Anyone who’s visited this site more than twice knows how much we love the work of Brendan Power. This strikingly beautiful performance of a traditional Chinese piece, “Jasmine Flower,” was recorded live in Shanghai in December 2011. Brendan is playing a Suzuki chromatic harmonica modified (by him) to enable the deep pitch bends that are characteristic of traditional Chinese music. (Brendan is apparently never averse to modifying his harps as radically as necessary to make them more playable in a given musical context. As PT Gazell, who recorded an entire album with Brendan, said to me once, “Who knows what harps Brendan is using?”) Beyond the gorgeously executed simplicity of the performance, what is most striking is how perfectly the harmonica fits into this traditional Eastern music.
Wim Dijkgraaf is the Dutch-born jazz chromatic harmonica virtuoso behind theEffortless Harmonica Blog. He’s also a key member of Portuguese jazz singer Mario Joao Mendes’s topnotch Brazilian jazz band. This video is a promo for Mendes’s new CD; Wim’s harmonica kicks in at about 1:26, and it’s beautiful, powerful stuff. Check out the rest of the videos on her channel as well.
This isn’t the first time I’ve featured a video from Climb Jacob’s Ladder, Paul Messinger’s killer band from North Carolina. This tune has a humorous lyric, but there’s nothing whimsical about the harp. Messinger uses at least three different sounds on this piece: he starts out running through his Crate VC508 tube amp, which is in turn output to the PA, then plays a pretty 1st position solo through the vocal mic, then adds a high octave doubler to the amped sound. Killer. This is one of the most exciting bands with harp in the world right now.
Climb Jacob’s Ladder is a North Carolina band that does a hot mix of rock, reggae, and world music. Harp player Paul Messinger is up front and center, and he sounds killer with this crew on both acoustic and electric harp. You can hear his roots in traditional harp styles here, and he’s adapted those roots brilliantly to fit the band’s broad and electrified context. This song–”Peace, Love and Respect”–starts with a strong reggae vib, and then takes off for the heart of the universe.
If these guys come to your neighborhood, go see them. Period.
I loved Huey Lewis and the News for their hard-rockin’ precision and their joy. Huey’s a great front man and solid harp player, and Johnny Cola knocks me out with this band each and every time he puts the sax to his lips–his ideas and sound are obviously rooted in R&B tradition, but his lines use a much wider range of melodic material than most in this genre. (The sax line in “I Want a New Drug” is a great example. The second half in particular doesn’t sound like anyone else, and it’s nevertheless clearly in the R&B tradition.)
This version of “Heart of Rock and Roll” was recorded live at a concert in San Francisco in 1985, with the Tower of Power horns putting some extra juice in. Huey solos on harmonica starting about a minute and a half from the end. Huey isn’t the most technically advanced player you’ll ever hear, but he sounds just fine here in the company of some of the heaviest horn players on planet Earth, and that ain’t bad. Cola puts in a great solo too, and the groove is strong.
And just because I’m really into Huey today, here’s a live version of “Workin’ for a Livin’” from 1982, also with the Tower of Power horns. Huey’s harmonica is carrying a heavier load on this one, and he’s rockin’ plenty hard with it.
This is a recent performance by PT Gazell with Shine in Barcelona. PT starts by playing the melody in his easygoing style, then ramps up the heat as he goes along. PT’s smoothly swinging approach to jazz on the diatonic harp is unlike anyone else’s, and this piece shows it off in all its laidback goodness.
Larry Adler had a strong affinity for George Gershwin’s music–they were young virtuosos in the same time and place, New York in the 1930s, making big waves in the world, and quintessentially American in their music and their bouyant, self-confident optimism. This piece was recorded in 1994, when Adler was 80, under the direction of producer George Martin, well-known for his work with the Beatles among many others. The singing, by Oleta adams, is sublime; the finished recording was released under the title “The Glory of Gershwin”, and it reached #2 in the UK Albums Chart in 1994.
Listen to the glistening beauty of Adler’s tone in the high register, and the casual mastery with which he moves from one vibrato to another. This guy could play.
“Cruisin’ (Sunset Sam)” was written by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, who also wrote “Mary Mary,” which Paul Butterfield covered on his amazing record “East/West” in the late 1960s. The piece has a head-bobbing groove that I’ve loved since I first saw the video in the early 1980s.
The lyrics to “Sunset Sam” (and the Nesmith video) have a surreal quality to them, which I’ve reflected in both the harp sounds and the vocal for this performance. The groove is serious, but the story is laughable. Hey, so what? Shake yer money maker, man, it’s only words. (Or as a poet friend of mine titled a collection of his works, “Only Worlds.”)
The harmonica is processed through 3 Digitech RP devices. The first is an RP355 running one of my favorite auto-wah patches, which is what provides the guitarish funk between lyrics. The second is an RP350 running two different patches: a high octave double on the signature lick and the first solo section, and a slightly different auto-wah patch on the second solo section. Both devices are run through an RP255 running one of my vibrato patches, and the vocal is coming through an RP250 running one of my new vocal patches (which will be released to subscribers to my patch sets within the week). All of these sounds, of course, are contained in my patch sets for the the Digitech RP 250/255/350/355, which you can learn more about here.
“Mississippi Queen” was recorded by Leslie West and Mountain in the 1960s. I always loved the original, and when amp modelers came along to give me all the grunt I could want, I made sure to develop an arrangement for it.
This version is played and sung live with looper accompaniment, recorded live in stereo. It’s a good example of the rock-oriented material I’m working on now, and of how the Digitech RPs make the big sounds that make it work. The looper is running drums, bass, and a harmonica part played on one of my patches for the Digitech RP350, a Matchless amp model with a Digitech FX25 envelope filter model. I love the FX25 model on harp–it’s easier to control than the original, and it gives the harp a totally different character, like a wah wah guitar. Since there’s only one live and one recorded harp part, this music could be played live with only two harp players, which is something I’d like to try sometime.
The live harmonica parts include the same FX25 patch running on the RP355, side by side with an RP350 running the Dark Blue Champ patch. I really like the way an autowah exaggerates every expressive move on the harp, and the Dark Blue Champ beefs it up. At the end of the chain, a Whammy patch on the RP255 shifts everything a whole step down under footpedal control. That’s how I get the slide guitar effect on the chords. I’m singing through an RP250 running one of my new vocal patches with a slapback delay. So that’s four RPs on the floor, three dedicated to harp, one to vocals. All of these sounds, of course, are found in my patch sets for the Digitech RP 250/255/350/355.
Everything is amped through Peavey KB2 and Peavey KB/A100 keyboard amps. The latter has a lot more bass than the former, and the stereo amps make the modulation FX in particular come alive. I recorded live through a Zoom H4 positioned to point a mic at each of the keyboard amps from less than a foot away. I compressed and EQed the live recording to make it louder and clearer. Otherwise, there’s no editing.
Just for extra fun, here’s a live video recording of Leslie West, Felix Pappalardi, and Corky Laing (a/k/a Mountain) playing this tune at Randall’s Island in 1970. The music starts at about 1:30. Rock n’ roll!
“2 Days Out” is PT Gazell’s latest jazz record, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. The music is traditional but subversive; the dozen pieces on the CD are mostly mid-tempo jazz standards, and the treatments would be familiar to any small ensemble from the swing era, but no swing era band ever put a diatonic harmonica up front and paired it with brass. From the sound of this record somebody should have considered it before now.
Did I mention that this record is a lot of fun? It all begins with a sprightly duet between upright bass and harmonica on “There is no greater love,” which melody I have been whistling to myself ever since I heard this recording. Gazell’s playing throughout the CD’s 12 cuts is deft and confident; I used to think PT was almost too polite sometimes, but he’s plenty assertive now. (A turning point seems to have been PT’s recent duet CD with Brendan Power, whose rampant energy is sure to bring out the fire-breather in any collaborator.) The band knows their business, and the various pairings of lead instruments–harp and flugelhorn, harp and trombone–sound fresh and lively. I don’t know who’s doing PT’s arrangements on this record, but whoever it is has come up with some inspired sounds. Trombone and harp–who’d'a thunk?
The record also raises some very interesting issues where playing the diatonic harp chromatically is concerned. To be specific, Gazell’s playing here is a lot smoother in terms of pitch and timbre than most of the stuff I hear done with bending and overblowing. The reason can only be that Gazell’s preferred technique for playing chromatically, which involves the use of valves on certain reed slots in the low to mid register, is inherently more stable than bends and overblows on unvalved diatonics. It’s rare on this record that I hear an altered pitch that makes me wince. The music just flows and does what it’s supposed to do: keep your toe tapping and your face smiling. The easy confidence of the playing makes it just as easy to forget that you’re listening to a technique with some pretty profound implications for the diatonic harp. This is another one of the ways in which this record is quietly radical. Certainly no one has taken this approach farther than Gazell, and the results are very musical.
The music is above all relaxed and swinging. Much modern jazz and classical (read: “serious”) music demands complete attention on repeated listenings to get the listener to the point where it all makes sense–where the listener can relax into the music, so to speak. The style Gazell is working here is familiar enough for most listeners to decode it instantly. It’s suitable for background when you’re going about your other business, and deep enough to reward careful listening with gems of nuance, emotion, and virtuosity.
Swing isn’t a new style, and I’ve heard a lot of it. I didn’t expect a swing record to be so captivating, but I find myself playing this record frequently, and smiling every time I do. If that sounds appealing to you, get this record.
