Musical Ramblings

Snowstorm of records

A "seasonal" slew of new reviews. I seem to be buying way too many records these days, but I still (barely) manage to find the time to listen to them, so... I guess I'll slow my acquisition rate when I can't handle the input anymore !

One of the most striking records I've discovered these last few months is Roland Kirk's early 60s debut on Atlantic, The Inflated Tear. I was introduced to Kirk through the Derek Trucks cover of his Volunteered Slavery, and a budget pricing on The Inflatable Tear triggered an impulsive purchase. I don't regret it one bit. There's a lot in that record that's reminiscent of the 60s Atlantic production style, but Roland Kirk is something else. One of the things that doesn't quite satisfy me in Coltrane's stuff for example, is that all the wildness is in the harmony of the improvisation, but the sound is mostly polished velvet. That's what Coltrane is rightfully famed for, but it doesn't move me. Kirk's sound is wild, and while he can (and sometimes does) go crazy in the improvisations, it's as much a primal sound as it is an exploratory construction, if you see what I mean. He doesn't strive for perfect accuracy, sometimes the sax quacks, breathes, wails, it's alive with energy. When he plays two or three saxes at the same time he builds powerful harmonies that simply could not be duplicated by multiple instruments and sound profoundly primitive. It's his sound, and it's very very potent. And The Inflatable Tear is one of his most introspective records, I'm told! Anyway, I loved it, from the somber nasal opening of The Black and Crazy Blues to the swinging, dying moans of I'm Glad there is You. The title track, The Inflated Tear, is particularly striking and frightening, with the multiple saxes bellowing over a dark and rumbling accompaniment.

Jean-Jacques Milteau (1999)

Since I've started decomissioning the original Planet Harmonica, I'm slowly migrating some of the old English Language content here. Here's a very long (and very interesting) interview that was published in the first issue of Planet Harmonica back in 2000. The interview was recorded in early 1999 in Paris, a few months before the release of the album Bastille Blues. I'm reposting it in extenso, simply updating the English since my original translation was a little shaky...

Benoît Felten: In France you're one of the harmonica players who's been on the scene the longest...

Jean-Jacques Milteau: The ancestor!

BF: If you look back 30 years, when you started playing harp, what's changed ?

JJM: Everything! This morning I met an old friend, a banjo player, and he told me he was deep into computer problems... We never would have thought when we started playing music that computers would ever be useful to us... I think everything has changed radically. When we started we were at the end of a century, now we're at the beginning of another.

BF: How has the perception of the harmonica and the music that features it evolved ? You started in the middle of the blues boom...

Adam Gussow Bares it All !

The ex-NYC diatonic harmonica player Adam Gussow, famous for his collaboration with guitarist Sterling McGhee in the duo Satan & Adam, has undertaken a wonderful and free series of informal tuition videos of blues harmonica on Youtube. Amplification, chording, tone, are only a fraction of the subjects broached in the first ten lessons currently available on Youtube, and Adam is adding a few each day, so you can start working on your harp playing daily with outside help !

All the videos are to be found here.

Jason Ricci finds a label

Maestro jam-blues harp player Jason Ricci has landed a record deal with label Delta Groove Productions. As mentioned on their website :

Delta Groove Productions is proud to announce the newest addition to  our family, Jason Ricci & The New Blood! Their upcoming release on Delta Groove is being produced by the Grammy Award winning producer John Porter.

Delta Groove already produces a number of blues artists, both traditional and out of the box, including Johnny Dyer, Ana Popovic, Kid Ramos and Philip Walker.

In addition, Jason has signed with agents Intrepid Artists to handle the bookings, in the hope of landing better and bigger venues. Hopefully, next time we see him in Europe, it'll be at a classy venue !!!

Mutation of the Planet

I have announced this week in an interview on the French harmonica blog L'Homme et l'Harmonica that Planet Harmonica will soon no longer exist in the current form. If you read French, the interview is here. If not, the reasons in a nutshell :

• it was technically too much work to maintain a "classic" website
• it was also too much hard work to keep the bilingual thing up
• it was editorially constrictive and I've found my freedom of speech here on Harmonica Ramblings
• I repeatedly failed to recruit reliable contributors with the exception of the excellent Laurent
• when we started, the web was empty of harmonica goodness, now it's everywhere to find provided you have a yellow belt in Google-Fu
• PH hadn't been updated in over two years

The content still has potential value. L'Homme et l'Harmonica has agreed to host the French language version, and I'm currently in the process of migrating the content that I hadn't already moved and that I think worth moving to Harmonica Ramblings.

In a couple of months, the www.planetharmonica.com address will start hosting a French language harmonica wiki called Harmopedia. We're currently working on structuring that project.

It was a fun 5 years, I don't regret a minute of it, and I wanted to take the opportunity to thank all the Planet Harmonica readers over the world for their attention and support. If there's any specific content that you are worried will go down the drain, please let me know so I can ensure it stays !

The Police is Back

You've probably all heard the news by now that The Police is reforming for a world tour in 2007-2008. What's so special about that, you will rightly ask ? After all, they're not the first good ole rock band to reform and tour, and they probably won't be the last.

I guess my curiosity about this was aroused by the facts that I dug back into my old Police albums earlier this month, and found a lot in there that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed. From the raw, quasi-punk energy of Outlandos d'Amour to the intricate post-prog sophistication of Synchronicity, here was a band that managed to do intelligent pop, keep a rock edge to it and, on the whole, produce a lot of memorable songs with both sharp lyrics and clever music.

Of course, the 80s mad habit of sticking synthesiser everywhere marred a lot of their output, but if you can get beyond that (as I did earlier this month relistening to it) the constructions are quite intelligent and musical. Still, that wouldn't have been enough to make me jump up and down at the news of a reunion (the prospect of seeing Pink Floyd live last year had me excited, but their performance at Live 8 was so poor it taught me caution.)

I did, however, manage to put my hands on the VH-1 footage of their live press conference / rehearsal last Monday. Now that got me excited. What I saw there was not three old guys reuniting because they need cash, but three old guys getting visibly excited about playing music together. I've no doubt they're going to make tons of money with this, but what thrilled me was that there was a genuine rock thing going on at that press conference.

Stewart Copeland was on fire, both behind the drums and answering questions. He seems to have been (positively) affected by his experience on the jam rock scene (he even referred to it, at least twice.) His drumming was as sharp and intricate as ever, very powerful and dynamic. Andy Summers seemed a little rustier on the whole, but he let loose during When the World is Running Down with a furious guitar solo the likes of which I've never heard on a Police concert or bootleg, let alone album. Sting was enjoying himself although his vocals were a little bit off (but I suspect they didn't hear themselves that well...)

They announced that the tour would only be the three of them (yay !), mostly stadiums (boo !) , only Police material, and all around the world. I think I'll let myself be tempted...

Junior Wells : A Partial Discography

This is something I intended to do for the posthumous release of Junior's Live at Theresa's 1975, but life sort of decided it should be postponed. Here is is now...

Junior Wells is rightly considered a Legend of the Blues, and yet he is not considered as high a reference in harmonica circles as, say, Little Walter, Big Walter Horton or even a player of his own generation like James Cotton. The reason, I suspect, is that his harmonica playing was only a facet of his talent, and not the core of his talent. Another reason, possibly, is that quite early on he started looking up to artists outside of the strict blues genre - like James Brown- and therefore some feel he's less of a hardcore blues artist.

For both these reasons, and many more, Junior Wells has been, to me, more influential than any other blues harmonica player. To this day, his good recordings fill me with joy or sorrow, but rarely fail to move me. That's what prompted me to envisage this partial discography. It is partial because I don't own every Junior Wells record out there, even counting only records available on CD, and some of the ones I miss are probably major (although I can't know that for sure until I've heard them.) It's partial also because it's my own opinion on his recording history, and as such is necessarily subjective. You've been warned.

I could have approached this chronologically, and I guess it would have made sense if I did own all, or at least most of Junior Wells' recorded work. As it stands, I felt it would make more sense to approach it from a neophyte's point of view : at first, I'll cover records I consider to be essential, then move on to releases that are maybe less enssential but still very fine, and finally cover these few records that I honestly don't recommend for purchase, for whatever reasons. The indispensable, the excellent and the so-so, if you'll pardon this parody of a famous movie title.

If you're looking for more background on Junior Wells before you move on with your reading, I strongly recommend the succinct but complete biography at Allmusic.com. As always, may I remind you that all the records mentioned here may be purchased through Amazon.com by simply clicking on the record titles. If you acquire them this way, Amazon hands a small percentage of your payment to Harmonica Ramblings, and that's how we finance the maintenance of this website.

Out in the Desert

In the latest Rambling Podcast I featured Collard Greens and Gravy' Out in the Desert for which I had a lot of very positive feedback. Several people wondered if there were two guitars on this track, so amazing are the bass lines of guitarist James Bridges. I questioned band leader and harp player Ian Collard about this and he pointed me out to a Youtube amateur video of the song:

And while we're at it, there's another track of their raw, tribal blues on Youtube called Mad Over You.

Damien Masterson's Intercambio on iTunes

Damien Masterson is a west coast harmonica and sax player who honed his chops in Brazil, and his first (and best, in my opinion) album Intercambio was the result of that musical and cultural shift. On Intercambio Damien plays chromatic harmonica in a latin jazz vein, surrounded by heavy duty musicians. From the opening title track and it's lightning fast theme to the excellently dirty Joe's Fried Chicken and the closer Chorando em Sao Paulo, this album manages to retain a vital energy throughout and never falls in the trap of being too easy listening. In other words, a winner.

Why am I telling you this ? Because, while the album might be up there on the hard to find list (though you can get it direct from Damien on his website if you're Paypal enabled), it has now been made available on iTunes and can therefore be obtained by anyone simply by clicking here.

Follow my banner !

Actually, the title should be Carry my Banner ! I've designed the code of the Rambling Podcast banner so it's pluggable anywhere and updates automatically each time a new show is released. I'd be pleased and honored if readers were willing to port the banner on to their own blogs, websites and what have you...

Since I can't simply print the code without it being interpreted as a banner, here's an image of the code you need to replicate (don't worry, it's real short!)

If you can't be bothered copying this or if you're worried you'll get it wrong but still want the banner code, just send me an email !