Re: [Harp-L]you know who

[Cara Cooke <cyberharp@xxxxxxxxx>]

All I can say, Barbara, is that we do ourselves a disservice when we are too 
critical of another player, especially to that player's fans. It makes us 
look worse than the person we criticized, and can, in some cases, drive 
those people away, rather than introduce them to a player we like better. 

 Often, the players to which we are most attracted at a particular point in 
our development, are conveying ideas that guide us to improve our
playing. Eventually,
as we develop, we may "outgrow" our old favorite players to pick up new 
favorites who are conveying that which will aid in our next
development. However,
those old favorites may never go away completely because, as we learn more, 
we understand more about their playing and continue to learn from it. So, 
criticism of a particular player to that player's fan is generally unwise if 
your intent was to encourage them to improve and hear someone else. They are 
a fan because the player's playing is, for some reason, attractive and 
educational to them. You may not understand it or like it, but it speaks to 
that fan; and until he is ready to move on, the only thing you can hope to 
achieve is to discourage the fan completely. We can encourage others to 
listen to our favorites without criticizing their favorites.

 This John Popper thing came up at SPAH last year, by the way, and nearly 
totally confused and discouraged one of our newest, talented players. I 
helped him clear it up and reminded him that he may actually 'get' John 
Popper's playing even better than those people who were criticizing him, 
especially since it was John Popper's playing that had encouraged him and 
guided him to take up the harmonica in the first place. But the incident 
caused me to wonder if those mouthy critics of John Popper could remember 
that the 'P' in SPAH stood for "Preservation" and the 'A' for "Advancement".

 Cara