Re: Haircut

[GREENWAY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Steve--

You asked about Magic Dick's "Magic" harps.

Pierre Beauregard, a really fine harp player from Boston, and Dick
have been working on these harmonicas for over 12 years. Last year
they were awarded a patent, which surprised a lot of people, including
myself, who didn't think that tuning schemes could be patented.

Pierre has made all the prototypes himself. He takes Marine Bands and
painstakingly retunes them. While a few of the models are not that far
from the standard Richter tuning, most of them are retuned from top
to bottom. Pierre has worked out over 300 tunings, but he has about
15 that he concentrates on.

A couple of months ago I took Pierre up to Beverly, Massachusetts, to
meet Mickey Raphael, who was playing with Willie Nelson at a theater
there. Pierre brought his top 15 models and demonstrated them for Mickey
and I in the dressing room. Pierre is a great, great player and he can
really get around on his instruments. He soon attracted a large crowd in
the dressing room.

The harps are basically tuned to make it easier to play in various modes.
Pierre and Dick both like to use chords in their playing; I do, too, so
one aspect of their harps that really appeals to me is that the rationale
behind a lot of the tunings is to enable the player to get chords--like
6th chords--that aren't available on the Richter tuning.

While it's true that most players are going to have a hell of time with
a 10-hole that is tuned completely differently from the Richter tuning--
much less 15 different tunings--the music that Pierre gets out of them
is truly remarkable, and one of the basic tenets of his demonstration
lecture is that all the tunings grow out of cross harp in some fashion
or another. Although it gets very dense, because there are different
positions inside each of these new tunings.

Pierre has been slipping his handmade harps to various name players
(including Jerry Portnoy, who uses one of Pierre's harps to play the
head to "Layla" with Eric Clapton). I've been urging him to videotape
a demonstration like the one he gave to Mickey and I, because Pierre
is such an ace on his instruments and can play such fascinating stuff
on them that the best way to get people interested is to put that music
out there.

Pierre and Dick are not only top-flight players, but they are thoroughly
versed in music theory. And Pierre is the equal in many ways to Joe
Filisko has a harmonica craftsman and technician, which is really
saying something. After playing Pierre's harps, Don Les sighed and
said, "I wish I'd had these 40 years ago." I'm personally intrigued
with the prospect of what some of the more adventurous harp players--
Paul deLay comes to mind immediately--would do with these Magic harps.
But there are few harp players more traditional than Jerry Portnoy, and
he made quick use of them when he realized how they could expand his
musical horizons.

Pierre Beauregard is a remarkable musician and one of the rare bona fide
harmonica geniuses. He shuns the spotlight himself, but I for one am hoping
that one way or another these fascinating instruments that he and Dick have
come up with will find their way into the right hands.

--Kim Field