole chromatic.

00:44:03.592 --> 00:44:04.733
But yes, it's bigger.

00:44:04.773 --> 00:44:07.614
And because the blow notes all bend...

00:44:08.476 --> 00:44:14.041
Now, when I first picked up an XP-40, I found out that I was accidentally bending the blow notes.

00:44:14.641 --> 00:44:26.672
Because if you apply bending technique, like, say, to draw four on a standard diatonic, and you leave your oral cavity in the same position and play the blow note, you won't get any appreciable result from the blow notes.

00:44:26.672 --> 00:45:07.175
note it'll stay the same I mean unless you've got something that's well adjusted for overblows and you pop out an overblow by accident but you pick up an xb40 and it's sensitive to all of those things so you had to modify your playing technique a little bit to make that work and then that's exactly what I exploited in Windermere because when you go to the four chord and it's sort of in a 12 bar blues format and sort of not all of a sudden you're bending blow one two three and four all down a semitone as part of the melody so that was my way way of having a little fun with that along with sort of a lot of other stuff about playing in bar bands and uh eulogizing some little town that's sort of a minor celebrity in in

00:45:07.215 --> 00:45:15.965
the local tourist culture don't have my xp40 anymore i'll maybe have to get one again and uh are they still available to buy on you do you know uh you can find them

00:45:16.005 --> 00:45:28.420
probably on on ebay and maybe on amazon yeah there's definitely a used market for them i i have all of the ones that i originally acquired in one or two since but it has sort of fallen out of use as my main diatonic.

00:45:28.822 --> 00:45:31.509
You also do a lot of teaching online and in person, yes?

00:45:31.728 --> 00:45:35.038
So people can contact you if they're interested in getting lessons from you, yeah?

00:45:35.157 --> 00:45:36.320
Yeah, they can, definitely.

00:45:36.641 --> 00:45:41.226
you have taught, or do you still teach harmonica at the jazz school at Berkeley?

00:45:41.766 --> 00:45:42.847
No, unfortunately.

00:45:42.867 --> 00:45:48.592
They found that, again, with the rise of the internet, people weren't signing up for an eight-week course for$300.

00:45:49.492 --> 00:45:51.315
It just wasn't attractive to people.

00:45:51.394 --> 00:46:03.985
So they took that off the syllabus, and for a while, until COVID came down, I would go over to Berkeley on the weekends to teach in person there, and they would rent me studio space at the faculty rate.

00:46:04.326 --> 00:46:10.637
But then, of course, COVID came down, and all of that And since then, I've just been teaching online, which I find

00:46:10.677 --> 00:46:11.621
to be very effective.

00:46:12.322 --> 00:46:21.425
And also you've run the Harmonica Collective with Jason Rich here, which is a kind of convention or a concentrated teaching sort of event, isn't it?

00:46:21.730 --> 00:46:26.153
Yeah, and we haven't done one since 2018 for a variety of reasons.

00:46:26.594 --> 00:46:29.076
And since then, others have come up as well.

00:46:29.536 --> 00:46:38.824
But initially we did that because we felt that the intermediate and advanced learning market segment, if you want to call it that, wasn't really being served.

00:46:38.945 --> 00:46:45.349
Most of the harmonica teaching events that were specifically teaching events were really geared towards the permanent beginner.

00:46:46.150 --> 00:46:53.460
In other words, there's always a class of people who have the money to go to something like that, but who never received Yeah.

00:47:09.858 --> 00:47:11.159
And those were a lot of fun to do.

00:47:11.179 --> 00:47:18.726
And a lot of organizing that came really from my experience with SPA, negotiating with hotels and structuring things and so forth.

00:47:19.425 --> 00:47:26.192
And then we did one in New Orleans in 2018 with Tom Watson as producer, which was wonderful to be in New Orleans.

00:47:26.672 --> 00:47:30.755
It's such a wellspring of musical culture.

00:47:31.416 --> 00:47:32.478
And we haven't done one since.

00:47:32.577 --> 00:47:35.280
We were trying to do things sort of during COVID.

00:47:35.719 --> 00:47:37.581
In fact, we had to cancel an event because of it.

00:47:37.601 --> 00:47:39.824
I don't know when we'll do another one.

00:47:39.824 --> 00:47:42.134
But we shall see what the future holds.

00:47:51.074 --> 00:47:51.755
hey

00:47:51.775 --> 00:48:10.498
everybody you're listening to neil warren's harmonica happy hour podcast sponsored by tom halcheck and blue moon harmonicas out of clearwater florida the best in custom harmonicas custom harmonica parts and more check them out www.bluemoonharmonicas.com

00:48:10.898 --> 00:48:19.034
so a question related to teaching is a 10 minute question so if you had 10 minutes of practice what would you spend those 10 minutes doing I mean, there's so many different

00:48:19.074 --> 00:48:21.056
things to play around with and explore.

00:48:21.538 --> 00:48:24.880
And sometimes they're purely musical and not specific to the harmonica.

00:48:25.400 --> 00:48:32.507
You know, ways of structuring notes and then maybe getting around among those notes on the harmonica.

00:48:32.527 --> 00:48:36.931
I mean, I might work on some of my teaching subject ideas.

00:48:37.512 --> 00:48:45.860
I might pick up this new chromatic from a specific company that they've sent me and say, gee, how does this feel to play versus some of the other ones that I like?

00:48:48.130 --> 00:48:52.163
me me

00:49:15.233 --> 00:49:16.016
It's hard to say

00:49:16.396 --> 00:49:16.757
what I would

00:49:16.797 --> 00:49:17.038
spend

00:49:17.077 --> 00:49:17.978
those 10 minutes on.

00:49:18.539 --> 00:49:20.043
Such varied interests, yeah.

00:49:20.644 --> 00:49:21.186
So great stuff.

00:49:21.206 --> 00:49:25.954
So we'll get on to the last section now and talk about gear, which we've obviously already touched on you quite heavily.

00:49:26.014 --> 00:49:30.083
So let's talk about some more about the harmonicas you use.

00:49:30.163 --> 00:49:33.329
So you've talked about you playing a wide variety of harmonicas.

00:49:33.858 --> 00:49:38.724
Playing chromatic, diatonic, you've got this game changer, XB40s, the pentahord, bass and chords.

00:49:39.286 --> 00:49:40.829
I think you even have a harmonetta, yeah?

00:49:40.869 --> 00:49:45.775
So it's just a case of what's got your interest in that day, is it, what you pick up?

00:49:46.117 --> 00:49:46.978
Pretty much, yeah.

00:49:47.980 --> 00:49:50.402
With special tunings, I do use them.

00:49:50.824 --> 00:49:54.869
I tend to pick one up and say, okay, what kind of chords will it produce?

00:49:55.652 --> 00:49:58.556
Rather than how can I get around and bend these notes and so forth.

00:49:58.576 --> 00:49:59.818
I do all of that, of course, as well.

00:50:00.259 --> 00:50:07.072
But I still find myself coming back to the basic solo tuning on chromatic and the basic standard tuning on diatonic.

00:50:07.713 --> 00:50:15.119
do you have a brand of choice or again is you got such a varied amount that you're playing from lots of different manufacturers

00:50:15.440 --> 00:50:40.103
I am playing from a lot of different manufacturers and I've been approached at different times about being an endorser for specific companies but I just feel that as a reviewer I have to have the trust of my audience and how can you really have that trust if you say this is the best and I'm going to ignore all of the others I totally understand where people are endorsers.

00:50:40.824 --> 00:50:53.538
But for me, I feel my responsibility to others in terms of being a reviewer and an influencer requires me not to throw my lot in with someone who will benefit me economically.

00:50:53.577 --> 00:51:03.268
The other thing is that I just enjoy so many things that limiting myself to being an endorser to one thing wouldn't really be all that much fun.

00:51:04.150 --> 00:51:06.934
I'm a friend to all those who make good products

00:51:07.521 --> 00:51:10.088
So let's talk about some more playing techniques.

00:51:10.510 --> 00:51:13.057
You do use overblows, Jan.

00:51:13.157 --> 00:51:19.175
I'm reading about that you knew Will Scarlett back in the 1970s and he sort of put you on to overblows.

00:51:19.215 --> 00:51:21.503
So you've been playing them for a long time since then, yeah?

00:51:22.244 --> 00:51:22.465
Well...

00:51:22.786 --> 00:51:25.050
Now, he showed me how to overblow in 1974.

00:51:25.711 --> 00:51:28.277
I heard him do it, and I thought, how is he getting that note?

00:51:28.858 --> 00:51:31.625
And so he told me, and I walked away from that.

00:51:31.644 --> 00:51:36.134
I mean, I was 19 years old and thought I knew everything, so this was like, oh my gosh.

00:51:36.574 --> 00:51:41.846
But at the same time, it didn't seem practical on the harmonicas that were available at the time.

00:51:41.865 --> 00:51:43.208
And you have to remember that...

00:51:43.650 --> 00:51:46.291
And Hohner was the only game in town in those days.

00:51:46.793 --> 00:51:51.476
The instruments they were producing at the time weren't really friendly to things like overblows.

00:51:52.237 --> 00:51:52.737
Now they are.

00:51:52.757 --> 00:51:54.298
In fact, most harmonicas are.

00:51:55.219 --> 00:51:57.041
It just didn't seem like a practical technique.

00:51:57.081 --> 00:51:58.922
It seemed more like a curiosity to me.

00:51:59.643 --> 00:52:06.849
And it wasn't until Howard Levy came along where I heard that, oh my gosh, this is a viable technique.

00:52:07.371 --> 00:52:10.532
And he really started the overblow revolution.

00:52:11.153 --> 00:52:12.835
You know, Will had been doing it since the 60s.

00:52:12.855 --> 00:52:16.742
Toots Thielen was recording overblows in the 1960s.

00:52:17.244 --> 00:52:23.076
And of course, we've traced it back to 1929, but with big gaps in time between those three points.

00:52:23.476 --> 00:52:26.885
The third being, of course, Howard coming up with it and really putting it on the map.

00:52:27.905 --> 00:52:32.652
So it's something that I, since then, I've incorporated into a lot of what I do.

00:52:33.393 --> 00:52:35.277
And I find it just a useful technique.

00:52:35.797 --> 00:52:44.090
With a lot of alternate tunings, you can get the notes that would otherwise require overblowing, but sometimes it's nicer to use the overblow for a variety of reasons.

00:52:44.891 --> 00:52:53.846
Some time ago, I attended a solo concert by the Swiss player Roland van Straaten.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:53:01.409 --> 00:53:05.322
and he was playing some Lee Oscar natural minor diatonics.

00:53:05.963 --> 00:53:33.137
Now, of course, you can get that minor third in the second position scale, withdraw seven which is you know tuned down but he was playing the overblow six instead and i asked him afterwards roland why why are you playing that note when you've got the other one that's easier to get he said i just like the sound of it sometimes it's down to those sorts of artistic choices it's nice to have those choices in your technique arsenal and maybe in your repertoire you know your bag of tricks of different

00:53:33.177 --> 00:53:39.722
tunings and so what about your embouchure i know you like some time blocking you're puckering as well in a different situation so

00:53:40.224 --> 00:53:48.112
yeah and I will move fluidly back and forth between puckering and tongue blocking in the course of playing a phrase, depending on what it is I'm doing.

00:53:48.572 --> 00:53:52.115
I really notice myself doing that in a lot of the traditional music.

00:53:52.155 --> 00:53:59.003
A lot of Scottish tunes have wide leaps in them, which on a violin might mean simply crossing the bow over from one string to the next.

00:53:59.784 --> 00:54:02.668
But on harmonica, it might mean moving several holes.

00:54:03.128 --> 00:54:08.853
And so tongue blocking and corner switching between the right and left corners might be very useful for that purpose.

00:54:08.914 --> 00:54:50.057
But then sometimes you get these quick art articulations like which are very cumbersome to do with your tongue on the harmonica so I might corner switch to a note which I would then pucker in order to deliver that quick articulation and then back to tongue blocking so for me it's a very fluid situation I've briefly experimented with u-blocking where you shape your tongue into more or less of u and there are some great players who u-block but for me it just doesn't do anything so it's not one that I use but definitely using the lips only because people get into saying oh don't call it pucker don't call it this, or there's some variations on it, like the one where you form the lower lip into a sort of a trough and aim the harmonica down into it, which I don't do.

00:54:50.137 --> 00:54:52.240
Again, I don't find it particularly useful.

00:54:53.041 --> 00:55:05.635
But between lips only and lips and tongue, to put it most broadly, for me, using whatever's available is the most versatile way to get as much out of the harmonica as you can.

00:55:06.255 --> 00:55:08.177
And what about amplification and microphones?

00:55:08.418 --> 00:55:10.340
You've got much variety in the harmonicas you play.

00:55:10.360 --> 00:55:13.603
Do you you do you like to use amps or keep the sound clean or

00:55:13.903 --> 00:55:42.333
well because I'm not presently playing out I mean I have a clean amp and I have a sort of an all-purpose pedal one of the ones that Richard Hunter has recommended the RP 355 or whatever series it is with effects built in so I'll use that when I'm playing out and I'm not somebody who's always you know tapping on this pedal or that I recently saw Jason Ritchie play a show and he was constantly you know tapping this or that on his pedal board and getting some very different audible effects.

00:55:42.855 --> 00:55:47.500
At some point, if I do start to play out more, I might get more deeply into that.

00:55:47.860 --> 00:55:57.150
Now, microphones can color the sound, obviously, and some players want something that sounds fairly neutral, and they'll use a vocal mic, as most jazz players tend to do.

00:55:57.389 --> 00:55:59.773
You know, they'll use the SM58 or something similar.

00:55:59.813 --> 00:56:06.179
They'll cup it, like a blues player might, but it's not in order to drive the sound into distortion.

00:56:06.539 --> 00:56:19.288
You know, they want a fairly neutral sound, maybe with a little bit of color, and the SM58 does do that, or Greg Heumann's chopped down 58, the ultimate 58 with the volume control, And I tend more in that direction.

00:56:19.407 --> 00:56:26.494
Now, I recently bought his chopped-down version of the 57, which can deliver a lot of color from the microphone.

00:56:26.974 --> 00:56:43.068
Most of the recording I do at home, and I'm speaking through a 58 right now, and I will play about as far away from the microphone as I am speaking, and then use a lot of effects in post, because that way I can color it after the fact and shade the coloring, you know, when I'm recording.

00:56:43.789 --> 00:56:48.333
And I find that a versatile way of editing Just

00:56:48.393 --> 00:56:53.257
final question then, just about any future plans you've got, what's coming up with your harmonica life?

00:56:54.119 --> 00:57:01.166
Oh heavens, continuing to do the many things, trying to figure out what to concentrate on in the immediate moment.

00:57:01.246 --> 00:57:03.750
I will be doing more videos, more instructional stuff.

00:57:04.190 --> 00:57:20.971
Recently I've been putting out videos that I stumbled on from another harmonica band from 1997 where I had Joe Felisco and a variety of other players playing with me as a five harmonica, mostly diatonica ensemble playing old Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt stuff.

00:57:21.090 --> 00:57:22.172
So I've been putting those out.

00:57:22.333 --> 00:57:23.074
Bunch of Guys.

00:57:23.416 --> 00:57:24.177
The Bunch of Guys.

00:57:24.398 --> 00:57:31.630
Well, it was informally termed that by the then president of Spa, Bob Williams, who said, oh, and Winslow and his Bunch of Guys will be doing something.

00:57:33.414 --> 00:57:37.181
So we just sort of said, okay, that's the name of the group.

00:57:50.626 --> 00:58:01.780
And we had Richard Slay in that group at different times, of course, Dennis Groenling, Larry Eisenberg, the late Chris McCulloch, Michael Palaquin, I'm probably forgetting one or two different people, Alan Holmes.

00:58:02.161 --> 00:58:06.286
So there were some really fine players who were part of that at different times.

00:58:06.788 --> 00:58:09.471
Again, it was something that hadn't been done before.

00:58:09.851 --> 00:58:17.501
We weren't using chord and bass, we weren't doing the traditional harmonica band repertoire, and we were very much using diatonic-specific instruments.

00:58:17.666 --> 00:58:22.231
techniques drawn from blues harmonica in order to deliver a very different kind of music.

00:58:22.530 --> 00:58:23.831
So it was fun doing that.

00:58:24.353 --> 00:58:24.733
Yeah, nice.

00:58:24.773 --> 00:58:26.295
So yeah, lots of stuff.

00:58:26.414 --> 00:58:29.838
Great being able to do all these stuff online and putting your stuff out on your YouTube channel.

00:58:29.858 --> 00:58:30.858
Yeah, so we can look forward to that.

00:58:30.898 --> 00:58:31.820
Very interesting stuff.

00:58:32.079 --> 00:58:36.704
Definitely recommend people check it out from what I've been doing to prepare for this conversation.

00:58:36.764 --> 00:58:39.967
So thanks so much for joining me today, Winslow.

00:58:39.987 --> 00:58:41.730
It's been amazing to speak to you.

00:58:41.909 --> 00:58:45.313
One of the most knowledgeable people on the harmonica people definitely want to check your stuff out.

00:58:45.762 --> 00:58:46.563
Thank you, Neil.

00:58:47.403 --> 00:58:48.666
And thank you very much for having me.

00:58:48.706 --> 00:58:55.195
It's always a joy to talk to people who are knowledgeable and interested in this fascinating subject of the harmonica.

00:58:55.715 --> 00:58:57.818
Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast.

00:58:58.199 --> 00:59:07.673
And be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas.

00:59:08.097 --> 00:59:10.181
Many thanks to Winslow for joining me today.

00:59:10.221 --> 00:59:16.009
He has a wealth of knowledge about the harmonica and has done and continues to do great work in sharing that.

00:59:16.550 --> 00:59:20.074
Check out the links on the podcast page for where you can find Winslow online.

00:59:20.856 --> 00:59:24.760
I'll sign out now with Winslow playing one of his compositions using the pentaharp.

00:59:25.302 --> 00:59:27.284
This one is called Strawberry Flutes.

00:59:31.050 --> 00:59:31.389
Strawberry Flutes

00:59:32.034 --> 00:59:46.717
Thank you.