Re: [Harp-L] Stevie Wonder's Influences

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

TWo things come to mind.

It's been little reported, but I remember reading an article a few
years back that stated that Stevie had a music teacher as a child who,
if I remember correctly, had him playing in some sort of harmonica
group. The teacher was named in the article. I don't nkow if he's still
alive, but it would be interesting to follow up.

The other thing is that if you listen to his very earliest instrumental
recordings, like "Square" and "Paulsby", you can hear very clearly the
beginning of his style of jabbing the slide in to get the blue notes of
the C scale on the draw. I can't help wondering whether one of the
studio arrangers at the time sussed out this happy accident of
harmonica tuning  and realized how easy it made a C blues scale come
out of a chromatic or whether Stevie somehow at the age of 11 or so
perfectly figured this out, but it became the nucleus of his approach
to the harmonica, at least in terms of note and action patterns. The
tone, phrasing, and all that other stuff I think it totally his.

Winslow

--- "jazmaan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dmf273@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I've been listening to some very early Little Stevie recently and
> wondering (no pun intended) who
> did Stevie listen to?  His style isn't really much like Little Walter
> or Toots Theilsman or Larry
> Adler is it?  Was anybody playing pop chromatic in the late 50's or
> early 60's with anything like
> Little Stevie's approach?
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