Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Clint Hoover interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 109

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Clint Hoover joins me on episode 109.

Clint is originally from Minneapolis and has spent a life immersed in music and the harmonica. He’s reached great heights on both the chromatic and the diatonic. Early on he also studied guitar and saxophone and attended a jazz course in New York City where he also took chromatic lessons from Robert Bonfiglio. 

His eclectic mix of interests has led him to recording albums in genres from pre-war blues to modern jazz, to rock, pop and World Music. His first recorded album was with a mainstream band called The Fontanas back in 1989, with the album release being delayed for thirty four years, coming out in 2023. In-between he’s released jazz albums, jug band music, rock and more, really showcasing his extraordinary talents on both the diatonic and chromatic harmonicas.

Links:
Website:
https://clinthoover.com/

Clint article: ‘My Harmonica Journey’:
https://clinthoover.com/a-harmonica-journey/

Richard Hunter interview with Clint:
https://www.hunterharp.com/hoover1/

The Fontanas album:
https://blackberrywayrecords.com/album/2566074/the-fontanas

Videos:
Clint’s YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE7io6uwgGzsOBpanupYdBg

Les Thompson performing live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlLGjO8MzpU

Get Up Off That Jazzophone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23VJPJeakJI

Sister Sadie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQG1sHJedgY


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
--------------------------------
Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

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SPEAKER_02:

Clint Hoover joins me on episode 109. Clint is originally from Minneapolis and has spent a life immersed in music and the harmonica. He's reached great heights on both the chromatic and the diatonic. Early on he also studied guitar and saxophone and attended a jazz course in New York City where he also took chromatic lessons from Robert Bonfilio. His eclectic mix of interests has led him to recording albums in genres from pre-war blues to modern jazz to rock, pop and world music. His first recorded album was with a mainstream band called the Fontanas back in 1989, with the album release being delayed for 34 years, coming out in 2023. In between he's released jazz albums, jug band music, rock and more, really showcasing his extraordinary talents in both the diatonic and chromatic harmonicas. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello, Clint Hoover, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, well, hello to you, and thank you so much for having me on your show. This is quite

SPEAKER_02:

an honor. Thanks, Clint. Thanks for joining. So, I understand you're originally from Minneapolis, but now you're living in Pittsburgh.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. Yeah, I've been out in Pittsburgh about 12 years. And I grew up in Minneapolis. Really, the majority of my music career is really in the Midwest of America, you know, and centered out of the Twin Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

SPEAKER_02:

And yeah, so what's the music scene like around there? And what got you into playing the harmonica around there?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it goes back to when I was quite a young person. Minnesota has one of the great... state fairs in America. And I was at that when I was about 12 or 13 years old, probably around about 69, 1969. And they had at the time, because it was the late 60s, they had what was called the teen fair. And at the teen fair, you know, it's like, well, okay, I'm going to go to that. And so I wandered off and went to that. And I heard this music coming out from under this tent. And I wandered into this, under this tent. And I saw these guys up there playing blues. It turned out later it was Muddy Waters with James Cotton playing the harmonica. I had no idea who those people were even. But I stayed for the whole concert and I was just enthralled with what they were doing particularly the guy with the big belt not with the harmonicas on it, James Cotton. I didn't start playing until a few years later but I really go back to that as the turning point for me and kind of getting very interested in music and in harmonicas, but I was very naive at that point.

SPEAKER_02:

I've got here that you bought your first harmonica at age 17, a diatonic Horner Blues Harp, was it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's right. Blues Harp for$3.99. I still remember the price.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. So a point which we'll obviously cover on here is that you play both diatonic and chromatic harmonicas to a very good level. So you started out on diatonic, so obviously you'd listen to James Cotton and play with Muddy, so you started listening to blues harmonica first and that's what you started playing first?

SPEAKER_01:

Right, that was my entry into it. You know, I was also listening to stuff by, you know, Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and things like that and then Jay Giles Band and all that kind of stuff that when you're that age, you know, they were very popular and it was a big deal and so that was my entry into playing. I didn't pick up the chromatic until a couple years later so I was mostly on the blues harpen first.

SPEAKER_02:

And how did you learn at that stage? Was it playing along with records?

SPEAKER_01:

That was strictly just by ear. I had no musical training at all. I didn't know what I was doing. I just listened to records and tried to copy them, just like a lot of people in those days. And there was no internet, there was no instruction. I had one instruction book by, ironically, Tony Glover, a harmonica player. I believe that's the first blues instruction book that was out. And he was from Minneapolis as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I had that book too. I think everyone back then had that book, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's how I got started with it. And before I knew it, I was playing in a little duo in high school with this girl and we started doing stuff. We played in the talent show and got a standing ovation and I was hooked at that point.

SPEAKER_02:

For when you picked up the chromatic then, again, reading that you were playing along with the piano player and then you saw some of the limitations of the diet on it. Was that right? And then he put you onto the chromatic.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. In those days, you know, if you wanted to expand the musicality of the instrument, you know, I didn't know anything about the idea, concept of overblowing or anything like that. It wasn't really out there. And so, actually the guy, the first trio that I was in with this girl, he was the bass player, but he was from a very literate musical family. They came out of musical theater, opera, and he was... you know, he said, well, you know, you should try to pick up the chromatic. You've got all the notes. And I was a little frustrated in the band with some of the things because I couldn't play certain lines and so on like that. So I just sat down with him and he played out all 12 scales on a piano. And I, you know, meticulously wrote it down with numbers and arrows and circles for when you push the slide and just started trying to figure out different keys at that point.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. And so you were playing different sorts of music then, were you, in this trio and, you know, away from the blues a little bit?

SPEAKER_01:

It was, yeah, it was a blues influence. Some of it was, you know, I mean, we weren't like students at that point of Chicago blues or anything like that, but we were really an original kind of a folk rock blues trio. And we did a lot of work in that area, you know, at the time and had a fair amount of success in what we did. But we were doing things like playing in talent shows and that kind of thing. But the music was good. The girl that played guitar and sang, she was a good writer. So we were really deep into the kind of the original music thing at that point.

SPEAKER_02:

So then you started getting more seriously into playing jazz, right? Because then you went to the Parsons Jazz and Contemporary Music Program in New York in 1987. So how far along is this?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's quite a bit later. I mean, you're talking about what we've been talking about at this point was like 74, 75, 76. So I finished college with an art degree. When I got out of college, I decided I really wanted to be a musician. And that's when I started getting serious about studying. I was playing guitar, learned a lot of my theory via the guitar. I also took theory lessons. And basically, for a long time, I was really dedicated to being a good guitar player because I could get into bands easier that way. But I basically transferred all my knowledge from the guitar in terms of chords and scales and stuff and started doing it mostly on the chromatic at that point. And that got me into some local bands and playing in bar bands and that kind of a thing. And then I started playing with a fellow, Dale Dahlquist. We did old swing music. And that was really my first introduction into some kind of jazz and starting to listen to jazz music and getting involved in that kind of thing. I started teaching harmonica at a little music school in Minneapolis, West Bank School of Music. I got to know a lot of good musicians through that. And at that point, some of the teachers, we started getting together and playing some jazz. And that's when I started getting really interested in researching about the players and the history, which finally culminated me really wanting to go back to school and go into a jazz program and that's when I went to New York at that point in 1987. Right,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah, so you took this jazz course and you also had lessons from Robert Bonfilio.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, right. The one program at that time that I could find where I could really, you know, use the harmonica as my main instrument of study. And so, you know, he was my teacher at that point. I was trying to get lessons with Toots Thielman as well, but he really wasn't around in New York in the wintertime. He was during school. He was back home in Belgium at that point. But very nice man. But I never really got, unfortunately, never got to take lessons with him. But with Bonfilio, I did a lot of studying of his classical technique, you know, learning corner switching, getting better at reading music, all that kind of stuff. Our concept really at the time was the idea of, you know, could you apply the classical corner switching technique to jazz improvisation? And so we were taking some, you know, bebop heads and then you'd go through and you'd analyze, you know, where to switch from side to side corner and you'd work it up that way. Unfortunately, what I found after a while was I could do that as long as it was something that was planned out ahead of time. I never really could learn to improvise freely and do corner switching at the same time.

SPEAKER_02:

So does that mean you think corner switching is more suited for music reading?

SPEAKER_01:

That's a good question. I think perhaps if somebody came along who started with that technique from the beginning, they might be intuitive enough with it to be able to improvise. I couldn't because I'd spent a long time before that, you know, playing, whether it was tongue blocking out of one corner or puckering. And like a lot of jazz players, I tend to play, at least on the chromatic for jazz and swing and things like that, I tend to play the pucker style, particularly for articulation purposes and that kind of a thing. But I also use a lot of tongue blocking. I'm a, I guess what you'd call a hybrid type of player. I like tongue blocking a lot, particularly on diatonic harp, but I do use it on the chromatic as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. So was Robert

SPEAKER_01:

Monfilio one of your tutors on the jazz course or was this just private lessons? so you'd have to at that time I played saxophone too so I you said I'd have to I'd have to do my major on saxophone if I wanted to do a performance degree and I didn't want to do that really so anyway but yeah yeah it was it was private lessons for credit basically in the program and I only lasted in the program to be honest with you for a year I started looking at the debt I was piling up and so on and so forth and got kind of flipped out about that

SPEAKER_02:

yeah I never think you're going to make that money back from music probably be right so from the what from the kind of early 70s when you really started playing the harmonica you really got stuck in there you obviously played the diatonic you played the chromatic you picked up the guitar seriously you're playing the saxophone so you're working really hard on all your chops there you know you know do you still play the saxophone and guitar or have you gone you know sort of solely to the harmonica now

SPEAKER_01:

well yeah I pretty much don't play the saxophone anymore and when I was in New York I was in a band where I was a triple hitter kind of a guy and who was a clean-up guy who played sax, guitar, harmonicas, both types, and vocals. But I've kind of abandoned the saxophone. And really, my harmonica is my saxophone, really. And the guitar, I still play because I don't play piano. And the guitar, I say it enough that I can really have a good, solid knowledge of chords and inversions of chords and all that kind of stuff. And so I use it for composition Sure, yeah. And

SPEAKER_02:

we know that playing a chordal instrument with a single note instrument like the harmonica is extremely valuable, right? So, you know, you would definitely advocate that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Everybody should learn some kind of a chordal instrument. I mean, a full chordal instrument, you know, an instrument that can play every chord and every key. That's really, really a helpful thing to your understanding and your ability to move on to the next level, for sure.

SPEAKER_02:

So another thing that you've done, you touched on earlier is, you know, you got to play a great level on diatonic as well. And you're playing overblows on the diatonic, which is probably reasonably unusual for get people who play the chromatic to a good level and play the diatonic with overblows as well. So what made you do both and

SPEAKER_01:

tell us about that journey? I thought it was unique and so on and so forth. And then a friend of mine, the same bass player who showed me my scales on the piano, he called me up and said, hey, there's this guy from Chicago. He's coming into town and he's playing jazz harmonica. I said, oh, OK, well, let's go see him. And of course, I walked in the door and I thought, well, you know, this is totally assumed it was going to be, you know, somebody in the toots mold. And there he was up on stage, Howard Levy. And I go, wait a minute. What? You know, I And he had the diatonic harmonica in his mouth. And he's doing all this stuff. And I couldn't believe it. I just said, well, how is he doing that? And I ended up talking to him on a break, and he told me about this concept of overblowing. And that was in 85. So I immediately went home and figured out how to get an overblow and started tinkering around with that. And at first, I would add overblows into my standard blues playing to fill out the rest of the blues scale, you know, on the higher end in cross harp. And then I started... around with it chromatically because, okay, I can get a chromatic scale here. And so with my knowledge of the chromatic harmonica and playing guitar and saxophone, you know, it seemed like it was just a natural thing to start kind of exploring that on a diatonic harp. And that's pretty much how that came about.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. Yeah. So, you know, I made the point that you don't get many people playing the chromatic and overblows on the diatonic because, you know, you maybe would turn to the notes right so what do you you know what when would you play a diatonic overblow rather than playing a chromatic say on a jazz song

SPEAKER_01:

yeah yeah well i i would play the chromatic on most of my jazz playing even to this day so I like the idea of having a dedicated read to every note. There's something about that that's really, really nice in terms of getting your phrasing to be consistent and have the timbre of that phrase and the articulation of that phrase working really well. That is truly, to me, the strength of the chromatic harmonica right there is that fact that you have a dedicated read to each note and that each one of those notes can be manipulated in a similar fashion. In the jazz thing, I will definitely use my diatonic in more of a jazz, blues, and soul jazz kind of a setting. It seems to work well with that very nicely. I am working, I am still chipping away at being able to play straight ahead jazz standards on the diatonic harp as I move along. I'm not Howard Levy, that's for sure, and I don't dedicate the time on the diatonic that I should to be able to like just completely play everything on it I still reserve that for my chromatic but I am fascinated with year after year after year of just trying to transfer everything that I learned with the chromatic harmonica over to the diatonic.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah because exactly that knowledge is there isn't it you know it transfers obviously fantastically well from the chromatic once you've got that knowledge so yeah you've got that so you taught there about you using the overblows on the diatonic on the style of music more than well you know obviously the diatonic is more expressive right you can bend it and the chromatic's cleaner sounding so that's driven again by the style of music that you choose between the two is it

SPEAKER_01:

yeah a little yeah a little bit i mean and i would i might take a little issue about the expressiveness of a chromatic

SPEAKER_02:

yeah it's um i mean the bend it's the bendability as much as anything yeah

SPEAKER_01:

well yeah there is but you know the thing about a chromatic is and if you're you know you listen to Stevie Wonder and stuff, you can bend every note. really well, you know. I mean, and it's a different timbre, but every note is bendable. It's just that you don't bend. You bend for expression only. For me, very rarely do I bend to like doing a half step to get a half step. I can on a lot of notes, but I bend for expression and the fact that you can bend every note. That's quite a nice thing about a chromatic. I spent a lot of time, particularly my days when I was really pushing the I play my chromatic in a blues band on tunes that most people would assume you would use a diatonic on. And so I really worked on my expressiveness of a chromatic to the point where I can make it scream, I hope.

SPEAKER_02:

So you haven't removed any wind savers or anything to do that?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I don't do that. No, I play a straight up chromatic with, you know, standard tuning in C. I don't play other key chromatics. One of my biggest things was to be able to play fluently in all 12 keys on a C. chromatic and leave it at that. I didn't want to be carrying around a bunch of chromatics like I do a blues harp. I've already got that where I pick up different key diatonics. So if I have a studio session where somebody wants me to play chromatic but they want me to play chords in a particular key, then I have chromatics that I can use for that if I need to. But I do not mess around with other key chromatics basically.

SPEAKER_02:

Here's a word from my sponsor. Looking for a new harmonica? Or maybe you just want to replace the replates on an existing harp? Theharmonicacompany.com is the place to go for all your harmonica needs. They stock a wide range of harmonicas and accessories from all of the major manufacturers and always ensure that they ship quickly, offer excellent customer service and are super competitive on price. Go to theharmonicacompany.com and enter the code HAPPYHOUR7 at the checkout to get an additional 7% off the already low prices. have a question or need advice just drop Jonathan a line on sales at theharmonicacompany.com and he'll be happy to help the discount code and email address are also listed on the podcast page I mean what you do as well is the great use of the chromatic and diatonic is you play a range of styles of music which really covers you know a lot of the genres for the harmonica so you like to play some pre-war sort of blues stuff obviously we talked about you playing jazz you're playing rock and pop as well so you've done loads of session work because you've got this versatility to play these different styles so I was reading a really interesting interview with Richard Hunter with yourself and on there you pick out five of your sort of favourite players or albums so just you know I've quickly looked through some of these. So first of all, there's a song by Les Thompson on the album Mouth, Organ, Madness. And I'm aware of Les Thompson, but listen to this clip. Oh, it's incredible playing. What a chromatic player he was.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, God, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the unheralded West Coast version of Toots Thielman. He was amazing,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah. Yeah, and obviously you're listing the Toots on this list as well. We've already covered Toots. So another one, you also pick out Eddie Clarke, who's an Irish player who plays mainly, I think, on chromatics, doesn't he, where he's playing fiddle tunes on chromatics. Yeah. So do you play much Irish music yourself and you draw inspiration from that sort of nice, fast Irish style?

SPEAKER_01:

There was a point where I was kind of into that. I mean, I worked up a number of Irish tunes and some bluegrass and old time tunes. There's a lot of interplay with that kind of stuff. And especially like when I was playing with people like Brian Wickland and other people in the kind of a traditional music world, I started picking up on all that stuff more or less just as a exercise to be, you know, for speed and all that kind of stuff. But I enjoyed it. My wife is a huge fan of Irish music, and I enjoy it very much. But I'm not going to go out and try to sit in on some serious high-level session.

SPEAKER_02:

but yeah but again it's a great use of you know harmonica sounds great in that setting yeah so yeah yeah and then in the pre-war stuff you you've picked out the the great harp players 1927 to 1936 album it's a great album and particularly uh blues bird head on there who you know is supposed to be the first person to have recorded overblows right

SPEAKER_01:

right right there's a little i guess there's a little bit of controversy about that but you i can i think i hear it in there so and whether it was a mistake or not i don't know maybe he just did it by accident he's trying to bend a blow note and he was on a note that didn't bend and it popped the overblow. I don't know. The thing about him that's so wonderful is that, you know, he was really the first jazz diatonic player. I mean, when you listen to what he's doing, he sounds like a Chicago jazz trumpeter from the 20s and that's really cool.

UNKNOWN:

......

SPEAKER_02:

No, incredible play, yeah. And like you touched on there, that sort of similarity between that pre-war and the jazz styles is actually pretty close, isn't it? You know, you wouldn't necessarily think the pre-war blues would be, but that definitely got that swinging jazz feeling there, isn't

SPEAKER_01:

it? Well, you know, the thing about the history of jazz is that, like, post-blues wasn't associated so much with jazz. Oh, the jump players, you know, yeah, yeah. But pre-war, I mean, jazz and blues was just, there are people walking both sides of street all over the place. I mean, if you look at the classic blues recordings, you know, with the classic blues singers, I mean, they're using all of these jazz horn players. Now, if you were to come up to one of those cats and say, yeah, man, yeah, you're a jazz player. You can't play the blues. I don't think you'd want to do that. Those guys played really good blues. And so there's so much interplay with all those guys. And Rhythm Willie is one of my favorite guys, too. He's right up there with Blues Bird Head and And people love to make that name.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, some great players in those pre-war ones, which are often neglected.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I know. It's really too bad. And that's when one of the bands I was in in the late 90s, early 2000s was the Sugar Kings. And we were essentially a jug band influenced pre-war kind of a group with a tuba and me and a guy playing resophonic guitar and slamming a hi-hat on the two and four. And we toured around a lot and did a record. And I got a real It was a real chance to kind of like really get into really researching and studying the styles of some of those pre-war players. It's really, really was a wonderful opportunity for me. And, you know, I felt blessed I could, you know, actually get away with doing some of that stuff and doing it in a band that worked.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And you do a blues bird head song on there. Get up off that jazzophone.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I love that.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So

SPEAKER_02:

we'll get into your output now. We've talked about how your divergent approach is, which has got some great output yourself. So you mentioned earlier on that you'd studied visual arts as your degree, right? That's right. And that sort of influenced your approach to music about pushing yourself for your own voice. So that's an interesting point. So what do you do to find your own voice in your music, and how does it help you with that?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, part of the thing I did was, of course, I just did a lot of I just said I got into deeply studying all these pre-war harp players, and I did. But one of my main inspirations over many years and decades, like Little Walter, I really listened to the horn players a lot, the trumpet players and the saxophone players, jazz, blues, jazz, soul jazz guys, all that stuff. I have quite a collection of listening to them, and I think that helped me create a style of music. of my own in a way you know I was certainly did my homework with all the great Chicago great players and all that kind of stuff and I certainly spent a lot of time particularly listening to toots and stuff but really I think a major source of my inspiration is with horn players

SPEAKER_02:

and did you you know did you learn this sort of Charlie Parker Omni book

SPEAKER_01:

yeah that's my bible yeah you know there's something about that even if I'm not playing Charlie Parker tunes there's this something about looking at and taking apart his solos and and his heads uh it's like it's a distillation of american music up to that point and it's it's full of blues by the way and it's wonderful stuff and it's not only is it a distillation of everything that was going on up to that point and then it also looked forward to the next level and so yeah i i am a huge huge charlie parker fan

SPEAKER_02:

yeah the greatest improviser of them all eh so um So we looked through your recordings. We touched on the Jug Band one there. So I think your first album coming out in 1997, was this your first ever album, or had you recorded as a sideband on other people's albums before?

SPEAKER_01:

The first album I did was Dream of the Serpent Dog.

SPEAKER_02:

yeah so that's in 1997 so you've been playing for quite a long time at this stage like there's sort of 20 odd years right so it took you quite a while to uh to get yourself down an album yeah

SPEAKER_01:

yeah well and then that's that story of uh uh the fontanas was really you know that was supposed to come out in uh 1990 the fontanas and uh that was that was after i just moved back from new york i was kind of tired of jazz and at the time i got into this original rock band that was part of the Minneapolis scene of music going on, which was very, very vibrant for original rock at that point. But that never came out until this last year. But that really was my first record, the Fontanus thing. We were done recording that in 1990, that's right.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so this is, like you say, a kind of pop rock band, right? And so they were quite heavy driven sound. And are you using mainly chromatic on this one?

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I was still way deep into the chromatic idea. And I'd never heard anybody really, you know, I consider that band kind of like a cross between, you know, power pop, garage rock, a little bit of new wave thrown in there. And I was really, really interested in taking my chromatic and highly amplifying it and trying to make it work in that kind of a context because I hadn't really heard anybody do that. Now, this is also pre-Blues Traveler, by the way.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, because I noticed there was some similarities to the Blues Traveler sound, but so this was your sound first, was it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, and it's chromatic, and it's mostly, I mean, I have a couple of diatonic tunes on the album, but really it was about the chromatic, and it was about the sensibility of, you know, the Fontanas was not a jam band. I mean, it was a pop band, you know, in terms of, like, even though we had extended solos where you could improvise But if you listen to that first tune on there, Where He Lies, that was supposed to be our single. I was trying to think, like, okay, I'm George Harrison, and somebody gives me a song, and okay, what kind of a secondary hook line can I come up with for a song that brings the tune out, makes it even more hooky, but doesn't overwhelm the song? That's the kind of thing I was trying to do. I also did, I was still playing saxophone that time, I was overlaying saxophone and harp together on a number of tunes as well on that record.

SPEAKER_02:

So what's the story, how Come the album's been released, what? 34

SPEAKER_01:

years

SPEAKER_02:

later. 34 years later, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's just a typical music biz disaster kind of a thing. We had a financial backer who we'd finished the album, and he skipped out. And we were left with a gigantic bill. And the label said, look, we can't release this. We can't keep doing this. So the whole thing just essentially at that part just completely collapsed. And that was the end of it. And everybody went their separate ways. 34 years later, the label just decided, well, let's see if we can put this out. Because they want to complete the history of the Blackberry Way label and have all the bands.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. So are you guys going to reform and start touring the album?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't think so. Well, you know, hey, if it became a hit, well, yeah, sure. I'd go out on the road with it. It'd be fun. I mean, the guy who's the main songwriter, songwriter Brian Drake and singer and rhythm guitarist he's still very active in the Twin Cities rock scene as a songwriter excellent writer and you know hey something happened who knows

SPEAKER_02:

yeah great so going back then to what is your is it your second album then was the Dream of the Serpent Dog the first one actually released that was in 1997 so this was largely a an acoustic jazz album,

SPEAKER_01:

yeah? Yeah, yeah. A little bit of a kind of a world music thing thrown in there as well. The big thing was there were three primary writers, myself, Bobby E., and Jim Chenoweth, the bass player, and we all wrote three tunes, put them on the album, and basically there was one tune that was co-written with Bobby E., the guitar player, Snake Oil. That record kind of set the stage for what I like doing on some of my jazz albums uh primarily chromatic one diatonic tune snake oil was yeah that was my one diatonic thing doing it and for everybody out there if you listen to it it's in uh what the howard levy uh system of uh it's called a second flat so

SPEAKER_02:

So, yeah, so you had this album in 97, and then you had your Jug Band album, which you mentioned in 99.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And then in 2003, you played with Bill Geezy and the Promise Breakers. This is more poppy, is this one, would you say?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's kind of an Americana roots country and pop. rock pop thing you know it's crossover like a lot a lot of different influences but you know that kind of idea

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and you're playing are you playing more diatonic on this one

SPEAKER_01:

yes it seemed like the material warranted more diatonic absolutely so and at that point i my diatonic skills were really accelerating fast because again i was i was constantly transferring uh what i was doing with the chromatic over to diatonic and i wanted to you know like with the sugar kings too i i I did a lot of diatonic. It's interesting because out there, if anybody knows me in the harmonica world, I'm so primarily thought of as a chromatic player, and yet my output of recordings, there's a lot of stuff that I did with the diatonic. So yeah, on that recording, I did a lot of diatonic, and on the Sugar Kings, there's a lot of diatonic as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, the song Arthur and Brenda, there's a fine, fast run on the diatonic Thank you. And then you do a blues album with Papa John Colstead, who I've had another player who played with. Mike Turk. Mike Turk.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent player. He's quite a bit, ironically, quite a bit like me. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

I had Mike on quite recently. You know, this is probably a full-on blues album, right? So, you know, you're showing that you can do the blues side as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, right. Yeah, doing the, it's still mostly acoustic and pre-war for the most part. I mean, we're doing Lonnie Johnson tune, Scrapper Blackwell, you know, all that kind of stuff Basically, I'm following Papa John's repertoire and what he does. He was a 12-string player, so he's a lot like Lead Belly that way. And we had a great time. I loved playing with him. He's a really fun guy. And we did another album, too, with a band called the Hot Club of East Lake Street. And we did more swing in that group.

SPEAKER_02:

And then in 2007, you released an album with the Clint Hoover Trio. So this is your first one as a band leader. So this is sort of jazz standards on this one.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, right. I wanted to do something that was, you know, reminiscent of the, I'm a really big fan of the blue note era of jazz. You know, I wanted that idea of just going in and playing live in the studio and doing a session. That's why I call it On This Day and just getting some really good, a couple of good players that I played with out a lot. It's interesting. We didn't use a drummer, but we were just a trio without a drummer. But I kind of like that, actually, because it left a lot of space in there. We work with dynamics a lot as the three of us. Those are all just straight ahead jazz standards. And again, I did the thing where it's all chromatic, but I do this Horace Silver tune, Sister Sadie, with the diatonic

SPEAKER_03:

harp.

UNKNOWN:

¦

SPEAKER_02:

And then a little bit later, a couple of years later, in 2009, you played in a band called Eastside.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we did two albums. And kind of the idea was playing that blue note jazz, but combining it with a kind of a Brazilian type of tango nuevo sound on some of the stuff.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

because we had this really good percussionist. So we did this, it was kind of a blend of that. The second album is called Astoria, and that's sort of a reference to Astor Piazzolla and that kind of music. That had a kind of a unique aspect to it. The guy I played with, Reynolds Flipsick, he wrote the majority of the tunes, an excellent writer and guitar player. And yeah, those were fun records to make. I think the first one is, I consider some of my best in-studio improvisation is on that the first Eastside album because again that was just live in the studio we did you do two or three takes of every tune and we were done and then it was mixed the same day boom you're done it doesn't take months of overlaying

SPEAKER_02:

great and then more recently you played in a band called Jimmy Mack and the Attack which I think is pretty much full-on rock music isn't it you're getting some sort of rock harp on here

SPEAKER_01:

yeah yeah full-on rock Rock and blues. Blues rock, I guess I would think of it. Although, yeah, it's definitely got some serious rock aspects to it. When I moved out to Pittsburgh, it took me a while to get into a scene out here, and I ended up kind of getting back into doing it. I hadn't done it for decades, doing highly amplified blues rock, classic rock kind of stuff, and just kind of having a gas with it. In a way, it's sort of fun to do. I updated all my gear on that, and I had a lot of fun with some of the newer things going on technologically. That's really, truly, again, a demo live. Live in the studio CD. So some of the vocals had to be overdubbed. And that's about it. It depends on the kind of music you're doing. But for that kind of music, again, I like doing it in terms of a live thing. There's just a freshness when you're soloing and stuff that's really nice about that kind of work.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And also, you do the song Why You Gotta, which I think he's played on a chromatic. Yeah, that's on a chromatic. So, yeah, it's a bit like the Fontana's where you mentioned earlier on. You're really driving the sound with a chromatic, which is, you know, probably quite an unusual use of the chromatic that you get in such a heavily sort of driven sound out of the chromatic.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I really worked hard on that idea of being able to get the chromatic to be really, you know, balls to the wall kind of a sound out of it. On that tune, the parts with the vocals and when I'm not soloing, all I do is take a chromatic solo, but the rest of is my diatonic, and I'm playing these kind of organ lines with the diatonic and using splits and running it through a Leslie pedal and with an octave drop. I'm really trying to be the organ player in the band.¶¶ So, but then I put down the diatonic and pick up the chromatic and turn off all the gizmos and just running through a little tube amp and just trying to get it to scream. I'm using a CX-12 on that, by the way. I like those for amplified chromatic.

SPEAKER_02:

So then moving into some of the other stuff you do, you've done quite a lot of session work. You've done movies and commercials, TV. You've even done a TV news thing. What about the TV news thing? How did you get that?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it was, oh, that's a long time ago. Oh, gosh. That was just for this reporter who had a segment on the news program that was called On the Road Again. And he'd go around. And he was from England, too. And basically, they just wanted me to play the Willie Nelson tune, On the Road Again. And

SPEAKER_02:

you've done some writing. Have you got a harp instructional book out?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I do not. I've been involved in doing harp parts for different instructional books, like for Mel Bay and stuff like that. But no, I've never put out a book. I've thought about it. I've done a lot of teaching. I have a whole methodology. I don't know. It just seems, though, that the market for harp instruction is so heavy and there's so much out there that I don't know if it's worth the effort to do it, to be honest. And at my age, I tell you, I just want to play. I want to perform as much as I can while I can and play and record and do all that stuff.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so Clint, a question I ask each time is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_01:

probably if I have 10 minutes I would I would try to play a bebop head and then you know play it a number of times or maybe a couple of them those are such great warm-ups and that would

SPEAKER_02:

be on the chromatic and diatonic or would you choose one

SPEAKER_01:

yeah yeah I've got some bebop heads worked up on the diatonic in different positions and I'll do that I mean I can't do like Howard Levy does is play confirmation in all 12 keys as a warm-up I saw him do that at a at a workshop but in a way that's where i got inspired to do that as a quick warm-up is just run through something like donnelly or confirmation as a warm-up you know and uh and it gets you going for sure

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and what about any sort of practice regime you know maybe you know now or when you were younger did you have any particular practice regime

SPEAKER_01:

i really do a lot of scale exercises and arpeggio exercises i also do like transposing is a real big part of what i do like i'll take i'll I'll take some kind of riff, particularly in jazz, 2-5-1 riffs. I'll take a 2-5 riff and the ones that I particularly like, and I'll run them through all 12 keys. That's a really good warm-up as well, that kind of a thing. And that ability to quickly transpose is a really helpful thing. So I'll do things like that, scale exercises, transposing, riff, or a whole head of something like that. Then I'll get to repertoire, and I'll start working on repertoires and learn learning new tunes, all that kind of stuff. I still practice a lot. It's just something I do. It's what I do.

SPEAKER_02:

And how old are you now? 68. I am now 68 years old. And you're still practicing hard. Great to hear.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it helps keep me young, for sure. I mean, I look forward to practicing. I'm not happy if I don't practice. As Dizzy Gillespie said, he said, if you don't practice for a day when you're out on the bandstand, you notice. If you don't practice for a few days and you're out on the bandstand, the band notices. If you don't practice for five days or a week, the audience notices. That's a paraphrase of his that I... live by because i tell you yeah i i really like to be sharp for when i go out and play so

SPEAKER_02:

So we'll get on to talking about gear now. So first of all, diatonic, what do you like to play?

SPEAKER_01:

My preferred is Golden Melodies. And I have a lot of customized golden melodies from different customizers that I use. I get the compromised tuning on them because, you know, I want to have the chords to sound good. Because, you know, gold melodies, they're not temper tuned. You know, they're equal tuned. And so the chords can sound rough. So I retune them myself if it's a thing out of the box or I have customizers do it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And which customizers do you like to use? Joe Spears. Joe Spears, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I use him a lot. I got Joel Anderson has done a lot of customizing for me. And right now I'm slowly getting a set of customized harps from the guy, Blue Moon.

SPEAKER_02:

Tom Halchuk.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Hey,

SPEAKER_00:

everybody, you're listening to Neil Warren's Harmonica Happy Hour Podcast, sponsored by Tom Halcheck and Blue Moon Harmonicas out of Clearwater, Florida, the best in custom harmonicas, custom harmonica parts, and more. Check them out, www.bluemoonharmonicas.com.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. So what do you see about the advantage of the customized harps? Worth the money,

SPEAKER_01:

yeah? Yeah, they're worth the money, I think. Although I still have to, when I get a customized harp back, I still have to go through and do the offset myself because of how I play. They're not me. I'm not that good of a customizer, but I sure don't want to spend the time doing the bossing and read profiling and all that. stuff myself it's just like i would never practice again if i was doing all that myself and and i put a priority on practicing over harp repair and customizing for sure chromatics are a high maintenance instrument you know there's a lot you got to do with them as well and i that work i have to do myself you know replacing valves tuning and you're of course you're always having to take the slide and the mouthpiece apart and cleaning the slides and all that kind of stuff so

SPEAKER_02:

So what about your chromatic of choice these days?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, geez, I've got so many. I don't even know what to say. But oh, by the way, the gold melodies I use are the old ones. I just want to make that specific. And also I do use I like rockets for blues rock. And I use those. Those are my beater harps that I take out when I'm playing out with like Jimmy Mack and the attack and stuff like that. They're very loud and they they can take a lot of abuse. So, but as far as my chromatics go, I come back a lot to the original 64X. I have customized versions of those with brass combs and I've had some other harps done like with the guy from China Wills Make. He will mill these bodies for you and stuff. And so I have a number of things like that. I like the CX-12 for, again, for super amplified work. Jay, Generally, until I moved out here, I didn't use a 12-hole lot. I was exclusively a 16-hole player. But for amplifying, the CX-12 works really well. Sometimes I do miss the lowest octave, but it's better for amplification. In the old days, back in the Fontanas, I used strictly a CBH. 2016 cbh for that i found that those covers with the little slots in them allowed me to be able to cup down and get the kind of sound compression that you can on a blues harp

SPEAKER_02:

yeah sure i've never tried one of those yeah

SPEAKER_01:

yeah you know i don't play those acoustically i don't like the sound acoustically but an unintended consequence of those little slots in there for individual uh resonating cavities for the reeds was that when you're amplifying it you can really shut it down like for a full octave with your hands easily and you can get as much bass push and again sound compression that you can when you're cupping down on a blues harp so that was absolutely essential for me back in the for loud bands back in those days so I have East Top brass comb chromatic I really like I have Suzuki Fabulous that's sort of a Frankenstein that I have another brass comb for very nice So I kind of spread it out over a lot of different types of harps these days.

SPEAKER_02:

You mentioned that you like to play, obviously, a chromatic just in the key of C. What about with the diatonics? Do you like to play different tunings? Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

I just kind of, you know, and I love all those tunings that, you know, particularly like Brendan came up with and all that kind of stuff. And they're really cool. But you know what? I mean, it's like I just log so much time on a Richter-tuned diaton and and getting getting good at the overblows and being able to get the overblows to bend and put vibrato on overblows and it's just like nope can't do it i just this point in my life i'm an old dog and i just stick with the richter tune diatonics and same with the chromatic i don't mess around with tunings and bebop tunings or anything like that so that's what i learned and that's kind of what i'm stuck with in a way

SPEAKER_02:

and what about amplification again i think i've been reading that these days you like to play more acoustically because you feel it brings out the the quality of the harmonica better which i you know definitely agree with and you know you certainly get a you know that distinctive sound playing acoustically

SPEAKER_01:

right well that's that's kind of an old uh whatever wherever that you pulled that from that's that's pre-going to Pittsburgh because now I'm back in amplified playing again. But I had pretty much abandoned doing amplified playing for many, many, many, many years after I was done with things like the Fontanas and my blues rock band. I was in the Blenders. All I wanted to do was play acoustic because I found dynamics of the harmonica are interesting. It doesn't have, of course, the dynamic range of certainly say like a trumpet or something like that. But within a narrower context of dynamics, it has a lot of subtleties of dynamics that you can work with. And so I was in a band for a while that was a crazy band. It was made up of bluegrass musicians and bluegrass instruments, you know, banjo, mandolin, fiddle and stuff. And we played straight ahead jazz. And that's where I realized, oh, I love playing acoustically. because of the narrower dynamics. It didn't get super loud, but within that, you could work with a lot of dynamics. And of course, then the tonal aspects of it is really nice too. But I've come back to doing a lot with the amplified harp and enjoying that as well. I'm a very eclectic musician.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, definitely. So what amps do you like using these days?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, my go-to amp since 1980 is just a simple Princeton blackface reverb, and I bought it for$120 back then. It's an early 60s model. You know, I have a custom amp. It's a Megatone amp, a separate head, and it's wonderful, you know, all hand-wired, the whole bit. It sounds great. It's got two 10s in it, wonderful for outdoor concerts and stuff like that, again, for highly amplified stuff. But my go-to amp is still a Princeton for anything like that. I'm just happy with it. You know, it just is a wonderful, seems to work really good. And for jazz, though, what I do is, you know, I play through a powered PA speaker. So I have my own sound, you know, it's a strictly, you know, it's a cupped mics through a PA speaker, because I don't want any distortion, right? I don't want any overdrive. I want it to be a pure sound on the harp, on the chromatic particularly. And so I use that for more of when I do jazz. as work. What about microphones? Yeah, I've played around with a lot of different stuff over the years. I think I recorded the Fontana's thing on a Shure Dynamic SM62 microphone, which was very, to say the least, not your typical harp mic. I've got a lot of different bullet mics and all that kind of stuff. I tend to not play a lot of bullet mics. I play a bulletini once in a while. I like that. But I keep coming back to uh just uh the fireball microphone biotics as what i keep coming back to all the time although however i am very interested in getting this buyer ribbon mic that's that's a ball mic and people are saying wonderful things about it i'm thinking of that and uh it's very expensive so i haven't bought it yet and i'm still just a working uh in the in the slugging it out in the trenches musician so i haven't really got around to buying that yet i used to I have the preferred mic that I still do that Howard Levy uses, the 442. Sennheiser? 441. 441, okay. In the Sugar Kings, I used to use that a lot and run it through a little tube preamp as well. But I was working on a stand with it because I wanted to have cupping effects and all that kind of thing. So I don't use that much anymore. I don't really have the opportunity to use it that much anymore. But I've recorded with it, and it's really good for recording too. So

SPEAKER_02:

final question then, just about your future plan. I think you've said already you just want to get out playing as much as possible. So where can people see you playing these days?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, mostly around the Pittsburgh area. I hate to say it. I'm not doing any touring or anything like that. I'm mostly just playing in the scene out here in Pittsburgh right now. You know, I'm a working musician. I'm playing out anywhere from two to four times a week, basically. And then supplementing that with my teaching, I do some teaching here locally in my studio and then online as well. You know, I'm always happy to take students online. And my plan is, I've been working on this idea for years. I really want to do a kind of a follow-up to the Dream of the Serpent Dog record. I think in some ways that was one of my best records. And I've been working on writing the tunes for it for a long time. I'm a slow writer. That's in the works for me. I wouldn't call it straight-ahead jazz. It's going to be more of a combination of some of my other influences in terms of style and production, but it's going to be an instrumental record.

SPEAKER_02:

So thanks so much for joining me today, Clint Hoover, and your obsession with the harmonica through your life is definitely what we like to hear on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, it's a total obsession. I love it.

SPEAKER_02:

Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Thanks to Rob Sawyer for another donation, and thanks to Tom Halczak from Blue Moon Harmonicas for providing some sponsorship for the podcast. Tom is a lovely guy who has some excellent harmonica products, endorsed by the great Jason Ritchie himself. I'll sign off now with Clint playing us out with what he considers some of his best jazz improvisation from the Eastside album, with the title track, Eastside.

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.