[Harp-L] Jason Ricci @ BluesWax Ezine- (Part Two)

[Fernando Toral <ftoral@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

These are excerpts from an interview published by BluesWax
http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/blueswax/default.cfm
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(...)
The diatonic harmonica is the small harmonica that most Blues players 
play. There are two different kinds of harmonicas. There are more than 
two, but there are two main kinds of reed harmonicas. There's the 
diatonic harmonica and the chromatic harmonica. Chromatic is a word that 
refers to all twelve tones of the scale. In western music we have twelve 
tones that we identify as being notes. In eastern music there are more. 
A piano has eighty-eight keys, repeated over and over again. A diatonic 
is limited, that's what the word means. That means there are less than 
12 tones. That's what the majority of harmonica players play.



Most of the people that play Blues on chromatic harmonica play the 
chromatic diatonically, meaning they don't use the twelve tones. They 
play the music in one, two, or maybe three different keys. And they use 
the little button on the side that gives them all twelve tones but use a 
few of them. So overblowing is in essence the opposite of playing the 
chromatic diatonically, it's playing the diatonic chromatically.



There's a player who came along named Howard Levy, he had been in a band 
called *Bela Fleck and the Flecktones*. He's on their first two albums. 
He rose to popularity through that band, however he had been around for 
quite awhile and has been doing some recording with some other bands, 
but he remained in obscurity in the harmonica world as well as in the 
musical world. He had developed this technique from my understanding 
sometime in the '70s. The technique came to the forefront of the musical 
world at the release of these albums with Bela Fleck. From the world's 
perspective all of a sudden we heard one of those little harmonicas, the 
Blues harp, playing all twelve tones of the chromatic scale whereas we 
had been told that it was impossible - the notes weren't there, and they 
didn't exist. So Howard called the technique "overblowing," and the name 
was coined.



It is the position of the mouth, the /embouchure/, that forces a hole to 
pop into that other note. You hear harmonica players talk about bending 
notes; it's completely different. It's popping that note which 
previously was thought to do nothing other than play that note into 
another note, the note that it lands on happens, by the grace of God, to 
be that missing note in every circumstance. It's really proof of the 
existence of God in a nutshell. Adam Gussow was to my knowledge and to 
my ears the very first Blues player to implement it, and it came out on 
a record called /Satan and Adam Harlem Blues/. I got the record, and I 
couldn't believe what I was hearing because it wasn't a chromatic 
harmonica. It was a diatonic harmonica. They have two very distinct 
sounds. Here are these notes that don't exist coming out. I'm like, 
"What is this?" I find out it's this technique that Howard implemented.



I started learning it, and then this other player came into my 
understanding, *Carlos del Junco* from Canada. This guy was playing them 
all over the place. This guy's amazing! So I start studying these guys, 
Adam Gussow, Howard, and Carlos del Junco, and I start mixing it in with 
the stuff Pat taught me. And then next thing you know, I stopped 
sounding like a generic copy of Pat. Between the study of scales, 
harmony, chord structure, and this new technique, I was able to get out 
from underneath the cape of Pat Ramsey. I was a carbon copy up until 1998.



Now I could suddenly play all of these cool Jazz songs that I'd heard. 
In the past I would say, "I'm sorry I can't play that. The note's not 
here. It doesn't exist." Then, all of a sudden, I was able to say, "Oh 
yeah, sure. What note is that? No problem!" I could play anything the 
piano played, anything the guitar played, anything the violin played. I 
just had to figure out how to do it. It's all owed from my end to Howard.



There are really only three of us that are doing this on a wide-scale 
level. There are hundreds of kids all over the world, if not thousands, 
who can do the technique, mostly kids that are attracted to it 'cause 
it's new and it's exciting and that's what kids want to do, things that 
are new and exciting and advanced and difficult and limitless. That's 
what attracts youth. But there's not very many people doing it 
musically, and on top of that there are very few people with record 
contracts on the road doing it. So, it's me, Howard, and Carlos del Junco.



There's a whole mess of harmonica players that don't believe still that 
the technique has any relevance. "Little Walter, he didn't play that 
way, so, why would I?" I say, if little Walter had known about it, he 
would have done it. He'd have been all over it, especially if it was 
changing the way the instrument is played, which it is. Who wants to be 
in a band with somebody and have them say, "I can't play that." I don't 
want to be in a band with that guy. I want to be in a band with a guy 
who says, "Yeah, sure." It's a really exciting time for the instrument. 
Being alive now is what it must have been like to be an alto player when 
*Charlie Parker* was alive or be a tenor player when *Coltrane* was 
alive. To be living at a time when this guy, Howard Levy, revolutionized 
the instrument.