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

[Steve Shriver <steveshriver@xxxxxxx>]

I have to throw in Bill Barrett¹s name here too. His solos sound like a
drunk man falling down the stairs who miraculously rights himself on the
last step and takes a little bow. His technical skills are unassailable, and
he is unafraid to try numerous instrumentations and styles. If you don¹t
know his work you can find it through billbarrett.net


on 4/26/10 7:50 AM, Bill at bill.eborn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 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

-- Steve