Re: [Harp-L] SPAH Updates- Will Scarlett - Cosmic harmonica pioneer

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thatâs great news that Will Scarlett Scarlett is coming to
SPAH! Will Scarlett is a highly original mind, a great player, and a survivor
of the 1960s San Francisco
music scene who remembers it well even though he was there.

Â

To give you an idea what a visionary and harmonica pioneer
Will Scarlett is:



-- Will was overblowing in the early 1960s - he taught me the technique in 1974
in San Francisco.



-- Will recorded two albums with Hot Tuna (offshoot of the Jefferson Airplane)
in the late 1960s, playing everything on a G-harp in several positions. He
later recorded an album with folksinger Rosalie Sorrrels where he bent an
overblow up six semitones.



-- Will figured out how both the blow reed and the draw reed participate in
note bending years before Robert Johnston wrote a scientific paper about it.



-- Will invented the hidden responder reed idea that Rick Epping later borrowed
and used as the basis for the XB-40, where all 20notes bend down.



The first time I met Will, back in '74, he had an old gramophone horn on his
shoulder, with the base of the horn cupped to the back of a harmonica with
wooden hand-carved covers that looked a lot like modern Turbolids. The gramophone
horn acted like an acoustic amplifier, and boy, was it loud! He played a solo
piece that contains some overblows, and when he finished, I asked him how he
was getting those notes.



Now, this was in a room full of hippies and academics at an independent music
school - Will was in the middle of giving a lecture on the genius of the
19th-century pioneering acoustic scientist Hermann Helmholtz. When I asked my
question,Will looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "Oh. That's an
overblow." Meanwhile, the whole room was looking back at me as if to say
"Who is this guy who doesn't know what an overblow is? EVERBODY knows
about that." (And here I thought I already knew everything; I was about 20
years old). But really they were just wondering who was asking this strange
question that seemed to have nothing to do with the lecture. Will patiently
explained the basic idea of what an overblow was and how to do it, and then
went on with the lecture.



At SPAH 2009 in Sacramento,
Will is scheduled to do a seminar in a sort of interview format (Iâll be the
interviewer),. I anticipate a lot of fascinating cosmic talk about acoustic
science, stories about the San
  Francisco music scene in the 1960s, and heaven only
knows what else that might pop out of the fertile and unconventional brain of
Will Scarlett.