Re: [Harp-L] Rick, Roscoe, Chris and the rest of the family



I think Ben raises some very valid issues regarding the difficulty of playing jazz on any harmonica. Tinus's follow up regarding articulation in particular is right on the money. This is an area where chromatic has an enormous advantage because it's a lot easier to articulate blow and draw notes on a chromatic and achieve the illusion of legato. When you throw in the issues of intonation and how that intonation is arrived at, slide versus manipulation of the airway it's easy to see why the only people currently commercially successful in the jazz arena all play chromatic. I certainly don't think that jazz playing on a diatonic is a dead end. Ben Bouman's mention of Magic Dave's The Deb is an excellent example of a jazz style played successfully on a diatonic. A lot of the overblow style playing is by definition experimental and ground breaking. Nobody has played a diatonic harmonica like this before. While I've always liked the Flecktones with Howard Levy I never truly understood what Howard was up to until the 2000 Summit in Minneapolis. Seeing Trio Globo was mind blowing, overblows with a context. It sure worked for me. fjm




This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.