[Harp-L] Chicago jams June 25-26



Hi all,

I visited Chicago this week, and had the opportunity to sit in with a couple of local bands.

Sunday night June 25, my friend Matthew Skoller hosted the weekly jam session at the House of Blues. It's a nice venue where the musicians and patrons are treated with respect.

Backed by his regular band (guitar/bass drums), Matthew opened the night with Little Walter's "Off the Wall." I've been listening a lot to Matthew's most recent and very enjoyable CD "These Blues" lately, and his playing in this set was looser and a lot more active than his recordings. He plays Marine Bands, and he plays them hard. Most of the set was played through an astatic JT-30VC mic into a tube amp -- in other words, a typical Chicago blues setup -- but he did a couple of numbers, including a Jim Liban blues, straight into the vocal mic. Overall a very nice set.

I sat in during the second set, fortunately with Matthew's band behind me (you never know what the rhythm section will be like at a jam), using Matthew's amped setup. We played "Comin Home Baby" (Lee Oskar A Natural Minor harp in second position) and Big Walter's "Have Mercy" (Hohner CX12 C chromatic harp in D minor). Then Matthew returned to the stage, and we played another half dozen pieces with two harps, Matthew coming through the PA mic, me on the amped mic. What a great sound! When I released my single "Put The Lever Down" in 1981, I used a similar formula -- acoustic harp on top, amped harp in the middle (and flanged amped harp on the bottom in that case). (You can hear "Put The Lever Down" at http://hunterharp.com/mp3s.html if you're so inclined.)

Monday night I sat in with the Mike Frost Project, a quartet of guitar/keys/sax/drums playing jazz standards and 60s-70s jazz-funk (Crusaders, "watermelon man", Ramsey Lewis -- you get the picture). This is the stuff I grew up on, and it is always fun to play. The first piece we played together was "Blue Monk", for which I used my Neil Graham customized Ab Marine Band in 2nd position. The overblows that are necessary to play the very chromatic head on this piece are almost all nice, short passing tones. Notwithstanding that these guys come from Howard Levy's town, they looked a little surprised when they heard the chromatic passing tones coming out of the short harp.

A very enjoyable but short trip. Two final comments: 1) Matthew told me that there are now very few active harp players in Chicago -- what's up with that? 2) Non harp-related: on Tuesday night I went to the art Institute of Chicago, and was completely blown away to find something like 100 of the greatest paintings of the first half of the 20th century hanging on the walls. We've all seen reproductions of those pieces (van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Seurat, etc., etc.) hundreds of times before -- it's a different feeling entirely to be standing in front of the canvas.

Chicago doesn't suck.

Thanks, Richard Hunter
hunterharp.com







This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.