[Harp-L] Re: Miller is a 12-Year-Old Harp Monster

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm a little surprised that only one post I've seen so far has mentioned 
John Popper as the obvious inspiration for this kid's playing.  Perhaps 
that's because a lot of people on this list don't listen to Popper much, 
so didn't get the reference.  But there's no doubt that the kid is 
coming from Popper.

It's very interesting to me that a kid who can't have been playing for 
very long has already picked up the basics of Popper's style. I'm afraid 
that the full-on shower of notes I heard on his performance last night 
of "Sweet Home Alabama" got to be a little boring for me before the song 
was halfway over, but he's only a kid, and young players like to be 
athletic above all.  Besides, he only had one song to get the message 
across, and "America's Got talent" is not a show that favors subtlety. 
He did one absolutely electrifying repeated-note riff in his solo that 
was executed with great speed and precision and a strong attack; his 
playing skills are much stronger than I'd expect from any player with 
only a few years of experience.

I'm hearing more and more younger players who're using Popper's style as 
the basis for their own, just as players in my generation based their 
early styles on the great blues masters.  A generational shift is 
underway.  It's very hard for a lot of players who grew up with the 
blues to "get" Popper, but as Miller shows, if you're coming from zero 
it's no harder to pick up than anything else.  In other words, you have 
to un-learn a lot of traditional blues harp to learn Popper; it's an 
advantage not to have to do so.

One of the posters on this topic noted that Miller might make it harder 
for a lot of players to get gigs.  I wrote a post to Harp-L in 1997 in 
which I said that any player who wants to work in studios had better 
learn how to produce 16 bars of passable Popper on demand. It's almost 
ten years later, and it's more true now than it was then.  Like I said, 
 it's a generational shift.

Regards, Richard Hunter
hunterharp.com