[Harp-L] Re: JRNB en France



Jason Ricci & New Blood played the Harmonica Sur Cher Festival this past weekend at Saint-Aignan, France, in the Loire Valley.

It was a fine festival run by volunteers, with great music, good engineering and lighting and a fun crowd in a beautiful setting, followed by lively jams into the wee hours. There was lots of fine harp playing with diverse other instruments and styles. Gentleman Ben Felton will, I trust, describe it better in his newsletter http://harmonica.typepad.com/, also see the festival website, http://www.harmonicasurcher.com/ The audience got a great show of what the harmonica can do.

But here I am writing about JRNB.

They played Saturday night, closing the festival. (They also played Friday night, a brief 45 minute impromptu set in the corner of a little bar. Tore it up.) After their Saturday night eye-opening show-closer, at 1:30 Sunday morning, after more than 3 hours of variously complex, simple, moving, technical, sweet, coarse, gentle, harsh, funny and even angry music ("Can't Close our Eyes" is not merely angry), everyone left smiling and in awe of the little ten-hole toy*, not to mention Shawn's searing guitar, Todd's solid & funky bass and Maki's lively drumming. They played fast and furious at times, sure, they also did plenty of slow sweet stuff that gently warmed the heart. And Jason wore a fetching ensemble, for most of the show.

When the set ended, everyone, including the band, had more energy than before. In fact, Todd, Maki and Shawn walked up the street to a jam that went on 'til 5 am. Rocking the village to sleep, as it were. Jason stayed at the venue to talk about customizing harps.

By 2 am several hundred people had left with their new CDs, a jam was convened across the room, and Jason Ricci and Bodacious Ben Bouman sat down and discussed harps and modification with a couple of us watching. For another 3 hours (or more; finally I had to go) Jumpin' Jason and Dr. Bouman explored their harp hot-rodding techniques, showing each other what they had done to their various harps and how they did it, and they did some of those things to each others' harps as a few of us watched. Pretty cool. Pretty generous No secrets held back. As I left, Jason and Ben said they wished I'd asked questions, but I was getting plenty as it was and didn't want to interrupt their flow.

It's never easy to tour, and a tour in Europe, albeit brief, without proper support and resources in terms of logistics and language is even tougher. Yet JRNB thoroughly enjoyed playing at Saint-Aignan, and it showed. I hope we can encourage them to do it again, to tour outside of the U.S.A., they deserve the broader recognition (and better pay). I think Sunnyside Bob Koch (who was there in fine form, not only playing some beautiful harp in jams but also helping JRNB tremendously in terms of language and logistics) agrees, and will help make it happen.

That's a good thing, for harps, for music, for blues, and for kids who will hear JRNB. New Blood: good as the old blood. And newer.

-Dave Fertig

*uh oh, that "toy" thing again . . .



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