New video from HakanEhn. I think this stuff is great. He's taking a series of old jazz/blues heads ("Things Ain't the Way They Used to Be," "Jumping with Symphony Sid," "Red Top," and others) and processing them in a way that nobody would confuse with Chicago in the 1950s. Some might say, "Well, he's....EURO-ized the blues. It doesn't really swing. It's...processed." And I say: Exactly. He's a contemporary Swedish harp player (and I hope I've got his nationality right; I don't want to start a war!!) making extremely creative use of the sounds and materials that the modern world has made available to him. He's not PRETENDING to be anything that he's not. He's not on a retro trip--although he's extremely familiar with the tradition. He's pushing the boundaries. He's trying to come up with something new even as he's reshaping the traditional materials he's inherited.
I value stuff like this, frankly, far more than any amount of patently derivative covers of old Chicago and West Coast blues. This doesn't mean that HakanEhn could blow Rod Piazza or any of his clones off the stage. And he doesn't swing like Rod. But he's authentic and modern--he's modern precisely in a way that Rod is not. In that respect, he--like Sugar Blue and Jason Ricci--is far truer to the spirit of Little Walter than the self-styled "traditionalists" are.
Here's the clip:
For those who are curious, here are the technical details:
SHURE SM57 microphone connected directly into BOSS recording studio.
BOSS BR-1200CD, digital recording studio: - bass and drums. - chorus and reverb effects: harmonica, bass and drums. - pitch shifter effects: harmonica, pitch -3, D:E balance 76:100.
Last Edited by on May 23, 2009 7:06 AM
I dont know what your saying Adam but my girlfriend said if we in the local bluesclub AJ s in Philly we would be dancing to it.. I think it swings.Great tone
so who would you list as modern blues harmonica players? Jason Ricci Carlos delJunco Sugar Blue John Popper (I hear more blues lines in his playing than anything else) Adam Gussow
Well, to my ear it sounds horrible. I don't find that kind of sound very modern either ; reminds me of some bands in the beginning of the 80's, like Residents or Telex. They had a strong distanciation from the music they played, and used a synthetic sound to that purpose (check The Residents covering "Hit the Road Jack" for example).
I like the vid he did with is new hair cut! That's funny!! OH and he can play the shit out of the chromatic too. I like his ideas on the chrom more than the diatonic, but he is doing his thing and not someone elses! He's good too. He's not just posting crap just to on youtube!
Budda John Popper? I know he's original, but that don't mean its good! And yes I know he's is very acomplished harmonica player, but there's more to it than that! For me he doesn't have that it!! I don't know how to explain it. He just doesn't seem to diverse enough for me.
let me say this about John Popper. I have only met him once. We was playing at a music festival. I had a gig in a club right outside of the festival grounds.
John walks in and paid the tabled directly in front me to leave. So now he and four others are sitting there and I could tell he was engaged with my music and playing. Shortly after we took a break and he graciously and politely introduced himself and then asked if he could sit in. I was going to offer anyway...
At the time, I had a crazy good band (hmm, I've always had crazy good bands) and John sounded really good considering it was an improv style jam band. Popper is much more versatile than you think. I don't class him as I would Jason Ricci but John Popper is a damn good musician, the problem is very few people know it. He's not a bad blues player and he has more original and bluesy type lines that I hear most harp players use.
John was impressed with the band and left us a $200 tip. It no coincidence to me that several months later that John Popper project surfaced and what kind of band is that? Funky improv Jam Band and what's this he's using a massive pedal board with many of the same effects that I use? And the band is harmonica bass and drums? Hey that's my thing! :-)
Now I'd liked to think it was me that inspired that but I can't claim such a thing because I don't know for sure.
However, as much as I didn't like Popper and his music before and as much as it doesn't move me know, I can't take away from the fact that he is indeed a "real" musician. He wasn't created by the media, he did it the old school way, talent, drive and a bit of luck.
OH yeah I agree with all that. I would like add one more thing. I wasn't bsshing him. Because I know you can't get that good at what you do with out hard work! I'm just not a fan of his work! Sitting around and jamming with someone is the true test of how good a musician really is talent wise. And I haven't done that! anyone that leaves me a $200 tip has a friend for life!
To your list, I'd add: Madcat Ruth Magic Dick (rock/blues comping, as much as anything) Billy Branch (inflects his stuff with chorus pedal) Greg Szlap Paul Delay Igor Flach Wade Schuman (more or less) Billy Gibson LD Miller
Each of these players is striving to modernize the sound, the approach.
I like Popper, too; he's a real musician. Great singer. His attack is too light for me, so that his blues pitches don't really dig in.
But you are absolutely right about what he got from you--given the evidence of these two videos--and that's new to me. Thanks for filling in the record.
Last Edited by on May 23, 2009 8:59 AM
He's playing with a rhythm machine, which accounts for the lack of swing. About the rest of it: we have an honest disagreement. I think that "modern" harmonica can be many things.
The words you use to describe HakanEhn, or analogues of them, were ALL used to describe Charlie Parker when he first came on the scene in the early 1940s. The truly modern always upsets the apple cart. I've heard many harp players put down Sugar Blue's playing for the same reasons.
Kudzurunner:I can't compare any comparison to this clip of this gentleman HakanEhn (if thats his name) with charlie parker coming onto the scene.
I don't know this player. Never heard him before in my life. From this clip that was my opinion.
The film industry have had wonderful technological advances now in making pictures and how with the right quality of Actors they can really do things, but it needs one essential thing.A good story.
I agree that modern blues harmonica can incorporate this ave of playing and quite rightly it should.I'm sure some will dig it and that helps the whole MBH business.
I also understand where you're coming from. You're a jazz guy. I'll be the first to say that this particular video doesn't swing. It has a bit of improvisation toward the end, but mostly it's not about that. My own aesthetic, as a performer, is quite different from Hakan's. I swing very hard, I care about dynamics, I try to put various sort of sharp edges and full tones on individual notes....I basically approach the harp like a combination of Hank Crawford and Larry Carlton (the guitarist for The Crusaders.)
Still, I appreciate the impulse to modernize that seems to drive what he's done here. I believe that the contemporary blues harmonica scene is, or was until recently, dominated by a backward-looking attitude, one that mistakenly associated "real" blues harp with a sound that was essentially codified half a century ago. Since the players who codified that sound, and Little Walter in particular, were radical innovators during their own time, I felt as though I were seeing a paradox, and a self-imposed limitation, where everybody else was just seeing The Way Things Were.
Now, I'm a guy who sells video lessons and tabs that teach people how to play all that classic old stuff! So I'm not saying, "Hey, forget about your cars, let's all become Jetsons! Beam me up, Scotty!" I know how important the tradition is. But I'm equally cognizant of how important the modernizing impulse is. It's what keeps everything alive and free-flowing and edgy. And each successive generation of modern sounds ends up, after sufficient time has passed, coming to seem like the real-deal sound of that time.
When blues harmonica players look back and the 1990s and early 2000s, which players will they point to and say, "THAT stuff has the sound of that era"?
That, to me, is the most important question any contemporary harp player should be asking himself, or herself.
If a player doesn't dig deeply enough into the tradition, he runs the risk of not making a mark on it. But if he buries himself in the tradition to the point where he's merely revoicing familiar borrowed licks, idioms, songs rather than wrestling the tradition in a new direction--as Jason Ricci and Sugar Blue, for example, have clearly wrestled it--then he runs the equally strong risk that he'll end up being seen as one of a hundred merely secondary artists of the time; part of the culture, surely, as Mojo Buford and Good Rockin' Charles were part of the Chicago blues harp culture of the 1960s, but no more than that.
I respect Hakan because, whatever you say about his playing, he's very familiar with the blues tradition as a whole, he's found a distinctly modern sound--processed, yes, but we live in a processed world--and his video sounds like....well, like today. It's just one man's take on The Modern, but I see it as an experiment worth making.
I agree with you, by the way, about the importance of telling stories, but again: Bird and Dizzy were lambasted by many jazz critics when the first burst onto the scene as having thin tone, playing much too fast, playing NONSENSE, basically. That's what bebop was considered: insane noise, played at insane tempos. As a jazz cat, I'm sure you know this. Nobody could hear the "story" in what they were playing. Eventually the world caught up with them, integrating their discoveries into slightly less radical approaches (Hank Crawford, Sonny Stitt, Richie Cole, if I can cram all those guys into the post-bebop envelope), but also, in figures like Ornette, Trane, and Eric Dolphy, going them one better. The modernizing process produces a number of waves; one wave is the retro impulse--the impulse to look back to older idioms, recapitulate them, perfect them, classicize them. That's why, 40 years after "Groovin' High," you get those albums where somebody scores Bird's solos for a sax quartet.
We're at the stage right now, with 70s/80s hard rock, where people are more or less scoring Bad Company and Kiss for full orchestras. That's the moment at which the modernizing impulse for that particular idiom has been fought to the death by the classicizing impulse.
One thing that has tempered the modernizing impulse in blues harmonica since the 1960s is the fact that most of the younger players were white. Rather than struggle against their precursors--i.e., the black guys who invented the music--they tended to want to BECOME their precursors. (This wasn't true, interestingly, for the best of that first generation: Musselwhite, Butterfield, and Magic Dick. They actually tried to do new things.) And of course, when a whole culture (call it white Euro-American blues culture) is inventing itself from scratch, some serious study of the tradition needs to go on, or else you get a lot of pretty bad blues harp playing.
At a certain point, though, when the tradition has been mastered, you need a creative act of aggression vis a vis your precursors: what might be called the "FUCK Little Walter!" stage where, by any means necessary, you yank things in new directions.
Or at least that's how I see it. One of my missions with this website is to clarify my position on all this and to spread the word, so that young players coming of age these days know that it's OK to try bold new things, even at the risk of failure. Through my videos, I'm challenging them to deepen their understanding of the tradition (no "harp lite" here), but I'm also challenging them to step beyond the tradition.
I appreciate you challenging me, because it forced me to dig a little deeper. Heck, maybe Mr. Ehn will be forced to dig a little deeper. It's all good.
Last Edited by on May 23, 2009 11:29 AM
Yes, your quite right, in that in jazz a lot of us do have a tendency to dig a hole in a particular time warp and then expand from that dimention.
In fact the other situation also can occur where you diversify too much and be too radical for any one to connect with.
I guess thats why perhaps experimentation with the blues still retains some reasoning to the listner.
Jazz in many ways is it's own enemy unlike blues perhaps.
Certainly when I hear a jazz,blues sax player or Blues harp player, the first thing I do is try and find reference to who they sound like or play like.
You could argue that what your describing is the true artist, that he or she does'nt get swayed by any traditional convention.A jazz player which ever style they were doing, would argue that's what they are doing.
Processing sound I don't like, they experimented with a device (Cant remember the name) in the early 60s I think,A sax sounding more like two or three of them, very close to whats going on here.For me just dosen't penetrate the soul.
Sadly I observe that most inovation tends to take place after world wars where all the exsisting values are smashed and then redeveloped. Thats merely an observation ha,
Last Edited by on May 23, 2009 12:19 PM
SOP writes: "Certainly when I hear a jazz,blues sax player or Blues harp player, the first thing I do is try and find reference to who they sound like or play like."
Well, the first track I listened to Buddha, I only listened to the beginning then it went all Blues reminded me of Miles Davis and Coltrane. Davis in the way Bitches Brew was. But very modal. The tone of your harmonica is very trumpet/horn like; Miles had no vibrato, and at some points you do that same vibratoless thing.
ok all theres no doubting there are some great modern day harmonica players about , but there is one harp player thats gotta get a mention , and that is west weston hes a uk based blues harp player, who rocks the socks of his audiences, he has plenty of stuff on you tube ,i dont know how to paste and copy to put on here, but theres a video which goes under british harp ace caught live, you should all check it out , and i am fortunate enough to have had the pleasure of going to watch him perform live at the aint nothing but glub, and i can honestly say he has got to be one of the finest blues harp players in the uk and europe.
West Weston http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2T2qUIic1g
Well, I wouldn't call him modern at all. He's definitely very good but he's not doing any I haven't heard before or anything that is unique to him.
Look at the list above. Jason Ricci definitely has his own sound and is very identiable. He's clearly doing new and never before heard things on the harp.
Adam Gussow plays things that most dont and also has a very unique sound.
now that I think about it, I think one of the marks of the modern blues player is the non-use of bullet mics. I know this doesn't apply to everybody but it's seems to apply to most.
I've chatted with West Weston a couple of times - a really nice guy and clearly a fantastic player.
I can also totally recommend his Marine Band harps which he customises - not a whole load more money than an out of the box harp, but way better to play. Sealed comb, optimum tuning etc.
However, I think he is deliberately sticking to that traditional jump style, which still sounds amazing to me by the way. I know from talking to him that he doesn't use overblows.
I'm not saying that's in any way reductive of course, but as Buddha points out I don't think he's attempting to break new ground or be particularly 'modern'.
The non-use of the bullets had occured to me also - seems many of today's innovators are using various alternatives.
ok buddha your comments are given full respect as ever. wont argue at all with the jason ricci and adam gussow comments, they are legends in there own rights , but back here in dear old blighty , if you are looking for a harp player to inspire you whos british then west weston would come out on top by miles, hes got a great sound,and a exellent vocalist to boot. its just an opinion.
Without getting into the broader discussion of "what's modern/what's throwback", I think Mitch Kashmar's title cut off of Nickels and Dimes in an interesting example of something that breaks out of recycling the same 'ol licks you've heard time and again without becoming some sort of exercise in ambient space noise :^).
It's contemporary sounding to me. And it's there with designs on making you shake your ass. And I guess that's the lens that I look a lot of music through: Will the ladies shake ass to it on a Saturday night? = good.
Gosh, I guess this might be heresy here but, MAYBE harmonica doesn't BELONG everywhere and in everything. Have people pushed the instrument past folk tunes and blues and country and funk? Yes. Some of them have done it very well. But sometimes people who aren't equipped to do it bring the harp out in places where it makes me cringe musically. It's like they're trying to eat soup with a fork.
