Blues Heard Around the World: A Micro-Memoir
1974: A 16-year old high school senior in downstate Congers, NY, I buy my first harmonica, a Hohner Marine Band made in Germany, and a cheap electric guitar. In hot pursuit of “Whammer Jammer,” a harmonica instrumental by Magic Dick of the J. Geils Band that is popular with my classmates, I am determined to teach myself how to play the blues. I begin the process with the help of several instructional guides, including Blues Harp by Tony “Little Sun” Glover, and by trying to copy, however imperfectly, the sounds that emanate from a series of records I have purchased at a record shop in the nearby Nanuet Mall from the bin marked “blues.”
I manage to find two records featuring harmonica players Glover discusses in his book, older black men who sing all the songs on both albums: Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds Live with Sonny Boy Williamson and The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions. “Bye Bye Bird” and “Little Red Rooster” speak to me. Both albums were recorded in England; Clapton, who backs up Wolf as well as Williamson, also plays incredible lead guitar with Cream and Derek and the Dominos, I soon discover.
I buy Heavy Cream, which has “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Crossroads,” and In Concert, a live album by Derek and the Dominos, and a welter of other record albums featuring photos and drawings of white men and black men — grimacing as they squeeze the guitar strings, or smiling in a relaxed way, or posed like rock stars, impossibly cool and famous. Rory Gallagher’s Irish Tour ’74; B.B. King and Bobby Bland’s Together Again…Live; The Butterfield Blues Band’s Golden Butter, James Cotton’s 100% Cotton; The Climax Blues Band’s FM/Live (“Let’s work together!”); John Mayall’s Movin’ On featuring a jazz trumpet player named Blue Mitchell. Plus King Biscuit Boy by a harmonica player named Richard Newell, from Canada. I’m not sure why, but Canada seems like a strange place for the blues.
1984: Heartbroken but weirdly euphoric after my live-in girlfriend of five years has abandoned me at spring term’s end for one of our fellow English grad students at Columbia, I toss a handful of harmonicas in my backpack and jet off to Paris with a grad school pal and a thick orange copy of Let’s Go Europe ’84. There, in front of the Pompidou Center on a sunny June morning two days after leaving Manhattan, my life veers in a new direction.
I begin as a solo busker, then accumulate a guitar-man: Jakob, from Denmark. Twelve-bar blues are our lingua franca. He sets his open guitar case on the cobblestones and begins strumming; I wail. A scattering of bills and change flutters down. Later, bonded and brimming, shoulders bumping as our jeans pockets bulge, we stroll back through the Quartier Beaubourg past caricature artists at their folding tables and poster-and-t-shirt shops. Here, as elsewhere that summer — in Avignon, Cannes, Florence — the featured images are Americans in dark sunglasses: Tom Cruise in Risky Business, Ackroyd and Belushi in The Blues Brothers.
1985: Nat Riddles, my harmonica teacher, is a black New Yorker, thirty-three to my twenty-seven, a legend in local blues circles. He takes me under his wing that summer. Lets me sit in when he’s busking the streets of Greenwich Village, force-feeds me recordings by harp players I’ve somehow missed in the course of my education. I’m familiar with Butterfield, Cotton, Sonny Terry, Little Walter, some basic Muddy Waters; he blows my mind with Kim Wilson, Sugar Blue, Big Walter Horton, Deford Bailey, John Lee Williamson — the first Sonny Boy, not the older guy who played with the Yardbirds.
Nat has gigged and recorded with Odetta, Washboard Doc, Larry Johnson. He gives me a couple of Johnson & Riddles albums to woodshed with. One of them, Johnson! Where Did You Get That Sound?, is a West German import produced by somebody named Horst Lippmann. Lippmann, I will find out two decades later, is the founder of the American Folk Blues Festival along with his partner, Fritz Rau: the two most important promoters, I will find out much later, in the history of blues music’s global spread.
“Horst wanted to bring me over,” Nat says when I ask. “It never quite happened. I’m still hoping.”
“You need to get over there,” I say. “It’s a whole other world.”
1986: I’m back in Paris for the summer busking season, working the Plateau Beaubourg with Bill Collins, my 20-year-old guitar man from the Bronx. I’m on break, prowling the streets for a couple of takeout Heinekens, when I find myself saying, “You American?” to a young black guy strolling past me who’s got that look — a rapper’s flashy vibe, with heavy gold chains and an iridescent blue shirt, big dark sunglasses — and he says, “Uh huh.” And suddenly, just because we share the language, we’re stopping and chatting like friends from back home.
His name is Bernard Allison. His father is a blues guitarist, Luther Allison, from Chicago. They both live here now; he plays bass in his father’s band. We chat for a moment and then he invites me to come and check out their show at a club called Baiser Sale´, up on the second floor, and slides away.
One month later, in mid-July, I’m in Avignon by myself — Bill and I have parted company — and the festival is on, I’m prowling the Place de l’Horloge with my harps in my daypack and battery-powered Mouse amp dangling from my hand, when I see a black guy in a dashiki sitting in a wheelchair with a Les Paul across his lap, his back to City Hall, twanging through a small amp as he tunes up. He’s about my age, very dark, with dreadlocks tied back in a bundle.
His name is Abraham Yameogo. Born in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, he’s been dividing his time between Paris and Nancy, fronting a band called Kilimandjaro. When he sings “Hoochie Coochie Man” — he invites me to join him after I tell him what I do — his voice is rich, deep, heavily accented: Francophone blues with an African undercurrent. Maugh-dee Waugh-tairs.
We are mobbed the moment we start. We play three sets, one song after another out of the Chicago blues songbook. We make more than two hundred francs apiece before packing up. We kick back at a nearby café, eat salades Nicoises, drink multiple tall beers, chat far into the night.
“My band is gonna join me in two days,” he chuckles. “They let me roll down here and make some trouble before they catch up.”
Later he gives me a press release:
Ce groupe, qui interprete d’une manière tres personelle le blues de <<Chicago>> a ete´ re´cement forme´ par Abraham Yameogo sous ce nom africain, des musiciens d’origines diverses (Haute Volta, Congo, Grece, France, Allemagne), sont reunis par une meme volonte´ de representer la musique noire sous ses forms ne´es dans le monde occidental (USA). De plus traditionelles aux plus urbanes et dansantes. Le repertoire propose´, va du blues traditional a la soul music, en passant par le blues urbain et le reggae.
[This group, which interprets Chicago blues in a highly personal way, was recently formed by Abraham Yameogo. Under this African name, musicians from diverse backgrounds (Upper Volta, Congo, Greece, France, Germany) are united by a shared desire to present a range of black musical styles originating in the Western World (USA), from the most traditional to the most urban and dance-oriented. The repertoire ranges from traditional blues through soul music, passing through urban blues and reggae.]
Long after we’ve parted company — and we’ve reunited four more times through the years, in Nancy, New York, Paris, and Oxford, Mississippi — Abraham will linger in my mind as a pointed but unanswerable question, a question that doesn’t need to be answered. Which of us is more authentic? Who is closer to the source? The African-born blues singer with the French accent, or the white American blues singer with the American accent?
He is, of course. He’s a much better and more experienced musician. He IS the blues, in a palpable and uncanny way. But still.
The moment the question first arises, which is the moment I first hear Abraham sing, provides a stunning epiphany: is the vaguely indulgent feeling I get as an American when I hear blues sung with a French accent, or any non-American accent, the way that Black Americans feel when they hear me, or any white American, sing, or try to sing, blues?
1987: Mr. Satan and I are playing on 125th Street in our usual spot, the stretch of sidewalk next to the Studio Museum in Harlem, in this first summer of what will turn out to be a decades-long partnership, when the members of U2 — Bono, The Edge — wander by and pause to watch us groove on “Freedom For My People.” I’m making my usual frying-eggs sound, as Mr. Satan calls it; he’s brushing a homemade bleach-bottle pick across the strings of his Ampeg Super Stud guitar, stomping on a pair of hi-hat cymbals, singing in a hoarse rasp. He’s only fifty-one but his fluffy grey beard makes him look much older, like a Biblical prophet.
The encounter lasts a minute or two at most. Then they and their camera crew are gone. I have no idea we’ve just been playing for the #1 rock group in the world, riding high on the success of The Joshua Tree. They’re Irish, somebody tells me.
A year later, when Rattle and Hum is released, album and then film, thirty-eight seconds of our black-and-white performance has been included. We are semi-famous, suddenly, although not for the music we play 95% of the time, which is blues. Having the movie out there, the album: it feels like something is working for us, out in the world. That’s how Mr. Satan talks about it. “It’s working for us, mister! You wait and see.”
1990: With our first demo cassette, Satan and Adam, in hand by that spring, we have begun our rise, opening for Buddy Guy at Summerstage in Central Park, and then, in mid-August, traveling to Nova Scotia — our first out-of-town trip, by car and cruise ship — to play the International BuskerFest in Halifax. The U2 connection helped get us the gig and has become a touchstone of our showbiz biography. We drink strong Canadian beer, play fiercely and well in the clear dry light, rake in Canadian bills and coins for ten days straight, and shake lots of white hands, which is a change from Harlem, where all the hands that reach out, slap me five, touch my shoulder and chest in a friendly instructive way, and point towards the Apollo Theater a block away — “Don’t forget us when you make it!” — are black.
1991: Satan and Adam break big: a debut CD on Flying Fish Records, major management, a pair of overseas tours. The first tour, ten days in the UK opening for Bo Diddley, is enabled by the fact that Bo is our roster-mate at Talent Consultants International. Bo has been working over there since 1963, when he tag-teamed with Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, and an unknown local band called the Rolling Stones, but it’s a new world for us, as are the encounters with the gatekeepers of UK blues fandom: journalists and DJs.
They find us after soundchecks in London, Newcastle, Glasgow, notebooks and tape recorders in hand. The former want interviews and a photograph, the latter want interviews and personalized station ID’s. Norman Darwen from Blues & Rhythm, with whom I will stay in touch over the years, chats up Mr. Satan — he calls him “Mr. Satan,” as we all do — and publishes our first serious profile in the international blues press: “Me and the Devil: Norman Darwen Talks to Satan.” Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings 2-CD set has just been released and people are fascinated by the devil-at-the-crossroads theme.
I’m fascinated the first time Mr. Satan speaks German, later that summer during our second tour. We’re in Neuchatel, Switzerland, taking a break from the busker’s festival to chat with a blues DJ from Radio Fribourg. He asks Mr. Satan if he’s ever been to Europe before. Mr. Satan starts talking about being an Army paratrooper stationed in Germany, back in the Fifties — seeing an Elvis Presley movie, deciding he should get a guitar, trading some white guy on the base for his used one. Then he says a couple of things in German, including “Wienerschnitzel.”
At the busker’s festival in Ferrara, Italy, on opening night, we set up our battery-powered amps and Mr. Satan’s percussion rig in the middle of an immense cobblestoned courtyard rimmed by ancient stone buildings. We are surrounded by a huge, near-silent crowd. Almost every adult has a camera and is pointing it at us. We’re an older black man from Mississippi and a younger white man from New York, but at this particular moment we are just couple of American blues guys surrounded by a foreign mob, chuckling nervously.
“Do you believe this?” I whisper.
“Hell,” he rasps, “I don’t have to believe a damned thing. I got eyes!
“Il diavolo!” somebody shouts. Later I will find out that the local press in this Catholic country has been playing up the devil-angle, along with the Rattle and Hum angle.
As we’re packing up after the set, a journalist from Il Blues crouches on the paving stones and asks me for an interview. We agree to meet the following afternoon.
“You like Paul Delay?” he asks
“Who’s Paul Delay?”
He smiles, surprised. “You don’t know this one?”
“Never heard of him.”
“A great American harmonica player. He just played Ferrara last year.”
The next day he hands me a cassette. You’re Fired: The Best of the Paul Delay Band. And he’s right. He knows something about our music — my music — that I don’t know. This bothers me, then intrigues me.
1992–1998: Over the next six years, until Mr. Satan has a nervous breakdown and disappears down South, we maintain a modest international presence. We tour Finland twice, play the Guinness Temple Bar Blues Festival in Dublin, fly to Australia for a week’s worth of gigs. Promoters in those countries who feel they can make a profit by importing us do that. Canada, too: summer festivals in Winnipeg and Toronto; a January club date in snowy Montreal. Our manager gets us good money and I am happy to be somebody’s commodity. We make the cover of Folk-Roots (UK) and are featured in Juke Blues (UK), Blues Life (Austria) and Blues News (Finland). Non-US journalists and DJs are invariably more conversant than their US equivalents with Mr. Satan’s prior career as Sterling Magee, early Sixties soul singer with not-quite-hits like “Oh She Was Pretty” and “Get in My Arms Little Girl.” Much later I will discover that his old 45s are embraced by the UK’s Northern Soul subculture: traded, danced to, woven into compilation CDs.
Our non-US audiences, wherever we travel, trend almost entirely white, although interracial couples sometimes show up — hoping, perhaps, to catch a bluesy reflection of themselves. The Finns drink with more abandon than most; at the ski resort in Akaslompolo, north of the Arctic Circle, a pair of shirtless bearded men dry-hump in front of the stage. “Saatanallista Menoa Ylioppilastalolla,” reads the handbill for our show at the Student House in Tampere. “Taman duon nimea on fundamentalistijeesusten turha tavailla nurinpain, silla rienaava yhdistelma aukenee vasemmalta oikellekin luettuna…..Muddy Watersin ja B. B. Kingin kanssa, ja vilahtivatpa he myos U2 — elokuvassa Rattle & Hum.”
2005: The Bouki Blues Festival in Dakar is the brainchild of Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese scholar of slavery and the blues who was mentored by the late Peter Aschoff at the University of Mississippi, my employer for the past three years. It’s an academic conference with a concert component and offers me the chance to visit Africa for the first time. I bring along my harps, just in case.
“What musical form symbolizes human sufferance better than the blues?” asks Dr. Seck on the festival website. “The blues is a way of life, a synthesis of African culture in America. Its most typical melodic features came from the Sahel and the savannah of West Africa just like Bouki and Lapin, the famous folktales characters which one still finds today in Louisiana.” The scholars who show up are an international cohort, mostly American and European. The first concert, in the university lecture hall where we read our papers, features a quartet from Casamance, a region — Senegal’s Deep South — considered somewhat exotic by Dakar’s urbanites, I’m told. Two very dark young men with very high cheekbones strum long-necked, narrow-bodied xalam lutes as two young women sing in high, keening voices.
Near the end of their set it is made clear to me, as the visiting American bluesman from Mississippi, that I am expected to take the stage and jam with them: a ceremonial coming-together of African and American blues energies. I figure out, with a furtive toot or two, that the key of C harmonica I’ve stowed in my briefcase is pitched a diminished fifth away from their key center, guaranteeing a horrible grating train wreck. I explain this to Dr. Seck and my other hosts. With great good humor they make clear that this is not a problem. I finally take the stage, nod to the quartet as they play on, listen for the groove, then double the main riff and lock in, a tritone above the lutes. And it works — at least to judge from the applause, raised fists, and demands for more. We have come together from opposite sides of the world to create something weirdly beautiful.
2007: Not long after I create my Dirty-South Blues Harp Channel on YouTube and begin uploading free instructional videos, I sense from their handles and comments that my rapidly accumulating subscriber base constitutes a far-flung international cohort. It isn’t until I create an allied website, Modernbluesharmonica.com, and figure out how to add Google Analytics, however, that the true dimensions of blues harmonica’s ever-increasing global attraction becomes apparent. In calendar year 2018, Modern Blues Harmonica will accrue 137,000 individual visitors and more than 750,000 page views from 192 different countries and territories around the world, including 35 of the 54 countries in Africa. (140 visitors from Anglophone Nigeria; only four from Francophone Senegal.)
2009: I’m in the early stages of recreating myself as a one-man band with the help of a small wooden stomp-board that has been given to me by Brandon Bailey, a teenaged black harmonica player in Memphis whom I’ve begun to mentor. We first become aware of each other after he comments in one of my YouTube instructionals that I’ve misplayed a couple of notes in a particularly tricky section of “Whammer Jammer.” Intrigued, I drive up to Memphis at his invitation to watch him play Magic Dick’s hard-charging instrumental in the semifinals of a “Star Search” competition at the Orpheum Theatre. A partnership ensues, one in which I coach him to victory by passing along a couple of key lessons that Nat Riddles had offered me two decades earlier. The stomp-board is his gift for that help.
In late May I upload my first public experiment in the new mode: a performance video and lesson video on “Crossroads Blues.” I have adapted Robert Johnson’s composition for solo harp by adding my own translation of Eric Clapton’s signature riff from the live Cream version, backed with a stomp-board groove that conjures up the spirit of Mr. Satan.
Five weeks later, in early July, YouTube’s algorithm shoots me a video entitled “Crossroad Blues (Åmål Blues Fest 2009)” by a Swedish harmonica player, Hakan Ehn, who has taken my opening riff and run with it. He’s got a kickdrum and a portable amp and is playing for a small Swedish bar audience. He’s stolen my shit! I think, stunned at how quickly digital technologies allow musical ideas to circle the world. But he hasn’t stolen it, and it’s not my shit. He openly acknowledges his sources, and mine, in the video description:
Åmål´s Blues Fest 2009. Harmonica: Hakan Ehn. 0:00: Crossroads (Robert Johnson), inspired by Adam Gussow and Eric Clapton/Cream. 4:25: What´d I Say (Ray Charles), inspired by Satan & Adam version with Adam Gussow´s harmonica.
Later Hakan and I become long-distance buddies, commenting on each other’s videos and chuckling about this moment of first contact. I develop a similar friendship with Lars Ringaard, Ehn’s Danish peer; we end up sharing the stage at the small, smoke-filled Mojo Blues Bar in Copenhagen the following year, capping off a short European tour — Amsterdam, Helmond, Munster — that I’ve organized to promote my new solo album, Kick and Stomp.
2012: For one brief shining moment, I am a hot property in British blues circles. Continuing sales of Kick and Stomp, driven by a viral video of “Crossroads Blues” filmed in the Mississippi Delta, has convinced the head of a UK record label to license my album with a promise of heavy UK and European distribution, including radio and press. (Within two years the deal will collapse when my London bossman finds himself disinclined to send me any accountings or royalties.) Another Londoner, the harmonica-playing head of a high-end musicians’ collective that specializes in supplying show bands for corporate clients at bespoke events, offers me a gig. He will fly me to London, put me up in a nice hotel, and pay me $1500 to perform solo for ten minutes at a posh fundraiser for Save the Children UK. Also on the bill will be James Cotton, Dr. John, Maceo Parker, K. T. Tunstall, and Ronnie Wood of the Stones. Tickets are 500 pounds apiece.
As I sit on the plane heading home after the gig has been played, high over the Atlantic, several moments stand out. The least memorable is my miniscule set, performed while salad plates are being cleared before the main course. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Helena Bonham Carter are sitting at a front table, my host tells me just before I go on. I am the blues equivalent of expensive imported sherbet, designed to clear the palate before the next important thing happens. I play “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” — not the best choice for Save the Children, it occurs to me later — followed by “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Crossroads Blues.” I have been flown across the Atlantic Ocean from Mississippi to play three songs for rich and fashionable Londoners in the hopes that they will drink heavily, enjoy themselves mightily, and throw money away on knickknacks during the silent auction. This is blues music in transnational context circa 2012. This is what globalization has done to the music I love.
But there is more, and it is what I will remember.
Chris Barber, for example: a friendly old white man in a tux with thinning hair and spectacles who spies me in the backstage canteen when I’m chowing down after soundcheck and sits down to chat. He’s got a trombone case in hand and will be joining me later, he says, for the all-star finale. I have no idea who he is but do my best to make polite conversation. Only later will I find out that he, like Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, changed the course of blues history — in the UK, and thus the world — as a jazz band leader and promoter who brought Muddy Waters to England for the first time in 1958.
“It was Big Bill Broonzy who changed everything,” he said. “We got him here in 1951.”
“You knew Big Bill Broonzy?” I said.
His eyes shine. “Nobody had ever heard anything like it. Amazing man. He changed everything.”
Later, sitting in my dressing room, I listen to Maceo Parker warm up in the room right next door. He blasts out scales for fifteen or twenty minutes: hard, disciplined work. He’s not phoning it in. I used to copy his licks off James Brown records.
Relaxing in the dressing room at the very end of the hall is James Cotton, one of my earliest harmonica heroes. I end up visiting with him while the silent auction is taking place, amazed at my luck. Later, when Dr. John and Maceo and everybody else is on stage and Cotton is leading us through “Got My Mojo Working,” he’ll glance at me over his shoulder, I’ll throw down my best, and the Rolling Stones’ #2 guitar player, standing in front of me, will give me a grinning thumbs up. But now, hanging out with the man himself, I’m filled with questions. The history he carries is priceless. He can put the pieces together.
“Muddy wanted me to be Little Walter,” he says hoarsely. “He wanted that sound. He tried to get me to make it. I could make it, but it wasn’t my sound. You know when he quit riding me?”
“When?”
“The Newport Festival.”
“Back in the early 1960s?”
“That’s it. He saw what happened with the crowd on ‘Got My Mojo Workin’ when I blew my thing on it. He left me alone about Walter after that.”
He tells me about listening to Sonny Boy Williamson’s “King Biscuit Time” show on a little radio his mother brings into the Mississippi cotton fields, back when he was a boy. He tells me about the day he blew harp on the steps of the plantation commissary and made $46 in tips. He tells me about traveling with Sonny Boy as a teenager and taking over his band when Sonny Boy went to Chicago. He tells me about playing with Wolf.
Finally I ask him the question I’ve been wanting to ask my whole life. It’s about “Creeper Creeps Again,” a seven-and-a-half minute instrumental on 100% Cotton that struck me like a thunderbolt at age 16. It had a harp sound so massive I was sure he was using some special instrument, not the same ten-hole Hohner Marine Band I was playing, plus it swung unbelievably hard through twenty or thirty stop-time breaks, every one executed perfectly. It was a perfect recording. How had he done that? It’s hard to do that.
He smiles. “We stayed at my place outside Chicago. The band and me. We rehearsed for a whole week.”
“Rehearsal,” I said.
“That’s it. Hard work.”
2015: He calls himself Komson Blues. He is a young Chinese man with wire-rimmed glasses — an early twentysomething? — who uploads YouTube videos of himself playing harmonica. In many of the videos he is sitting in what appears to be a college dorm room, with dingy fluorescent backlighting and a huge cartoonish stuffed brown bear slouched in a chair behind him. Every video is a performance piece: his attempt to replicate, as closely as possible, a particular recording by a well-known blues harmonica player. His technique and his ear are scary good.
He’s got a fine rendering of James Cotton’s “Pacific Blues,” along with homages to Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and several other deceased African American greats. Magic Dick is spoken for — he nails “Whammer Jammer” — as are other white players who came of age during the 1970s in the immediate aftermath of the Blues Revival, including Jerry Portnoy, William Clarke, Kim Wilson, and Rick Estrin. He has also included his takes on a representative sample of non-US players: Bonny B (Cambodia/Switzerland), Steve Baker (UK/Germany), Flavio Guimarães (Brazil), Paul Lamb (UK), Jean-Jacques Milteau (France), Victor Puertas (Spain), Lee Sankey (UK), and Frédéric Yonnet (France/United States). His YouTube channel is a curated collection of self-designated masterworks, offering viewers a tour of the blues harmonica world as he understands it.
Komson first comes to my attention when “blues harmonica: Adam Gussow solo cover” shows up in my YouTube suggested videos. In the span of 84 seconds, with a metronome clicking, he replicates a harmonica part that I’d improvised for a Swatch watch commercial back in the late 1980s, one in which Mr. Satan and I grinned and jammed on the steps of a Greenwich Village brownstone. I’ve uploaded it to my own YouTube channel at some point; he has found it and — I gather — designated it a masterwork. He copies my part so perfectly, with such eerie fidelity, that I sign in and leave words of praise. Within twenty-four hours he has emailed me:
dear adam:
i am the guy who imitate your solo from the Swatch watch ad, and thank you for your comments, and i got some questions, can you explain for me or give some tips. thank you so much~~
Q: i heard the song named “good morning little school girl” its sonny boy williamson version, but seems its not 12 bar blues, cause i lost the beat every time, and i am not clear about the 8 bar blues, is this the 8 bar blues song?
Q: i really love playing blues harmonica, but i know its not sound good if i play all the time, but i am not good at singing, could you give some advices how to singing blues songs?
Q: do you got plan to come China to play? nowadays, blues harmonica fans all know adam, hahaha, you are my teacher~~
thank you so much
Best wishes
komson
Komson and I exchange several emails. I answer his questions, offer him tips. “I don’t really have any advice about how to learn blues singing,” I write, “except to listen to the best singers. I like Sugar Ray Norcia (Sugar Ray and the Bluetones), Joe Williams (with Count Basie), Keb’ Mo’, Eric Bibb, Junior Parker, John Nemeth.” He becomes my far-flung correspondent in the nascent Chinese blues scene. “So here’s the situation,” he tells me:
1: nowadays blues music is not popular like pop music, so people playing blues harmonica, its not easy to change the feeling to blues style.
2: few ways to learn blues (youtube can not be open here), so people who love blues harmonica need to take some way to watch videos in youtube.
3: blues players normally playing gigs in some developed city in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen.
4: some blues players come to China this year, such as: Mathew Skoller band play gig in May 18th, and blues guitarist: Shun Kikuta played in Beijing few days ago.
5: We run a harmonica party about two weeks ago, but not just blues harmonica, such as: tremolo harmonica, chromatic harmonica, blues harmonica. about 200 people, this is the second annual party, we hope more and more people love to play blues harmonica, cause its really amazing music.
6: harmonica player such as: Kim Wilson and Rod Piazza, we just watch videos or listen records, and do love their sound.
Hope more and more people love blues, Hope blues in China getting better.
Thank you so much.
Best wishes,
komson
And so we roll, onward into the new millennium.
