[Harp-L] Sam Hinton early impressions

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A friend sent me a copy of Sam Hinton's double CD set "Master of the Solo Diatonic Harmonica"recently, and I've been working my way through it.  The set contains a massive amount of material, both spoken and played on the harmonica, and it takes time to hear it all.  Below are some of my early impressions.

Hinton has a strong and very individual style.  Like any strongly defined style, significant choices have been made about what's in and what's out.  In Hinton's case, the most important choice is to treat the melody as the key element in his arrangements.  In almost every measure of almost every piece I've listened to so far, the melody is on the top of the arrangement, throughout the piece.  I don't think I've heard any improvisation yet, and I haven't heard a lot of vamping-till-ready either.  

The magic in Hinton's work is the remarkable range of accompaniments he lays against the melody.  I think it's fair to say that any harmonica player could learn something useful about chord voicings from listening to Hinton's arrangements.   The range of chords he manages to get out of the instrument while simultaneously doing a bass line and melody is fresh and powerful, both harmonically and rhythmically.  My guess is that Hinton thinks of himself as a one-man-band playing for dancers, which would explain both the emphasis on melody and the attention he gives to varying the accompaniment while maintaining a strong rhythmic pulse.

Hinton's repertoire consists mostly of non-blues folk material, including lots of Celtic tunes, American folk songs, and so on.  There is very little apparent blues influence in his playing--compare the way he does a train to the way Sonny Terry does it, for example.  Since there's apparently no improvisation, there's also no jazz influence in the stuff I've heard so far.  Probably in order to maximize the clarity of his multiple lines, there's very little obvious manipulation of tone with hands, throat, etc.  To some extent, Hinton treats the harmonica as an accordian or piano--the notes are there and he plays them, clearly and cleanly, with good balance between upper and lower registers.  He uses bending sparingly, and apparently to fill in missing notes, not to create an emotional effect. 

Most of Hinton's stuff is done on standard-tuned diatonics in 1st position.  When he wants to expand his harmonic range, he uses two harps at once.  He occasionally uses a harmonic minor harp, and sometimes a Chordomonica II, which is great instrument that's not widely enough known or used.  (I own one, and I don't use it everyday, but it does some very cool things that are very hard to do with any other instrument.)  Given his obvious ability to come up with cool chord voicings, I think he could get a lot of mileage out of a few non-standard diatonic tunings, with the Natural Minor the obvious choice given his preference for 1st position.  However, natural Minor harps didn't become commercially available until the late 1980s, by which time Hinton's style and much of his repertoire was fully formed.  (As of the time of this recording, Hinton was in his 80s.)  

Like I said, I think any harmonica player could learn something from Hinton.  One of the exciting things about Hinton's work is the potential to build on it in new and interesting ways--for example, by applying his discoveries to blues, with all the additional color and emotion that implies, or including  non-standard tunings, or electronics to color the sound and bring out different aspects of the arrangements.  You can hear a lot of potential for further exploration easily in these recordings because of the utter clarity of Hinton's conception and execution.

In short: Hinton is an original with a lot to offer, and is obviously required listening for harmonica players.  

Thanks and regards, Richard Hunter