Re: [Harp-L] Popping Popper popping

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

David - 

You're referring to what is often called mouth breathing. In medical-dental circles this just means breathing through your mouth instead of your nose, but harmonica players use the term to describe  pushing air in and out of your mouth with your tongue (and maybe jaw or cheeks) with your throat closed so as not to engage the rest of your respiratory tract. L D Miller and Toots Thielemans also use this technique for very fast runs. Obviously you can't sustain a note with it or create much in the way of tone (though, if you really worked on it, who knows?), but it can be very useful for lightning-fast passages.

I've never used mouth breathing in my playing, though I've experimented with it a little. The difficulty I encountered was that with the throat closed off, the mouth shapes I was getting tended to either bend the notes down or blank them out - my close-ended oral cavity was acting like a tuned chamber that interfered with the vibration of the reeds. For me, the challenge would be to turn a closed chamber into a neutral one.

Your observation on Jason Ricci vs John Popper is also astute. Jason consciously chooses and sculpts every note he plays, no matter how fast he's going, and I get the impression that he thinks first about the notes, then about how to play them (correct me if I'm wrong, Jason). Popper, when he gets going really fast, tends to play sheets of sound, where the overall shape and velocity are more important than the actual notes, and much of what he does is shaped by breathing patterns. Both of them tend to think diatonically - at least by the evidence of what they actually play - without delving as deeply into the underpinning of the harmony as someone like Howard Levy does. (Popper characterized this to me in our 1992 HIP interview, talking about how much there was to explore in the simple major scale.) But then Howard, while he can play fast, is not someone I'd characterize as a speed demon - speed isn't as important to his overall musical energy as it is
 to Jason or to Popper.

Winslow

Winslow Yerxa

Author, Harmonica For Dummies ISBN 978-0-470-33729-5

--- On Thu, 7/23/09, David Fertig <drfertig@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I saw Jon Popper on tv some years ago and he actually played some blues pretty well for a few bars, but his BT stuff does nothing for me, personally.  

Now, a technical question: I saw a fellow once play some fast Popperesque runs and he wasn't using his lungs, but popping or pulsing air with his tongue to actuate the reeds very quickly in and out, is that how Jon Popper sometimes does his super-fast riffs?  

<snip>

A recent screening of Pocketful of Soul "45" (pre-release sneak at 45 min of the eventual 90 min flick) had some comparing Jason and Popper, but to my tin ears I hear Jason play gobs of musicality in each passage, whereas in Popper I hear merely gobs of fast notes...

<snip>

But, is that tongue-pulsing technique for playing whole riffs at all common and does anyone do it with rich tone?  And anyway why does this technique seem cheap and gimmicky to me?   Am I really that hidebound?