SPAH COnvention

[Winslow Yerxa <76450.3230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

TO: internet:harp-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I have to agree with Chris Michalek; this was the best SPAH I've
been to. A big part of it was having it in Memphis, with its rich
historical associations with American music. They were also
having a Music and Heritage Festival put on by the Center for
Southern Folklore (with a T-shirt that featured a harmonica
player), and the SPAH cxonvention was part of the festival - we
had a tent on the fairground, and this is where the Blues jam
was. This was one reason I chose not to play blues in all 12 keys
on a chromatic - it was more a show than a jam sessions - and
instead chose to open the third set singing a comic-sarcastic
blues ("Two Way Street") about mutual infidelity, a subject I
used to know fairly well.

Yes, Chris M. got a poor opening spot. The band was a little too
hyped-up, and made him accompany them instead of the other way
around. Kim Field performed a very valuable service by getting up
around the fourth number and playing a relaxed, down-home
midtempo blues to put everything on the right footing.

Pete Pedersen, a jazz chromatic player who was once a Borrah
Minnevitch Harmonica Rascal, and who remains a consummate
professional musician, lives in Memphis and is very well
connected in the musical community, and it was he who linked up
the festival with the SPAH convention. Everywhere we went on
Beale street, we just had to say we were with the SPAH
convention, and they let us in free. Chris M. and Buzz Krantz
played in several places. My only other performance was to get up
in Joyce Cobb's and sing and play a rather loose version of "My
Babe." 

Robert Bonfiglio was a gas. The guy is EXTREMELY opinionated and
talks mostly about himself, but he can be a lot of fun. You can
be extreme back to him - but be prepared to be articulate and
passionate in defending your position. For some reason he chose
to hang mainly with the diatonic players. He started out on blues
harp, and plays a little of it by way of encores in his classical
concerts, but doesn't really understand the diatonic very well in
terms of its true idiom and technique (he understands classical
very well). Chris M., Joe Filisko and I were playing one of my
bizarre brainstorms in a mens' room (playing ascending parallel
semitones on a bent draw 3), and Robert burst in to see what the
hell we were doing. I showed him the "score" - a diagram scrawled
on a piece of brown paper towel, and he launched into a diatribe
on modern composers, being sure to mention that he studied with
John Cage. Then he pulled out some Cross Harps and we all started
to jam, with me snapping my fingers and playing a low SBS chord
to glue the proceedings together.

I felt a lot more acceptance of the diatonic from the older
players this time, even thought the diatonic contingent was
smaller than at the other SPAH conventions I've been to. I was
having lunch with Joe Filisko when Jerry Murad (lead player for
the Harmonicats) came up and gave Joe a handsome compliment on
his tone. After the disastrous performance of Blue Monk that
Chris mentioned, Buzz, Chris and I each got several compliments
our playing. Even though thw whole performance fell apart, those
older chromatic players were listening to the quality of our
ideas and execution with open ears, not waiting for us to go down
in flames.

Part of the theme of the convention was "the classics," not in
the Bonfiglio sense, but referring to several alumni of the
Borrah Minnevitch Harmonica Rascals, including Pedersen, Murad,
Alan Pogson, Fuzzy Feldman, and Stan Harper. They had a group
with four chromatics, accompanied by bass and chord harmonicas. I
sat in on some of their rehearsals, and the arrangements, mostly
by Harper and Pedersen, were gorgeous in their harmonies and
voicings of four chromatics. Unfortunately they were badly miked
for the Saturday night performance, and the chord came through
with a weak wheeze of chromatics and some muddy bass.

By the way, there WERE two Charlie Musselwhites there, Charles
Musselwhite III (the famous one) and his son, Charles IV, who
looks sort of like an Egyptian surfer dude, with a little goatee
that he either braids or knots into Pharaonic form.

But Charles IV was not the only youth participant. We had Brody
Buster (age 7) and Uwe Pentzold from Germany (age 11) to show us
what kids can do.

Buster (he gave a very dirty look to one emcee who accidentally
introduced him as Busty Broder) is being promoted like crazy by
adults (mainly his mother, it seems), and he was prominently
featured in several shows, while his "You're Never Too Young to
Get the Blues" T-shirts were being hawked all up and down Beale
Street.

Now, as a children's harmonica educator, Phil Duncan pointed out
that a seven year old normally can't do the things Brody does -
play in time, etc. But while he may be an unusual child, any
adult who played at his level would be unlikely to be asked to
play a second number on a sit-in. He tends to step on singers
when accompanying, and to play the garish and uncontrolled runs
that a beginner with some chops would play. Which is to be
expected from someone of his small experience. He needs more
seasoning before being promoted as a show business entity, let
alone a valid artistic performer. His attraction is built solely
on his age, which makes his promotion seem a little cruel - as if
he's being paraded around like a dancing bear or some other
oddity. When we left Joyce Cobb's at 2AM on Friday, his T-shirts
were still on sale outside the club. I asked the lady behind the
table if he had a press kit, and pulled out my business card,
expecting that they'd mail me one. But at 2 in the morning, on
Beale Street, a press kit was immediately produced. This marvel
of savvy promotion made me a little uncomfortable, and everyone I
spoke with seemed to be uneasy about the commercial exploitation
of this child.

Eleven-year-old Uwe (OO-veh) Pentzold, on the other hand, played
amazingly well - better than most adults. He was here with his
father Andreas (they were off to New Orleans for the following
week to absorb more of the southern musical culture before
heading home to Germany - we tried without much success to get
them to drawl "Naawlins"), and there were no press kits or
T-shirts, just phenomenal musicianship. They did a train blues as
a duo at the Thursday blues jam, and I noted an improvement in
his playing over the prize-winning performances he had given at
the competitions in Germany the previous year, which had seemed
heavily coached. But when he got up at the Saturday gala next to
diatonic jazz pioneer Don Les and improvised fluent, beautifully
phrased jazz, everyone in the house was floored. I was howling in
amazement at some of his phrases. It's like he had done a Vulcan
mindmeld with Les and absorbed his entire style. Uwe seemed to be
absorbing a lot around him. Earlier, in the lobby, he was singing
and dancing a tune he'd heard and liked:

"I want a big fat Mama"

and commenting in his chirpy upbeat German English, "it's very
good, yes?" On Sunday, when I shook hands goodbye with him, he
gave me a full Soul shake, with some added twists I'd never seem
before.

Jack Ely asks about Saturday Night's weird incident. It's all on
video, unless they turned off the camera. I doubt it will be left
in the offical SPAH video, but, as a conoisseur of chaos and
paranoid behavior, I want my own unedited copy. Never have I seen
such a spectactular act of self-destruction by a performer.

I'm curious. Does anyone here have access to Westlaw, Lexis, or
another service that would allow them to look up civil court
cases? There was a story going around about Danny Welton, the
performer involved in this incident, that he had been ejected
from a cruise ship in central America for a similar incident, and
that he had sued them and won. It would be interesting to see
what a search on his name might produce.

Almost from the hour he arrived at the convention on Friday
afternoon, stories were circulating about his behaviour - acting
the star, introducing himself to anyone who would listen -
sometimes more than once - and declaring that he owned the town
of Salt Lake City. This seemed harmless enough, and a bit campy,
if slightly bizarre. He was to do a seminar the next morning on
"What it Takes to Succeed in the Music Business," and I decided
to attend. As often happens, I was delayed by the usual
kibbitzing and sampling of activities, and only caught the last
fifteen minutes or so. But during those fifteen minutes, he never
got to the topic of the seminar - he dismissed the whole topic by
declaring that it was too hard to make it in music and that
nobody in the room would ever do it anyway. He kept up a steady
stream of jokes and wisecracks, did a commercial for a summer
camp for kids that he helps support, and, in quick succession,
singled out a Japanese attendee, told him that the Japanese make
lousy harmonicas - "Great cars, but lousy harmonicas," then
declared his preference for German harmonicas, said something
critical of Hohner, and imagined their retaliation by revealing
that he was Jewish and making a gas chamber/shower joke. I was
later told by other attendees who had seen the entire "seminar"
that the whole thing had been full of insulting jokes like the
ones I had witnessed, and that exasperated listeners had been
yelling at him to start the seminar, to no avail.

Later that day I was at the hotel desk, when Mr Welton grabbed
(literally) Beverly O'Connor, a SPAH official, in the middle of
her telephone conversation, to declare that at the rehearsal for
his show, the drummer had quit and the sound man had gotten in an
argument with him and quit, too. He then launched into a heated
argument with SPAH officials in the lobby in front of everyone. I
was beginning to wonder if trouble dogged this man.

That evening, there were murmurs about Welton. After the dinner,
he was the opening act. Without a drummer and with a new face
running the sound system, he played brilliantly in a pop vein,
and his patter was light and upbeat. I was crossing my fingers
that he would keep it that way, but I noticed that he was
essaying jokes, and that they were not well received - at this
point the audience was a little nervous about him. A tinge of
defensiveness started to creep into his statements, and at one
point he compared himself to Pete Pedersen (who is an excellent
comedian, and always comes across very warmly to an audience)
wondering why he couldn't get the same reaction. Finally, after a
fairly long set, he launched into an anti-SPAH tirade. Booing
began, and he started insulting the audience directly. Buzz
Krantz and I approached the stage, and were about to step up and
escort him off, when the microphone was cut and he left the stage
with a final obscene gesture from the wings.

Later that night, when we arrived at B.B. King's club on nearby
Beale Street, the doorman, who by now knew us as harmonica
players, told us of a man who had tried to gain entry to the club
and repeatedly declared that he was the greatest harmonica player
in the world. He had been so unpleasant that he was denied
access. When we asked what the man looked like, the description
sounded distressingly like the unfortunate Mr. Welton. How sad to
contemplate.

Meanwhile, back at the Peabody Hotel, there several wonderful
performances going on. Charlie Musselwhite did a nice set, and
Brody Buster came on to trade some licks with him in a way that
worked nicely; we had the Classics, and Stan Harper played a
Mozart piece with recorded orchestra backing. Pete Pedersen and
Fuzzy Feldman played some of the chromatic and chord duos they
had presented on the Ed Sullivan Show, and Rich Machiz, the
emcee, read a poem about a young boy's first encounter with the
spirit of the harmonica on a moonlit night, accompanied by Joe
Filisko and Bob Miner on diatonics.

This is getting way too long, and, unfortunately, I've been
fulminating about some of the things I didn't enjoy. There was an
awful lot that I did enjoy, and I'll try to convey some of it,
time willing - I'm off to England for a week on Friday.