[Harp-L] Subject: BluesWax Interview with Jason Ricci, Part II
With express permission of the Editor of Blueswax Ezine, here is part 2 of
the Stacy Jeffress' interview with Jason Ricci. -Part III will be posted
after next Thursday, June 18 with Chip Eagle's permission. Anyone wishing to
read it earlier, can easily sign up for their own Blueswax Ezine.
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BluesWax Sittin' In With
Jason Ricci
Part Two
What Little Walter Didn't Know
By Stacy A. Jeffress
In Part Two of a three-part interview, Stacy Jeffress discovers that this
lad from Maine whose father never opened the CDs his son gave him learned
to "overblow" on harp from the late Pat Ramsey in Memphis and never looked
back. If you missed Part One in last week's issue, _click here_
(http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/blueswax/backissues/blueswax_452.cfm) to
read it in our ARCHIVES, if not, here we go...
Photo By Scott Allen of Vividpix.com
Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: Did you have formal instruction in any
instrument?
Jason Ricci: I had formal instruction in harmonica and guitar, but it
didn't really include much theory. I learned the layout of the instrument -
where the notes were. I was taught right from the very beginning about people
like Howard Levy, who's a really exciting Classical, Jazz, and Blues, and
World harmonica player. To my ears, he's the best harmonica player alive,
hands down. I never went to school for it. I did do a semester of Jazz
improvisation that I signed up for down in Florida, and I got quite a bit out of
that course.
BW: How old were you when you started on guitar or harmonica, or just
playing on your own?
JR: 14
BW: What was it about 14?
JR: I guess I just wanted to be in a band. My friend had a band and I
thought it was cool, and I wanted to be in it. I wasn't a very good singer, so
I was starting to get benched a lot because they would write a song, and
they would sing the songs. I had nothing to do. So I wanted to be able to do
something. So when I wasn't singing, I could still be on stage. I got into
playing harmonica and guitar. Then I kind of gave up on guitar. I still use
it to write songs, but I gave up on it 'cause harmonica came so naturally
to me, and I got good so fast. There weren't a lot of people doing it, so it
was not very competitive, and I did have access to some wonderful teachers
over the years: [Maine harmonica player, the late] D.W. Gill and Adam
Gussow and then most recently, of course, the late Pat Ramsey, who was my
biggest influence.
BW: You were born in Portland [Maine], you go to Idaho when you were 18,
at what point do you go to Mississippi - in the '90s?
JR: I moved to Memphis in 1995 to study with Pat. I did that for a year,
waited tables, and then got a job playing with Junior Kimbrough, and his
kids mostly, and then I'd occasionally play with Junior. I'd play with Junior
every Sunday at the juke joint [Junior's Place in Chulahoma, Mississippi].
I'd play with his kids in between then and at the juke joint. I also got to
play a lot with R.L. Burnside, which was really cool.
BW: How did you know about Pat to move to Memphis to study with him?
JR: I was just driving home one year from college to Maine. I decided to
stop in Memphis and I went to Beale Street. I was walking down the street
and I heard this amazing harmonica coming out of this club and it was this
kid named Billy Gibson, and I was like, "Holy crap!" [Gibson won this year's
BMA for harmonica player of the year] He was my age, the first time I'd
ever seen a harmonica player my age, everybody was 50 and 40, I was 20. I was
like, "You're incredible," and he was, "You think I'm good? Wait till you
hear the next guy." I'm like, "Who's that?" Pat got up and played. I never
heard harmonica like that ever in my life! Sounded like a guitar player.
After he got down, I went up to him. He was really nice, approachable, very
humble, and cool. I said, "I'm in college, I'm from Maine. I was going to go
back to college, but I'm just going to go home and work and get enough money
and move back here and get a job and go to every one of your gigs."
So I just moved back to Memphis. I went to every one of his shows for a
whole year and hung out with him, "How do you do this, how do you do that?"
Probably annoyed him quite a bit. And then he bestowed some other knowledge
on me that I really didn't want to hear at the time and later ended up more
or less saving my life.
"I say if little Walter had known about it,
he would have done it."
BW: Pat Ramsey passed while you were in Amsterdam [in November, 2008]?
JR: The day before I left. I'm actually a little upset about the whole
[thing], not about Pat's death really but, you know, it's frustrating for
people that are fans of somebody to see them die, and then suddenly [they] get
a lot of attention because they're dead. But this is the first time I've
ever seen somebody die and get less attention then when they were alive.
BW: You quit college to move to Memphis and watch this guy for a year and
learn from him for a year. Was your family supportive of this choice?
JR: Not really. My mom pretty much told me that I could do whatever I
wanted to do, but they weren't going to pay for it, which was cool. My dad, on
the other hand, it's hard to say how involved he was or if he even really
knew what I was doing. Every time I would make a CD, I would send it to him.
Then I'd come home a year or two later, and I'd find the CD unopened. He
really never paid much attention to what I was doing. Of course he had a lot
of advice about how to do it.
BW: He didn't open your CDs? That is so sad.
JR: Yeah, it is. He was a business man himself and pretty self-absorbed
dude, unbelievably intelligent and articulate and a very popular figure in
Maine culture. He just basically told me, "I don't care what you want to do.
Just don't ever change your name to Blind Lemon Leaddick." And I still
agree those are good words to live by. He told me to be myself and not try to
be something I'm not, like an old, black Mississippi Blues guy. And I've done
that. I've adamantly done that. And it's probably cost me some fans. I
think that the fans that I've garnered by being myself are worth more and have
more integrity themselves. I think the reason there are a lot of young
kids who don't dig this music is because of the fact that Blues is often
associated with show.
BW: "Show?"
JR: Yeah, show. There's an act there by a lot of the white performers.
They may be excellent musicians, but there's a talk and a kind of inflection
in their voice that does not actually come from their background. I'm not
going to do that. I'm not going to stand up there and wear a suit. You read
the article in [Blues Revue]...I'm not from Mississippi, I've never picked
cotton.
BW: You said, "I've never 'reckoned' a day in my life," my favorite line
anywhere.
JR: There you go! That's the first thing I learned living with R.L.
[Burnside] and Junior was that I was never ever going to be one of those guys.
They grew up with that music. It's part of them from the time they were
little kids, it's their heritage, it's their grandfathers', their cousins',
their second cousins', their great-grandfathers'. There are bloodlines that go
to [Mississippi] Fred McDowell, that go to John Lee Hooker, that go to
Muddy Waters. My bloodlines do not go to those people. I have no history of
that. I stumbled upon it accidentally. No matter how much I dream or wish,
it's not where I come from. I can dig it, I can talk about it, but I'm never
going to be it.
BW: I have what's a really dumb question, but I want to know, what exactly
is "overblowing"?
JR: That's not a dumb question. 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.
Stacy Jeffress is a contributing writer at BluesWax. This is her first
contribution. We are sorry that we called her Sarah last week. A rose by any
other name... You may contact Stacy at blueswax@xxxxxxxxxxx
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