Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Steve Baker interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 34

Share episode

Steve Baker moved from his native London in his early 20s to become part of the vibrant music scene in Hamburg. His brand of punk folk won him recognition and he was soon a regular on the German session circuit, as well as collaborations in various bands and duos, with his best work coming working alongside Chris Jones. 

Steve has long been a consultant to Hohner, and was instrumental in the development of the modern incarnations of the Marine Band: the Deluxe and the Crossover, as well as other Hohner innovations. He has released a body of instructional material and helped set-up the Trossingen festival and the Harmonica Masters Workshop, which runs in the same town three out of every four years.

Select the Chapter Markers tab above to jump to different sections of the podcast.

Links:
Steve's website
http://www.stevebaker.de/news_en_6.html


Videos:
YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqsgaR1LVVqVT7u_Ud5jpEQ

Tutorials videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5dC3pKSfIt4vSp9RT75I_KHaULc45e7u

The Baker Family Live in Lockdown:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5dC3pKSfIt6AFZyMJtYBF55-e2aH9SkX


Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/

Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Steve Baker moved from his native London in his early 20s to become part of the vibrant music scene in Hamburg. His brand of punk folk won him recognition and he was soon a regular on the German session circuit as well as collaborations in various bands and duos with his best work coming working alongside Chris Jones. Steve has long been a consultant to Holner and was instrumental in the development of the modern incarnations of the Marine Band, the Deluxe and the Crossover, as well as other Holner innovations. He has released a body of instructional material and helped set up the Trossingen Festival and the Harmonica Masters Workshop, which runs in the same town three out of every four years.

UNKNOWN:

Music

SPEAKER_00:

So hello Steve Baker and welcome to the podcast. Hi Neil, it's good to be here. Well thanks so much for joining me today, it's great to have you on and your distinguished career in the harmonica which we'll get into. Starting off a bit about your background, so you were born in London in England before moving across to Germany. So how was it growing up in England and what got you into playing harmonica in England or did that come later?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I started playing when I was 15 or 16. Probably the first harmonica I heard would have been Bob Dylan. But a friend of mine who had the first harmonica that I ever took into my hands in South London where we lived, he lent me, when I got one for myself to learn to play, two records of Duster Bennett, the first Duster Bennett LP, Smiling Like I'm Happy.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_01:

And the first Butterfield Blues Band LP on Elektra. And these are two like seminal white blues records, which I basically absorbed and taught myself to play from. He lent them to me for several months. And at the end of it, I could play all the tunes on the Buster Bennett record, you know, some attempt at playing them. Yeah, so that was my sort of... start in playing but as a self-taught musician because then of course there weren't any teachers they didn't exist and I didn't know any other harmonica players there was one other harmonica player at my school Chris Turner who founded the group that I later joined at Mercy you couldn't really you know learn off anybody so everyone was self-taught

SPEAKER_00:

Duster Bennett tribute concerts still go on in London. Have you ever managed to come and play in any of those or see them? No,

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't. I haven't played in Britain virtually since I left. I've done about half a dozen shows in Britain in the last 40 years because you don't get paid. And I'm a professional musician. I like to get

SPEAKER_00:

paid. So was the harmonica your sole instrument back then? Did you learn any other instruments as a youngster?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I learned guitar parallel to it. It was amazingly useful to me because I had the opportunity to observe a few other guitar players because there was a lot more guitar players than harmonica players around. So you could, you know, watch people's fingers. I just learned to hack out chords on the guitar starting when I was about 17, about a year after I started playing the harmonica. And I taught myself the notes to find the notes of the chords that I was playing on the guitar on the harmonic And were you focused on learning

SPEAKER_00:

blues at this stage?

SPEAKER_01:

Not on the guitar. No, not at all. I was, you know, playing Bob Dylan songs or, you know, whatever, the Grateful Dead, all kinds of stuff. But with the harmonica, I listened to a lot of blues because at that time in Britain, there was the wonderful institution of the record library. And I used to go down to Peckham to the record library and take out, you could take out four LPs, I think, for a period of two weeks. And I got, you know, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, the Sonny Boys, Walter Horton, all this kind of classics of black blues chicago the blues today these sort of vanguard lps and i listened to a lot of that and also they had jazz records so i listened to things like sunny rollins and stuff like this because it was all just sort of interesting music though i never really became a jazz musician

SPEAKER_00:

around london at this time was a quite a good blues scene did you say see dustin bennett play yourself

SPEAKER_01:

yeah i saw dustin bennett in the lyceum probably about 1960 Two or three, something like that. And I used to go to a few gigs. For me, one of the real seminal starting points, which inspired a lot of what I subsequently did, was going down to Studio 51 in Soho on Sunday afternoons and seeing Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts, who were absolutely marvelous band, who later had some hits as Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs, I believe. But originally, they were a blues band, and they were anarchic and funny. And they were in the middle of a scene of people like Sammy Mitchell and these sort of British country blues people who used to play there. And that, for me, was very inspiring. I started going there when I was about 17. We actually booked them for the school dance when I left school that year. There was gigs going on. But I didn't really start playing myself until a bit later. I started playing myself probably with a guitar player, a great guitar player, Dick Bird, who also came from London and came over here with me when we left. And we used to play the odd sort of folk club, floor spots and stuff like this. And I would go to gigs, but not specifically blues gigs. I did go to a few specific blues gigs, like there was a big concert concert in the Royal Festival Hall, I remember going to probably about 1970 with Champion Jack Dupree and Ainsley Dunbar and the Groundhogs and people like this. And I saw a few of the touring Black American artists. I got to see Arthur Crudup, the guy who wrote That's All Right Now Mama, which was Elvis' first hit. I got to see him with the Climax Chicago Blues band. But it was a hideous spectacle because he was terrified he hadn't performed for You could actually see the managers in the wings filling him up with whiskey and then literally pushing him onto the stage. But I went to gigs whenever I could. And as soon as I started playing them myself, which was about 75, I joined a band, a jug band called Have Mercy. And we were like North London street musicians, basically. We had a couple of gigs. We played in Bungie's Folk Club, also in Soho, and the Old Swan in Kensington Church Street, which was an Australian pub. These were residencies. He went down once a week. But we were a bit too crazy, really, for them, because we were actually playing what later would become defined as folk punk, I suppose. You know, we were like a bunch of crazy young guys who were playing jug band music and blues, but foaming at the mouth and rolling around on the floor. Bungie's Folk Club didn't really like us. We turned up one night and there was another band there.

SPEAKER_00:

So at this point in 1975, reading on your website, is when you turned professional, yeah? So you've been a professional musician ever since then? Yeah. And you were able to sustain a reasonable living then when you were young?

SPEAKER_01:

Not really. No. I mean, in London, it was dreadful. And it still is for most people. I think we used to get with Have Mercy. This was the band that I started off playing with. We used to play, like I say, these two regular weekly residencies and we got paid 10 quid. a five-piece band. And then we would go and play the Portobello Road, the market, on Saturdays. And there we used to make good money because we had a really clear system. We would have one or two attractive girls with drawstring bags who would go around. As soon as we started playing, they'd start shaking down the crowd. And we drew big crowds. We used to stop the traffic so the police would come within about 10 minutes. You had a very small window of opportunity to actually make any money. But we did pretty well there. We sort of scraped by, but we were all basically on the dole and squatters, you know, in Camden Town.

SPEAKER_02:

I was born in London in 1953 I was born in London in 1953

SPEAKER_01:

When we got invited in the summer of 76, To come to Germany, we jumped at the opportunity because one of the band had already been there and said, oh, you can get paid. So we went and were pretty much instantly, I wouldn't say successful, but we realized you could make a living. People loved us and they were willing to pay us. So it took about three weeks to decide to cash in the return ticket and not go back. Germany especially is full of musicians from from all over the English speaking world. They all come here. They are flocking here and they have been for the last, ever since I came. I mean, longer than that. Because it's like the promised land. I know so many Americans and Australians and Canadians are saying, oh, I'm thinking of relocating to Germany. Can you help me get gigs? I say, no, stay where you are, man. I want to keep the gigs that I've got. It is kind of attractive certainly for musicians because not only, it's not a question just of money, it's a matter of respect. And that is the biggest single thing. If you can say here I'm an artist and you're good people will respect you for it instead of treating you like a beggar and that is incidentally also one of the things behind the current scare in the British music industry because of course Brexit is going to make it very very difficult for British artists and associated with artists who work with British crews to tour in Europe. If you're really a big act and you play big venues in Britain, then it's not, of course, the same issue. If you're an independent act playing clubs, especially in the blues field, it's a lot more interesting to be able to come to Europe and enjoy the respect that you gain as an Anglo musician.

SPEAKER_00:

Great. So you moved across to Germany in 1975, as you said. 76. 76. So you basically didn't come back. Did you go to the Hamburg area then?

SPEAKER_01:

No, we went first of all to Aachen because the guy who invited us, he saw us playing. He saw Have Mercy in Bungie's Folk Club. And we were named at that time the Have Mercy Jug Band. And this guy was a pre-war blues expert. He was an academic, a German academic from the Technical University in Aachen. He was a very knowledgeable guy about everything regarding pre-war blues. And he heard us and he said, boys, you are fantastic. You must come to Germany. You know? And we said, yeah, that's right, mate. We'd love to. And then he actually sent us the tickets, which we just couldn't believe. We thought this is like too good to be true. And we went to Victoria Station on the appointed day and got on the train and went to Aachen. And Aachen is a lovely town. It's on the border of Belgium and Holland. And so we stayed there for a couple of months, but we were basically living on our friend's floor and nearly destroyed his marriage. So finally he kicked us out and said, why don't you go to Hamburg That's where the Beatles started. And we did. And we instantly met a booking agent who fixed us up with work. Gained, you know, first of all, local notoriety, because at the time there wasn't really any local blues acts who could either sing as well, play harmonica as well, or play... with the crazed intensity that we brought to our music. Because like I say, I claim, have mercy, we're the only band that ever worked regularly with three harmonica players at the same time, the only one ever. Three harmonica, well, we actually had four, but Henry Hagen, the singer at that time, didn't play. But Rory McLeod was a member. And some numbers we even did when Henry played harp, we did a version of Bye Bye Bird with four harmonicas. So basically, I would say we were the only band to feature music Multiple harmonicas are playing at the same time as well, not like trading solos. We had arrangements for four harps, three to four harps.

UNKNOWN:

All right!

SPEAKER_01:

And we also, I would claim, invented folk punk, or punk folk or whatever it's been subsequently titled, because that was the era in London where punk music was emerging. We recorded our first LP in February 77, in the same two-week period where The Clash recorded The Clash in London. It was that energy of the time, you know. That struck a chord here and it enabled us to basically... get an audience and earn what, for our standards, was a load of money.

SPEAKER_00:

The blues scene in Germany then was, maybe you were starting this out, there wasn't a big blues scene, was there not? Is something you maybe helped get going?

SPEAKER_01:

We were part of it, picking up momentum. I wouldn't say we started it in any way, because you have to remember that we went to Hamburg, and Hamburg is the town where British beat music was actually invented. You can say Liverpool, of course, but the fact is that the clubs in Liverpool shut at 11. And on St. Pauli in Hamburg, they don't shut at all. All of the bands, not just the Beatles, but all of those people from the British beat music scene from about 1960 onwards came to Hamburg regularly to play residencies of several weeks. The gig was like you start at 8 p.m. and play till 4, who used to go for the music to the clubs. But it was a very exciting scene. And I played for about 10 years with Tony Sheridan, who used to have the Beatles as his backing band before they were famous. The Beatles played their first recordings with Tony. And I knew him well. I played in his band and with him in a duo right through the 80s.

SPEAKER_00:

There's an album with you live at the Rias, isn't there?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Alexis Cornyn was in that band as well, yeah?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it wasn't a band. It was a radio show. Reus was a radio station. It was radio in the American sector. It was a propaganda station to broadcast to East Germany from West Berlin. Tony got invited on to play a show with Alexis Corner, who he'd heard of but had never met, and the other way around the same. He didn't want to get in the situation of being interviewed by someone asking him about his glorious past with the Beatles and asking Alexis Corner about his glorious past with the Rolling Stones. So he got me to come along as sort of musical grease to make it easier to jam. And we just sat up all night and jammed. That's where that record was made. It was a live radio

SPEAKER_00:

broadcast. So was this your next band following the Have Mercy? and you played with Tony Sheridan.

SPEAKER_01:

It was one of the things I did at that time. I realized that you need to diversify. I had already started getting, by the end of the 70s, the first studio jobs. And the next 20 years, I did a ton. I still get the odd one, but not very much now. Since the new millennium, there's less because the whole structure of record companies and making records has changed and the budgets have changed. But then Hamburg was a big studio. And all of the major labels had their own studio. I'd managed to get studio work playing on various different German records.

SPEAKER_00:

Anything notable from those studio sessions?

SPEAKER_01:

I played for James Last once, who was a big MOR name. And I played for a producer called Dieter Bohlen, who was a sort of Euro pop god. And he produced all kinds of people. I got to play for Bonnie Tyler. I met Al Martino. He was a contemporary of like Dean Martin and Sinatra and stuff like that. So I got to play for a few people like that. But mostly it was German artists who your listeners probably would never have heard of. But they were reasonably well known here. And that was quite useful because it helped me strengthen my connection to the Hohner Company, which started very shortly after we arrived in Germany. But I was doing a lot of things. I was in studio. I was playing with Tony. I had a band called Tough Enough from about 81 onwards, several years. I played with a German singer-songwriter, a political singer called Franz Josef Degenhardt, who was a big figure in the German political music scene, because 1968 in Germany and Paris was the revolution. It wasn't the summer of love. And this guy was one of the sort of bards of the left-wing political scene. And I played with him, parallel to playing with Tony and parallel to playing with Tough Enough. So I had all these kind of different things going on, which made it possible for me to survive because otherwise just doing one thing you couldn't really do it you know

SPEAKER_00:

So as you said, you played in various bands and got by. And then you started playing with Chris Jones in 1995.

SPEAKER_01:

Chris was the most significant act that I ever worked with, I would say. I spent most of the 90s, the first half of the 90s, I played with a really great Israeli-German singer called Abbey Borenstein. Brilliant guitar player and singer.

UNKNOWN:

Oh, oh, oh

SPEAKER_01:

Then I met Chris, and so I was playing parallel with him. We just had a magical relationship. He would play something, and I would play something, and we'd realize that we were playing exactly the same notes at the same time. It was just sort of like telepathy. Musically, first met, really, I suppose, 94 on the Frankfurt Music Messe, the trade fair that was there every year. And I was there for Hohner. I used to go every year. They asked me to get someone along to play some live music with. And I'd met Chris and I thought, oh, that'd probably be a good idea. And I got him along and it just took off. It was unbelievable. We stopped the traffic. We had these huge crowds gathered around. People just like open mouth because there was something magical about it. And at the end of that, I said, look, Chris, we have to record this. This is extraordinary. And he said, yeah, but who's going to pay for it? And I said, I will. And did. We never really, unfortunately, basically, we were just starting to get, you know, the success that our music, I think, deserved. When he became terminally ill and died, it was very sad because that was, we'd just done our fourth album. And after the third live album, Smoke and Noise, that really took off. And amazingly, it still sells because it's got a lot of the first versions of songs from Chris's solo album, Roadhouses and Automobiles. We did those versions. That was really pivotal for me because we made four albums together that have, I think, really stood the test of time. and are a tribute to also his brilliance because he was an unbelievable guitar player and singer.

SPEAKER_00:

yeah yeah so as you say four albums from some 95 to 2005 and some uh some good tracks and the live one as you say they're the uh the smoke and noise one the the 2005 one the gotta look up which is your final album together that's your song i know you most for which is the double crossed and blue maybe uh that's the song you're more strongly associated with

SPEAKER_02:

yeah

SPEAKER_00:

but what about double crossed and blue it's a third position song how did you come up with that one

SPEAKER_01:

I wrote it when I was doing the first volume of Blues Harmonica Playalongs in about 97. And I came up with a chord sequence of just substituting a couple of chords so it wasn't quite a normal 12 bar and played it on Blues Harmonica Playalongs Volume 1. And people really liked it. And I started doing it at workshops from the playback. Chris really liked it, and we just decided to record a version of it, do it a bit better justice, because on the original, on Blues Harmonica Playalongs, I was just basically jamming. In fact, the track that you hear, the harmonica track, was a pilot version, which I did in the control room while the band was playing the backing track. Then I realized I couldn't top it. I tried and failed. So I took the pilot version. But after a while, I kind of figured out a few more things that I'd like to do, and And the latest version is on my first solo album, Perfect Getaway, from 2018, where there's a great band version, which I think really nails the tune. Yeah, I

SPEAKER_00:

was going to mention that. It's nice to hear that sort of full band version, isn't it? Because I think the stuff you were

SPEAKER_01:

doing with Chris was that mainly duo stuff? Violet vocal on and then me putting a harmonica on and then we would fiddle with it basically and if I reached a point where I thought oh no this is actually how I want to do it then I'd re-record the harmonica and then we put the final vocals on it and any overdubs he did a few guitar overdubs and stuff like this but we never really did any band recording at all.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think that duo format works really well with the harmonica, doesn't it? It gives it plenty of space. Rather than having to compete in a big band, obviously the band's good as well, but the duo stuff works really well with the harmonica.

SPEAKER_01:

I spent about 20 years, I think, probably, from the mid-80s till Chris died, only playing in duos, really. I had the odd sort of band gig going on. It was too loud and, as you say, it missed the space. So I love that. Though now I'm doing more stuff. I'm kind of having worked with a band for the last three or four years. I'm getting back into playing acoustic stuff. And I've been doing some things with Jeff playing upright bass. and my wife playing cajon

SPEAKER_00:

and there's some videos of you isn't there during lockdown and yeah I've got a clip onto one of those

SPEAKER_01:

yeah I play guitar on most of them because I didn't have a guitar player you know but I've got a great acoustic guitar player Robert Carl Blank who I'm going to be doing some stuff with and we'll do that I think in a probably anything from a trio to a quintet depending on what's you know what the gig fee is sort of thing because I love playing the songs that I wrote for bands, I love playing them acoustically as well. Because basically after I decided to start making solo records, I wrote a lot more. I've been writing a great deal in the last years.

SPEAKER_00:

Are you going to be playing guitar more in these outfits then?

SPEAKER_01:

No, well, some, a little bit. I'm not a good enough guitar player. I love playing the guitar, but I know too many really, really, really good guitar players to have any illusions about my capabilities. I write the stuff on guitar, so I know exactly what I want it to sound like. I'm going to be doing some recordings probably in about 10 days, starting in about 10 days, where I'll play some rhythm guitar myself, if I can just put it down first to have the thing how I want it. But for performance, I'd rather not. I'd rather get a proper guitar player than I can play harmonica, because one thing I'm not ever going to do is play rack hard.

SPEAKER_00:

So going back to your recordings a little bit, you mentioned Dick Bird went over to Germany with you. So you did an album with him, I think, in 2008. Is that the only one we did with him?

SPEAKER_01:

I did another one before that. We had a record called The Mudsliders that we did round about 2000. And I mean, I worked with Dick basically for probably easily 40 years because we met when we were both 18. I got him in to have mercy and he came over here with me and with the rest of us. And then we... played together on and off for decades. He played on the second and third volumes of my Blues and Monica play-alongs. He was in Tough Enough at the beginning. I had another band within the Mudsliders with Angela Altieri, who was a great singer and washboard player, used to play with the Silver King Band, Rock Bottom from Florida. So I had a lengthy association with Dick until he gave up music in about 2012, 13, something like that. sad really because he's a fantastic fingerstyle guitar player uh and great singer

SPEAKER_00:

yeah and i like that uh that king kazoo song it's nice you've got a harmonica and kazoo sort of a duo thing going on which is nice

SPEAKER_01:

I like that record, but unfortunately it never really went anywhere because Dick wasn't that active doing anything to promote it. You've got to have input from both sides if you're going to make a go of anything. You can't just have one side doing all the work and the other one just waiting for the gigs to come in. That doesn't really... function like that

SPEAKER_00:

so good and then um there's a recording you'll be playing knights in white satin as a sort of melodic uh single is that something you released uh you know to get that sort of melodic side out or

SPEAKER_01:

Someone suggested it to me. I've always played like that. And if you listen to my recorded work, I mean, a lot of the stuff with Chris is very melodic. Most of the studio work that I did was playing melodies. I've always played melodies. And that's why also I'm not really a very typical blues harmonica player, because I've always played other styles of music, because you have to. If you're going to do sessions, then you have to play what they want to play. So I've always enjoyed that. I played loads of country music on records. I've never had a country band, but I've played I don't know how many country music sessions, loads and loads for German country acts. That's something where in the end, if producers want harmonica on a record, they either want wavy bends or they want melodies. And so you have to give them what they want, you

SPEAKER_00:

know. Yeah, and you did a workshop recently, the Harping by the Sea in the UK, where you were talking about the major seventh tuning, yeah? So that was your melodic playing coming in for that.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah. I mean, if I look back on the studio work I've done, I discovered that tuning in 85 and immediately fell in love with it at the same time as Natural Minor. And so I started figuring out ways to use it. And the studio work really helped because producers don't know anything about the harmonica and couldn't care less about its limitations. All they want is that you play the melody that they've written. And a lot of these melodies and a lot of the songs that I was playing on were very strong, major key things with a strong dominant chord with a major third, which is the major seventh in the tonic. And you've got to be able to play that. And if you don't, then you're not playing the tune. So I probably used the major seventh tuning on at least 50 to 60% of all the studio recordings I did since the mid 80s.

SPEAKER_00:

And so getting onto your recent albums, your two solo albums the first one in 2018 and then another one the year after with your Livewires band yeah so a full on band I think you've written the songs for these you've composed all the songs and you're also the main singer in the band as well yeah

SPEAKER_01:

I've always written songs and round about 2016 I realised that I was never going to get to play them with the other people I was playing with because they weren't really interested and I wanted to find out if I could and So I booked a studio and I engaged musicians well in advance and just went for it. I just thought, I'll see if I can do it. Got great people to work with, you know, good studio, excellent conditions. I found that it actually worked really well. And so having made the record, I realized I would have to put a band together to play it live. And so I got a live band because the people who played on the first album, I couldn't afford and weren't available when I needed them. So I got a band of people from the Hamburg region. And, um, Started playing gigs and realised that, you know, I mean, it's a steep learning curve. I've had to really learn an awful lot because I had no experience of fronting a band and no experience of being a lead singer. But it's been a very enriching experience.

SPEAKER_00:

There's quite a mixture of tunes on here. It certainly isn't just a blues band, is it? There's different genres on there with a few blues songs in the albums.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC

SPEAKER_01:

In the stuff that I write. I'm kind of recycling the stuff that I grew up on. So there's tunes which are very clearly like, if you like British beat music, and there's stuff which is maybe slightly reminiscent of stuff like the band or sort of, you know, it's kind of 70s music, a lot of it, because that's when I grew up. In the end, the stuff that you hear in your formative years is what stays with you. So that was what I found myself writing. I didn't have a plan. You know what I mean? It's just how it happened. And also, I made a very clear decision right early on. I'm never going to do blues covers unless they're songs that I absolutely love. I'm never going to get up and play Sweet Home Chicago. I mean, it's a brilliant song, but there have been about five million versions and no The problem with blues as a white people's retro oriented genre is that there are a few really good songwriters and there's a tiny repertoire of standards. It's about 30 songs that everybody plays. And I just thought, I'm not touching them. If I haven't got anything to say, I'd rather not say it. I would rather just simply take the risk of trying to do my own stuff, even if I crash and burn.

SPEAKER_00:

You do one-drop blues, which is a real reggae sort of thing there. That's an interesting one.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, sure. I love playing reggae. It's brilliant. And I grew up with it, you know, so that's like something dear to my heart.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and the harmonica works well in it as well, doesn't it? I had Errol Linton, who does that kind of blues reggae thing a few episodes ago. So we're getting on now to talking about your teaching, and then we'll get on to talking about your Horner Association. So you've put lots of tuition material out there for harmonicas. You're well known for it. You wrote the Harp Handbook in 1990, and then the three-volume series of blues harmonica play-along. They were one of the things that a lot of people turned to, because there weren't that many sort of things around then so uh you managed to sort of you know get onto that and you know a lot of people use those didn't they

SPEAKER_01:

yeah i mean the the place where they were most successful believe it or not is china but i never saw a penny for it they were just nicked they were just you know illegally uploaded but an entire generation of chinese harmonica players play my tunes and i was invited there to the canton harmonica festival in 2019 to play and give you know work I was the star guest, which was quite amazing. And they put on the Steve Baker Cup, which was a harmonica competition where people played my tunes from those harmonica play-alongs books. And that was incredible because some of the people who took part were utterly brilliant kids. Tansy Liu, she's about nine, and she just is incredible. And also older people, where basically that was the stuff they all learned from. So they would play my songs, which is a huge honor, which I'm really deeply touched by. Unfortunately, the distribution of those books is poor, and I have to find some way of simply digitalizing them and Bach directly, because unfortunately, the publisher won't sell outside of Germany because of the you know, the difficulties of mailing stuff out and all that. So a lot of the time people can't buy them, which is sad because I think they're very good.

SPEAKER_00:

All available on your website

SPEAKER_01:

though? Not really. I've got links to the publisher and you can write to them, send them an email and order stuff. But they've been singularly unsuccessful at marketing anything outside the country. Like I say, I basically need to take the stuff back and market it myself because it's a sad waste that it doesn't really sell in significant amounts because the quality is high. But I just played stuff that I liked and there's a ton of great material there.

SPEAKER_00:

And I didn't notice that your play-along tracks were part of some blues harp app. Is that something you were involved with?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's from the same publisher. When the whole idea of that kind of app became popular about seven or eight years ago, They suggested it. And I said, yes, of course you can do it. I've probably earned like about 100 euros from it since they released it. The way to do stuff like that is probably just to market it yourself and digital. And I need to get onto that. But I just had so many other things going on that I haven't really managed to organize that.

SPEAKER_00:

You're known as a teacher. You taught at various workshops. And of course, you're famously associated with Trottingen, which I think, did you help set it up in the first place? I think the first one in 1989 knowing you were involved from the start, weren't you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I was at the World Harmonica Festival because I started working for Hohner as a consultant in 87. Well, I've been an endorser since the Have Mercy days and they'd heard of all the people I was playing with. You know, for them, they were big names, Roger Whittaker and people like this. This was, you know, for Hohner was... what they could relate to, whereas blues was a foreign language to them. And they got me to play for them on the Music Mesa, 85, the first time. And I went there every year for, you know, ages and ages. And 87... I met Lee Oscar, and Lee told me his story about how he approached Tonya in about the mid-70s when he was Billboard Artist of the Year with two platinum albums, his solo albums, after he left war. He said, you know, those guys, they should hang on to people like you. And I took this to heart. And I thought out a consultancy concept and pitched it to them, and they took it. And so I've been working for them ever since. And one of the first things they got me to do in 87, Jim Hughes put on the World Harmonica Championships 1987 in Jersey. a huge undertaking, and he sunk his life savings into it and lost them, I fear. But Hohner sent me there as an observer, you know, and I kind of sat on juries and met a load of people. And this was a very crucial time in the inception of the modern harmonica scene because it started to articulate itself for the first time. The National Harmonica League came up in Britain. Overblows had been... Recently discovered by more people than just Howard Levy or one or two other people. So there was a whole upswing of interest and communication in the scene. A lot of the people that I met in Jersey were basically involved with that. That led to Hohner deciding this was too good to miss out on. And they decided two years later to put on the first World Harmonica Championships, it was called then, in Trussingen. And I was closely involved with the organization. And that went on every four years after that. And the next one's Meant to be this year. We shall see what happens. We're still planning on it, but it's November, so God knows what will be happening then. We'll see. But at the moment, the state of planning is that we're still intending to do it. And so I was kind of involved with harmonica festivals from an early stage. I went to Spa for the first time in 91, and I was doing a lot of Hohner workshops in music retailers right through the 90s. And about 2000, I got invited to teach on the Schondorf Guitar Days, which is in South Germany. It's a very reputable guitar event. And I was their first harmonica instructor. And that was the first time I taught at an event over several days with a class where you just came in day after day and could go into stuff in depth. And I realized this had huge potential. After the second time, I approached the cultural office of the town of Trossingen, because, of course, I had the connections through my job for Hohner, and asked them if they'd like to put on a similar event there. And they said, yeah. And we did it the first time in 2003 with me, with Joe Felisco, with Brendan Power, I think, and with Carlos Del Junco. And it was basically immediately successful. And so we've done it three years out of four ever since, because every fourth year has been the World Harmonica Festival. And I basically took the slot in the other three years out of four. So we've done 2003, 4, 5, and then 7, 8, 9, and then 11... You can figure it out. Like three years, and then every fourth year was the World Harmonica Festival. It's really been amazing fun to do it. And we've got the most fantastic people who come, not just the instructors. It's really about the students, and I think it's one of the coolest gatherings of people that I've ever been part

SPEAKER_00:

of. Yeah, so this is the Harmonica's Masters Workshops, isn't it? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01:

I've got a date for Whitson. The Whitson holidays. Wait a minute. It's going to be 2022. Well, the Harmonica Masters workshops in Trossingen, the 15th to the 19th of June, because we've had to move away from the autumn dates because the conservatory in Trossingen wants them for an accordion event or something like that.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it'll be nice and warm then in southern Germany.

SPEAKER_01:

It's lovely. It's very pretty countryside as well. It's like high leisure value. So, you know, come to Trossingen in June and then you can have a lovely holiday in the Black Forest or go down to Lake Constance. France is near. Switzerland is near. Nice area.

SPEAKER_00:

And so from your great history of teaching and education and playing, you received the Spa Award in 2019 for longstanding work in harmonica, the Pete Pedersen Life Achievement Award.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a huge honor. I knew Pete Pedersen. And he was a great guy. He was a really delightful man. And he was the fourth harmonica he played. I saw him performing live with Jerry Barad and the harmonicas in 87 in Jersey, which is when I met him. So to get an award, a peer award in the name of someone like Pete, who was one of the greats, is a huge honor. And I'm very grateful for it.

SPEAKER_00:

So getting then to your association with Hohner, which you touched on there, since 1987, you've been a consultant to them. But not only that, you've been very involved with developing some of their modern harmonicas. But going back, the Steve Baker Special harmonica, which is something that I bought and I think quite a lot of people bought back then. Was that the first harmonica you were involved with then?

SPEAKER_01:

The first thing that got me to do was a improved version of the ProHarp, the ProHarp 2, which was around for a couple of years in the late 80s, where I got them to make it in natural minor and country tuning. And I got them to punch out that little thing that goes through the middle of a Special 20 and ProHarp comb, the old ones. The Special 20 comb is still like that today. And I got them to punch it out to improve the airflow and improve the tuning and got them to to offer a couple of alternate tunings and stuff. So

SPEAKER_00:

that was, I had a great pro harp, and I know a lot of people talk really fondly about the pro harps, because at one stage, the pro harps were really great, and I remember having a few, which is like, these are brilliant, but then they changed them. But yeah, there's that period where the pro harps were really great harmonicas.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, but it was a difficult time because the reed gap, the air gap tolerances were poor then, and they didn't really significantly improve until about 2005, no, 2003 maybe, because it needed expensive retool which they eventually did under the influence of Rick Epping, who's instrumental in improving the specifications of the tools and also setting up the read profiles, which we use today. I was involved with all kinds of developments. I was involved with the development of the CX-12 chromatic, for example, which I still think is a brilliant development. So there was a whole series of developments where I was more or less closely involved, less with chromatics, more with diatonics. And the SBS diatonic was one part of that because I thought out the tuning in the mid-80s and got them to make it. And it's a great idea. It's just that that form is so unwieldy that it's really hard to play and I stopped using it because I like to be able to enclose more tightly with my hands.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So for people who don't know, it's basically, it's got an extra low octave on the bottom end, doesn't it? Yeah. So was that the kind of, precursor for the low harps that we're seeing now? Because we see the low harps pretty common. Obviously, Hohner have got the Thunderbirds, Idle have got their low harps.

SPEAKER_01:

Not really. Hohner always made low-tuned harps. Rice Miller, Sunny Boy 2, had a whole set in all the keys. And I know because I interviewed John Mayall in the late 80s that he had a complete set in all the keys that Sunny Boy wrangled for him from Hohner UK. They always made them. And the SBS just used that as a basis and retuned it.

SPEAKER_00:

You've been involved with the Marine Band Deluxe and Crossovers as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's my life's work. That's really, for me, the improvements to the Marine Band series is something that I fought for for years. Because I've been friends with Joe Felisco since 1991, when he was a young lad. And just starting out in the world of harmonica customizing, I had instruments that he built for me from about 93 onwards. And then I met Richard Slay. and other early customizers and acquired a lot of their instruments. And I realized that there was some really major improvements that you could make to the physical construction of the Marine Band harmonica. And of course, the crux of a lot of the work that those guys did did was the reed work was um narrowing the reed slots and adjusting the offset curve and all this kind of stuff but if you simply seal the cone open up the covers make them more stable and louder and assemble the whole thing with screws then you already have a vastly superior instrument and i pushed for that over a period of years from the mid 90s onwards and hona there was a lot of opposition Hohner USA was opposed to it and said, why do you want to change the Marine Band? Just make it as it is, but better. I said, well, that's what I'm trying to do. Because you can't ignore these groundbreaking pioneers like Felisco, like Richard Slay, and the others who were basically inspired by them, Jimmy Gordon, all the rest of these people. Now there's countless people who have been inspired by their work. I just said, you can't ignore this. You can't see this as competition. These people are not competing with It's like saying that someone who tunes up BMWs is competing with BMW. Of course they're not. So it was a long battle. But finally, I managed to convince the powers that be at Hohner that it was viable to assemble a marine band with screws. and to seal the comb and to improve the covers and went through a whole load of tests from about 2003 2004 and the marine band deluxe was the first result of this which came out in 2005 wasn't perfect at the beginning there was some screw-ups with the sealing and of the comb but this fell together with the improvement in the reed plates which rick epping had brought about of tightening up the tolerances and so for the first time you really had a great out-of-the-box harmonica that played beautifully and could be disassembled with a screwdriver and was you know easy maintenance and all that that went down very well and then I started thinking about comb material and talking to a lot of people of course because I you know through that work I and through the workshops and all the rest of it. I knew harmonica players from all over the world. And I suggested to Hona, why don't we try bamboo as a cone material? The managing director at that time was a Taiwanese, Arthur Chang. And the Chinese had been using bamboo for, you know, thousands of years. So he was easy to convince. And they started building prototypes using bamboo laminate for cones. And I tested a bunch of different bamboo laminates. And finally, we decided on one. And that That was the crossover, which, like I said before, it's been the most important aspect of my work for Homer. The culmination of my life's work was having them make the crossover because I think it's the best harmonica, the best diatonic harp there is.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, me too. That's my harmonica of choice. And so I'm very grateful for you making that. It is fantastic. You know, it modernizes that, the Marine Band, isn't it? Which obviously is traditionally what all the great players used to play. So yeah, it's fantastic. So yeah, well done for that. So a question I ask each time, Steve, and going back to your instructional material, if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend that 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_01:

I think probably hand positions and tongue block rhythm, because how you hold is of great importance to how you sound. And if I just want to play something that is a warm-up. Then I think that playing tongue-blocked rhythms and figuring out how to enclose to get the sound where you want it is a very good way to spend your time practicing. But you could equally well say you practice scales or you play your favorite licks or whatever. I don't think it matters. I think the main thing is the play.

SPEAKER_00:

So you're a tongue-blocker mainly, are you?

SPEAKER_01:

No, not really. I started off exclusively puckering. And then because I saw the insert in the harmonica boxes, which suggested that you contort your face into this ridiculous shape and play with your tongue. And I thought they've got to be kidding. So I never even tried. And I, as a self-taught player, simply puckered everything. But I learned early on to play intervals, octaves. So that is tongue blocking, of course. And not just two-hole blocks, but also one, two, three, and even four-hole blocks to play big intervals. Then in about... late 90s probably about 97 i realized because i did a acoustics test in the acoustics lab at hona and i compared playing the same note with a pucker and with a tongue book and i realized that what the tongue blockers have been saying all along is true that the sound is different because what happens is if you play with a pucker then if you look at the overtone spectrum the overtone series which you can see on an oscilloscope then if you play with a pucker the The fundamental is quite strong, but not that strong. And then the first two or three overtone fractions, the octave, the fifth above that, the next octave, are really powerful. They're really strong. And that makes the sound bright. Whereas if you play with a tongue block, you strengthen the fundamental and you weaken the next few overtone fractions. So the sound is more round and fat. and fundamental because you've got more of that root note of the whole thing. It's louder. That forced me to start learning to tongue block single notes. And I've struggled with it ever since. And I now tongue block probably about, depends what I'm playing. You know, I switch all the time. I switch. So if something's too difficult to do with a tongue block, I'll pucker it. And if something doesn't make sense with a tongue block, then I'll pucker it. And if something sounds better with a tongue block, I'll tongue block it.

SPEAKER_00:

You do play some chromatic, don't you? I've got some recording you playing some chromatic.

SPEAKER_01:

I used to. Throughout the 80s, I had to. When I was playing with the German political singer I accompanied at that time, most of his music demanded the chromatic, and I used to play a lot of chromatic, but never really that well. And I can't say that I have the emotional connection to the instrument that I have to the diatonic part.

SPEAKER_00:

And obviously you're a Horner and Dorsey, so you're playing Horners, and the crossover, as you said, is your diatonic choice. And I see on your website you're talking about... HB52 heart blaster microphone from Horner is that your microphone of choice now?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. I mean, I was very closely involved with the development and the physical dimensions are based on my own custom mic, which was made for me by a friend from a Harley Davidson blinker, the shell, and with a Fender Telecaster volume knob on the back and an XLR socket and exactly those dimensions. So basically I provided them with the physical dimensions. Then the developer at SE Electronics, Tom Stube, who did the, he's a brilliant microphone expert. He analyzed the frequency spectra of a whole bunch of popular vintage microphones, beloved of harmonica players, and built an element from the ground up that duplicated those characteristics and put it in this shell, which was based on my mic. I think it's brilliant. I got the first one October 2019. It was a pre-production one, but I got to therefore play it on a bunch of gigs. I played three months of gigs on it before the lockdown. The sound is beautiful. The handling is perfect for my purposes. And there's a number of features which you don't have with comparable microphones. There's a wonderful American microphone builder who's a good friend and whose name I therefore won't mention, who makes a popular microphone of a similar size, but that has not got the angled back XLR connector. The HB52 has got that feature which was on my mic and that means that it doesn't get in the way of your hands so you get a much better enclosure for example you know there's some very good features of that mic and Tom Stubich the developer also took an absolutely top line potentiometer for the volume control it's a born pot as good as you can get and it gives you a totally linear volume increase so it's not like the fender complex where you turn it up and up and nothing happens and you get to two and suddenly it's really loud and then it only gradually gets louder from there on up it's with the hb52 you've got a linear from zero to a hundred so virtually a linear scale and so that's very practical

SPEAKER_00:

fantastic and what about amplifiers what's your amplifiers of choice

SPEAKER_01:

i use marble amplifiers i've used fenders all my life as an electric player and i've got a couple of fender amps i've got a custom bass man but it's too heavy without a roadie i'm not going to carry it to a gig and it's too loud i But I have two Marble amplifiers. Marble is a Dutch company that makes excellent handmade amps with hand-wound transformers and all this sort of stuff. And I have a Marble Max for small gigs and recording. And I've got a Marble Blue Sonic, but with one 12-inch Weber speaker, not the two 8-inch that the standard version has. And that's what I use with the bands. Killer amp. I've never needed one this louder.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, a lot of people are really liking the Marble amps now. days oh they're great they're great okay and then so final question so what about your future plans now obviously uh hopefully things are opening up a little bit gig wise you've got some gigs on your website you were hoping to get out playing soon and i think in april and may

SPEAKER_01:

uh um no most of them have been cancelled now uh it's it's rollback at the moment i'm hoping that in summer we'll be able to play a game and so i'm not expecting too much but what i'm looking at is now starting to record some acoustic versions of my new songs because I've been right I've got a half a dozen new songs and just see how that works out and then try to parallel to the live wires to also play some gigs in this acoustic lineup because I love playing acoustically and if I had the choice I would never use an amplifier or a microphone or a PA ever again.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much, Steve Baker, for talking to me. You've been instrumental in developing the harmonicas that a lot of people play and, of course, the instruction material as well, so it's been a real honour. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Neil. Thanks so much, Steve. Players out with Double Crossed and Blue.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC