Re: [Harp-L] Re: Genius? LOL

[Bill <bill.eborn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Elizabeth wrote
"But who's done anything honestly new in the last 20 years?"

I must also respectfully disagree - I think there's lots of exciting
harmonica around at the moment.

Take Gregoire Maret for example, a chromatic player obviously and extremely
busy playing with a lot of significant people.  I've been tracking down his
session work on Spotify (sorry you don't have this in the states yet, it's
really useful).  I love his stuff with Dapp Theory and Steve Coleman, that
angular M-bass stuff won't be to everyone's taste but it's very much 'now'
in terms of the development of jazz and technically challenging in terms of
what's happening there harmonically.  The other big technical challenge is
that way he can mix the very delicate sound of chrom with all that brass.
If anyone out there has tried to mix it with brass in a group improv at a
jam session or whatever they'll no how tricky that can be.  I saw him with
Tony Gray at Pizza Express in London last year and was totally blown away,
chromatic with hard core jazz-rock fusion and totally holding it's own.
.

So often when I hear a new to me chrom player, I think ok it's good but not
as good as Toots - his legacy is so enormous and so defining but I reckon
Gregoire takes the instrument to a new place and has found a place for it in
a new music.


As i understand it when Levy started on the harp, he was preoccupied by the
lack of a minor third on the second octave in 2nd position, he thought
that's crazy and set out to find it and when he'd found that missing note
set out to find all the others, so it was maybe a more incremental thing,
just one logical step after another with the consequential conclusion being
that he could play much more complex music than is usually presumed possible
on the harp.

That's an incredible and important development, as Sebastien Charlier
mentioned in the article that jerome (i think) posted a link to here a while
back, it's now possible to think of the diatonic harmonica as having a place
in the conservatoire and for those musicians choosing this as instrument to
apply the discipline associated with studying the instrument in the way the
conservatoire would expect.

Another argument to think about if bemoaning the lack of interesting
music, is the state, not of music but the music industry.  My theory is that
music itself is very healthy but the industry is in a mess as it struggles
to adjust to the industrial paradigm brought about by new technology -
there's loads of great stuff out there but the reactionary, risk averse
industry's not bringing it to us maybe that's more the problem