Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Winslow Yerxa interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 126

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Winslow Yerxa joins me on episode 126.
Winslow is originally from Canada, now living in San Francisco. He started out playing blues harmonica before becoming interested in the traditional music of French Canada and British origins, among others. Winslow plays in harmonica ensembles and produces his own compositions using a wide variety of harmonicas, including the diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, the Pentaharp, XB40 and the recent Gamechanger harmonica.
Winslow created the Harmonica Information Publication (HIP) magazine in the 1990s, with much of the publishing and writing done by himself. This led on to him writing Harmonica For Dummies and Blues Harmonica For Dummies.
Winslow was also the President of SPAH from 2012 to 2015.

Links:
Winslow’s website:
https://winslowyerxa.com/

Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WinslowYerxaHarmonica/

Bandcamp:
https://winslowyerxa.bandcamp.com/

The HIP magazine:
https://winslowyerxa.com/articles/hip-the-harmonica-information-publication/

Videos:
Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@winslowyerxa8505

Tommy Reilly playing Chez Helene TV theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da6dW7aV7D0

The Rounder’s Rag:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKZmcSAanc4

Spanish Changes with Tuula Tossavainen Cotter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30BatYKOOC0

JDR Trochilus / Bushman Gamechanger harmonica:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0NM1mxtzHw


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

Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Winslow Yerxa joins me on episode 126. Winslow is originally from Canada, now living in San Francisco. He started out playing blues harmonica before becoming interested in the traditional music of French Canada and British origins, amongst others. Winslow plays in harmonica ensembles and produces his own compositions, the diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, the pentaharp XB40 and the recent game-changer harmonica. Winslow created the harmonica information publication Hip magazine in the 1990s with much of the publishing and writing done by himself. This led on to him writing Harmonica for Dummies and Blues Harmonica for Dummies. Winslow was also the president of Spar from 2012 to 2015. 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. Well, hello Neil, and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to get you on, Winslow. So let's start off with your name. It's an interesting surname. So where's that come from? Where are your roots from?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, my family's been in Canada since 1784, but they started out on the island of Texel, which is off the northern coast of Holland, where people speak a language known as Frisian. And I had an ancestor who, in 1742, came aboard a ship that landed in what is now New York, which was at that time New Holland, a Dutch colony, And for the next century or so, under British rule almost immediately, they slowly transitioned from speaking Dutch to speaking English. By the time the Revolutionary War had concluded, the ancestor who was born as Johannes Yerxa was now John Yerxa, spelled Y-E-R-X-A. They re-spelled it for English speakers. The only letter they kept was R. Everything else changed. But even though it's spelled perfectly phonetically, it still confuses people, and they always second-guess the pronunciation and have wildly imaginative ideas about where it might have come from.

SPEAKER_00:

So great. So as you say there, you've got Canadian roots, but now you're living in San Francisco, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, that's correct.

SPEAKER_00:

I think your Canadian heritage there has played a big part in the music you play. So tell us about how you got into playing the harmonica and how your living in Canada influenced the sort of music you were interested in.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, a lot of that happened after the fact. Now, like with so many people who take up the harmonica, and this has been true for several decades, I started out hearing, well, for me it was actually British blues rock. Bands like Cream, Spencer Davis Group, later on the Rolling Stones. You heard little bits of blues harmonica in a rock context. And then, of course, I heard John Mayall, who was much more definitely blues. although a lot of his guitarists went on to become famous rock guitarists. And then I found people like Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite and then all of the wonderful original blues harmonica players. And then I branched out from there because I started getting interested in jazz. I went to music school. I moved to San Francisco because my wife was from here. Started playing in a band that played original music based on African and Caribbean rhythms. And during that period, I wasn't playing harmonica at all, hardly. But then I started to hear Scottish and some French Canadian music, and it resonated with me. It felt like home. And so I started to explore that and joined a local club called the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers and really dove deeply into both the French Canadian and Scottish repertoire, along with associated repertoires from Scandinavia, Ireland, and other places. So I came at it sort of side-long. It was more like a... So this

SPEAKER_00:

fiddle group, you were playing harmonica with them, were you?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, this was a group started by Alistair Fraser, who's a Scotsman and probably one of the world's premier traditional Scottish violinists. And he started going to the various traditional music camps, and the Celtic music tended to be Irish-focused. And he thought, well, gee, I'm a Scotsman. Why not do something about Scottish music? And so he started this club about 40 years ago. And they meet monthly. They have an ever-growing book of tunes. And he started a teaching camp. Now he has, I think, four or five of them in different parts of the world. where people would show up with their instruments, mostly violins, and learn tunes by ear primarily. And he would often have guest teachers from a variety of traditions, the Cape Breton tradition in Canada, Irish players, Scandinavian players, later on French-Canadian players. So that was a real atmosphere in which to develop my knowledge and playing of that music. And at first it was a very steep climb because there were no other harmonica players. I had to figure out how to adapt the harmonica to This music, which is very different from playing blues or jazz or even popular music. And so that was a real learning experience for me. I had to learn to read from the dots, as they say. They have everything notated. And what kind of harmonica to use, what key of harmonica to use. And I went through a lot of different phases of working those things out. And I ended up recording an album's worth, actually I have some additional stuff, of Canadian traditional music.

UNKNOWN:

piano plays

SPEAKER_02:

Canadian traditional music has a lot of input from Scottish, a lot of input from Irish, a lot of input from French, and also native input. And where the French-Canadian and Native traditions merge is a really interesting place because they share certain rhythmic tendencies to play in inconsistent meters. In other words, something might be in two until it isn't. Then it's in three. Then it's in two again. Then it's in five. And it flows very naturally. You may not even notice these shifting metrical patterns. So those recordings reflect my investigations into that and it kind of inject my own ideas into it as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Is this your 2006 album, The Northern Traditions Reimagined? Yes, it is. Going back then to your music development, so you say you went to music college. What were you studying there? Was that a different instrument or in harmonica?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, of course, harmonica was not a taught subject. Now, I was studying composition and arranging, but in order to have an instrumental major, which was required, I studied voice.

SPEAKER_00:

And then you started playing blues harmonica. I heard an interesting story that you had a sort of electric kazoo, and that's kind of what drew you to the harmonica. Tell us that story. Like many players of my

SPEAKER_02:

generation, I started playing in garage bands or basement bands, you know, just kids getting together in a recreational space and banging out music in whatever fashion they could. This was the period when I was hearing bands like Cream and so forth, and there would be some little harmonica part that would And my mother had worked as a telephone operator before our marriage, and she had this set of high-impedance headphones, which didn't use speaker cones, paper speaker cones like we know in standard speakers. Instead, there were metal discs attached. mounted over electromagnets with an earpiece screwing them down. So if I bent the discs a little bit, screwed them on not too tightly, I would get a kazoo-like effect. And because they were higher impedance, you could plug them into a guitar amplifier, and so I would hold this thing close to my mouth, pretty much cupping it almost like one would a harmonica, and hum these simple harmonica parts. But eventually I started feeling a little silly about that, and I thought, well, maybe I should get a harmonica. So I asked a guy I knew at school, Harry Kalinsky, what I should You don't get a C harp. That's good. What I didn't tell him was I was trying to play a tune in the key of E. It was Cream's version of Spoonful. And the two notes of the harmonica solo were simply the notes E and G. And that works fine just blowing and drawing on hole two of a C harmonica. But the chords sounded weird in the context of E. So I didn't know what to make of that. And I actually mapped out all 12 keys of diatonic harmonica. I knew how to do that. And I looked at an A harmonica and I thought, hmm. That looks pretty good, but I can't bend that G sharp and draw seven down to a G. You know, I knew about bending, too, at that point. So that can't be right. So I rejected the right solution until I walked into a music store and mentioned this to one of the employees who said, oh, there's this thing called cross harp in our second position. Oh, and by the way, there's this book by this guy named Tony Glover called Blue's Harp. The only book available back then, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. I mean, there were other books for chromatic and things that had been published 30 years ago, a lot of them British. And so I got that. And I didn't really learn to play from that as much as I learned about the players. Because a lot of what Tony had in terms of what harp was being played on a particular cut, he had wrong. But that didn't deter me because I was figuring things out anyway on my own. And that year in my Christmas stocking, because this was close to that time, there was a marine band in A. My mother had been listening or Santa Claus had been listening I suppose and it all kind of proceeded from there.

SPEAKER_00:

Great. So it sounded like you knew a lot about harmonicas early on, or at least very interested to look into, you know, the layouts of the notes or some of the things you've touched on there. So this has led you on to being very, you know, one of the most knowledgeable people around, right? We're getting to the great things you've done in that area. But you were obviously very interested early on and how it, you know, worked under the hood, as they say. Yeah, I didn't know much about

SPEAKER_02:

how reeds worked or why bending had, you know, limits on different notes. That came much later. But I was one of the people who was lucky in that I could get singing quite easily. I learned how to bend fairly early. And these are the two greatest mysteries for most beginning players. How do I get a single note? How do I bend notes? Those sorts of things came easily to me. The other thing that I'm sort of thankful for is that I had great models, and not just in blues. I heard the really great players fairly early on, and I knew what a good sound was. I knew what a good phrase sounded like just by hearing what was being played. It was also true on chromatic, though. And it Again, this gets more into the British realm of people like Tommy Riley and Larry Adler, and much later, Toots Tielemans. So I heard great chromatic tone. And my mother had the idea that, oh, gee, he's interested in harmonica. And the chromatic, I mean, that's the really good kind. So off we went to the music store and got me a chromatic harmonica. So I played diatonic and chromatic. I learned them almost simultaneously, although I didn't get as deep into chromatic as I did into the diatonic initially. That took a while longer.

SPEAKER_00:

And at this stage, were you mainly playing blues, or when you got the chromatic, what were you trying to do on that? Initially, I was just playing

SPEAKER_02:

third position blues, and it was tongue-blocked and all of the various tongue effects, because I was taking it from Little Walter and from his techniques, and he rarely strayed from doing that in his playing. But at the same time, hearing people like Tommy Riley and Larry Adler led me to know there's a whole lot more this can do. I remember hearing on the radio Adler playing Blues in the Night, and Adler It was astonishing to me the variety of tonal colors. Now he sounds like a flute. Now he sounds like a trumpet or some other thing. So I really knew there was a lot of potential there. Interestingly, as a child, I heard Riley and didn't know it. He had a production company that produced library music, the sort of music you can license to use with your industrial film or whatever it happens to be. And there was a children's program called Chez Hélène, where a woman, Hélène Bayarchand, who was actually a very respected folk singer and folklorist, the theme music was played by Tommy Riley.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_02:

And years later, after growing up and getting curious about that music, again part of my exploration of my Canadian roots from here in California, I finally found the music. And I immediately recognized Tommy's playing. It was unmistakable. And it turned out that it was indeed him. So I'd been hearing Riley and extremely good chromatic techniques since childhood and just didn't know it.

SPEAKER_00:

Of course, Riley's Canadian, isn't

SPEAKER_02:

he? And he moved over to Britain. Right. He was among some Canadian musicians who ended up settling in the UK after the war. The other one being Robert Farnham, the great conductor and arranger and composer.

SPEAKER_00:

And of course, interesting that Larry Adler also went to the UK. So the chromatics... seem to have got drawn to to the uk and yet spa which you were heavily involved with and then were there present for some time uh initially was a you know more focus on the chromatic wasn't in the early days

SPEAKER_02:

well it was and it reflected again the musical backgrounds and tastes of the people who founded that in 1963 most of them were employees of the ford motor company back when automobile manufacturing was very much centered in detroit which is where the club started there have been and still are harmonica clubs all over the united states that tend to be very local and often have whimsical names like the Peoria Pocket Piano Puffers or something like that, but the name Spa Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica is far more farsighted in its view, and it grew to be a national organization. Now, the players of that generation were admirers of the great harmonica bands like the Harmonicats and the Borominovich Harmonica Rascals.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_02:

and of chromatic soloists like Adler. So that reflected their view of what a harmonica club should be and also, of course, what the harmonica should be. And in those generations, there was the idea that the chromatic harmonica reflected progress. The diatonic, that's old-fashioned stuff. So when players of my generation came along into that organization, it was like, why do these kids want to go backwards in time and in progress? And of course, our generation had very much been influenced indirectly by blues and roots music through blues, through rock and roll, through country, through all of those sorts of musics. And the diatonic was really the main instrument there. And that caused a lot of conflict for a while. And eventually... It's gotten to the point where really the diatonic has taken over in harmonica clubs, and chord harmonica and chromatic harmonica and bass harmonica are on the verge of being endangered species, although there's a very strong movement to keep those alive. We always make sure to feature harmonica bands and chromatic soloists at the spa conventions.

SPEAKER_00:

And you're in some harmonica bands yourself, haven't you? You've featured on a few, yeah, and you played at Spa in some harmonica bands, I think. Do you do that every year? Yeah, I'm

SPEAKER_02:

part of the

SPEAKER_00:

Tom

SPEAKER_02:

Stryker Big Band, which is an octet and sometimes a nonet, with bass and chord, sometimes two basses, and the rest chromatics, usually.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_02:

There's a whole library of wonderful arrangements, very sophisticated ones, that have been written by a variety of arrangers over time for this size of ensemble. So we've got some players who range in age from, oh gosh, close to 80 down to, in one case, 20s. A couple of cases come to think of it. There are younger players taking up the bass and chord and chromatic. They're definitely a minority, but they're some very strong players. So we really have a wonderful time playing a lot of that music and every year we do do a concert.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, fantastic. I've had a few harmonica bands on the podcast. I've had Fatima Ghana and Swang but both European based so yeah, great to see the harmonica band still going and you're involved with them too. So what do you play in the harmonica band? Which instruments?

SPEAKER_02:

Generally I'm playing chromatic, usually somewhere down in the stack. I seem to have a natural affinity for playing sort of baritone parts and I do play the lower harmonicas. I play bass harmonicas some although not in that particular group and I play a little bit of court, just enough to know how to write for it.

SPEAKER_00:

So, getting back to SPA then. So, you were the president of SPA. We're jumping ahead a little bit in time, I think from 2012 to 2015, yeah? Right, yeah. It's

SPEAKER_02:

a three-year term.

SPEAKER_00:

So, how did that come about and what did it involve being the president of SPA? Well, a lot of

SPEAKER_02:

putting out fires. Now, SPA does two things. It produces an annual convention that lasts roughly a week somewhere in the United States, usually somewhere in the Midwest, where it's most accessible to people traveling from all points. And the other thing it does is put out a quarterly magazine. We also have a scholarship program for youth up to the age of 21, and we solicit donations in order to be able to fund those things. So being the president, you've got an executive committee, and then all of the people responsible for a variety of things, such as running the convention director while the magazine publisher and editor we've got of course you know treasurer and a membership secretary and then we've got all of the people who do all of the variety of tasks associated with the major activities of the magazine the youth scholarship and the convention itself and how it came about for me well my immediate predecessor tom striker had decided to step down he served two i think it was two terms he and his immediate predecessor paul davies per And indeed, my candidacy was the only time in anyone's memory that there had actually been two candidates. Generally, it's sort of, there's a vote, but it's by acclamation because who else wants to step up for an unpaid volunteer position, which is true in most volunteer organizations. It's whoever's most willing. Well, I wasn't terribly willing because I didn't really want the job all that much. I knew what it involved, but they prevailed on me and I said, okay, give me three days. And this was at the convention. I thought, if it settles with my gut, okay, then I'll do it. I accepted the candidacy. And then we had a rather contentious back and forth. It was a little like American elections. And I ended up winning, you know, hugely by a gigantic margin, largely because people knew me. So I was able to serve almost in a transitional function. And there were a lot of sort of little problems and disruptions going on in the background. But I was successfully able to to navigate that period. And luckily, one of the people that I had been trying to recruit prior to my accepting of the nomination and who had begged off at the time stepped up. And so I had a very good successor in Michael Dieth, who himself is British. Yeah, Michael's been on the podcast already, yep. Ah, okay. And now we have Jerry Diehl in that position. And we've got a very strong team. And it's one of the things I used to say to people when they said, oh, things are going wonderfully, you know, thank you very much. And I'd say, well, I have a very good team in place, because I did. And that's continued. And when you look at the idea of people joining clubs and actually traveling places, You know, in this virtual world, it's not a given that these things will succeed or persist. But SPA remains strong, and I'm really happy to see that. And I contributed to that, you know, during my presidency and continue to on the Youth Committee and the Entertainment Committee.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so you're still involved. Oh, yeah, very much. Yeah, but it's a good point you make. I think COVID's changed so many things. And one of the things is, you know, making a lot more things online. So like you say, people are more willing and happy to do online things now. And they've got the equipment at home, right, these days that they didn't have before. So yeah, it is more of a challenge, isn't it, to travel hundreds of miles to go and do these things. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And yet it's wonderful to be in the company of 500 other harmonica enthusiasts, all hyperventilating together day and night. And people are so enthusiastic you can stumble out of your hotel room at any hour of the day or night and somebody is doing something. There'll be a little jam session going on or some deep discussion happening. So it's a wonderful experience to physically be in the same space with other people who share this

SPEAKER_00:

very

SPEAKER_02:

deep

SPEAKER_00:

interest. And we have a similar club in the UK, of course, which was called the National Harmonica League and now they've rebranded themselves to Harmonica UK. So I was trying to work out which is the worst name, National Harmonica League or the Society for the preservation and advancement of the harmonica quite unusual names but i'm glad that i'm glad that the us has stuck with spa

SPEAKER_02:

to a canadian nhl means national hockey league so there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance to that but harmonica uk i think is a great name you know and i've been we've been getting the magazine for well going on 30 years so i'm aware of what what's going on and i actually like what's going on with that with the magazine too it's coming out on a regular basis and actually a lot of the american are writing for that. I wish they would write a bit more for

SPEAKER_00:

Harmonica Happenings, the spa. Yeah, the Harmonica UK team are doing a great job and trying to bring us into the 21st century, which is good to see. So let's talk about some of the other amazing things you've done writing. So you're very probably best known for writing the Harmonica for Dummies, you know, the famous series of books. So you did the one for Harmonica. So, you know, there's a lot of Harmonica books, right? But that's, you know, it's got a lot of kudos being as part of that dummy series yeah so tell us how that came about

SPEAKER_02:

i actually have to thank and this is an american who has written for for um is it harmonica world the harmonica uk publication yeah rob paparazzi out of new jersey who is a wonderful player and a great singer yeah rob's rob's also been on the podcast right yeah i'm i'm in great company then with all the wonderful colleagues that have appeared anyway john wiley and sons the publisher of the dummy series is located in new jersey headquartered there and And I guess somebody came to one of Rob's shows and asked about the idea of doing a book. And he said, oh, you've got to talk to Winslow. And so they did. So thank you, Rob. And I had to prove myself to them by submitting some writing and other similar things. And eventually I was approved to do the series. I talked to the guy who did the banjo for Dummies. And I just got an idea, OK, are these people OK to work with? And what should I know? And he recommended getting an agent. So I did. So it came about that I would do this book and then later Blues. Harmonica for Dummies. It's a very intensive writing process because they edit very intensively. You know, you have a project editor, you have an acquisitions editor, and then you also have a technical editor, you know, who will call you out if you're spouting nonsense, I guess. And so it's a four-month writing process. You have to deliver one quarter of the book each month So it's pretty intensive, and you're getting a lot of editorial feedback as you write, because the idea is that anyone of normal intelligence and education can pick up the book and at any point open it to any page and understand what they're reading. And when you get a subject which involves music terminology, that involves harmonica-specific terminology, that involves learning techniques that are progressive, you know, you build one skill on another, That's a pretty tall drink of water. And you have to avoid jargon and try to use generally understood terms by most people, as opposed to people who are specifically into music harmonica. So it was quite the experience writing that. And then, of course, I had to record all of the audio.

UNKNOWN:

piano plays

SPEAKER_02:

So quite the experience, but it turned out a book that I think has been successful, both in terms of sales and in terms of people actually being helped by reading it. I wanted to write something that would take people from absolute beginner to somewhere in the intermediate range, and also not focus on one style, at least in the first book. Because one of the things I had noticed, certainly coming to spa conventions, was that not everybody wants to play blues on the diatonic harmonica. I mean, I did write the book specifically for diatonic. I thought it would be too much ground to cover to go into tremolo or chromatic or any other type of harmonica. But I did know that people want to play more than just blues, and so I made it broader. There was some blues-specific information. And I think it's been helpful to people in general. Of course, now there are all sorts of things online, many of them free, and that has definitely impacted the book market in general. You know, the internet has changed everything. But I'm happy to have done it, and I continue to get royalty checks, so I'm happy about that.

SPEAKER_00:

Like you say, it sounds like you had a real professional publishing team behind you, so I'm sure that really raised the quality level as well, right? It sounds like those guys really knew what they were doing. Well, you know,

SPEAKER_02:

as I was working on this, I picked up Tony Glover's book again, and I realized he had very good copy editors. It was in the background. I didn't see that as a teenager reading the book, but as someone who had gone through the process, I saw how well edited that book was. And the fact that you don't notice it as a general

SPEAKER_00:

reader is a good sign. Any chance of any more Harmonica for Dummies books from your side? Well, I had

SPEAKER_02:

floated the idea of doing Chromatic Harmonica for Dummies because people ask for that. The problem is that the book market is such that unless you can sell something like 10,000 copies in the first six months, it's not worth the publisher's time to invest in it. I mean, I could come out with something independent, I suppose, but I've got so many possible projects in front of me that much as I'd like to do that... I don't know if I'll get around to it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and like you say, the medium these

SPEAKER_02:

days is so spread, isn't it, with all the things available online? form like Jason Ricci, who doesn't have any formal course but has hundreds of YouTubes out there. And of course, if you get enough views, YouTube will pay you substantial amounts of money. And I've been rather lax about getting organized to do

SPEAKER_00:

something like that. But you do have a good YouTube channel, too, where you have great content. So we'll get on to that shortly. I just want to stick on the writing theme. So another fantastic thing you did in between 1992 and 1997, you released or you produced created published the harmonica information publication the hip magazine which is a harmonica magazine which you I think pretty much started by yourself and kind of published for yourself at least for the first few publications yeah I did

SPEAKER_02:

yeah I did have guest reviewers to review CDs and things like that in some of the later issues, and that actually came out of another publishing frustration. I'd been in contact with Toots Tielemans. I'd transcribed a bunch of his solos and initiated conversations with him about working together on a chromatic harmonica instruction book specifically for jazz harmonica, and he kind of sort of ran warm and cold on the idea. It never came to fruition, although we developed a pretty good... casual relationship, and he actually helped me a lot with my chromatic playing, but in sort of oblique ways. But when I approached publishers about this, they said, oh, there's no interest in that. Everybody who wants to do that, they'll have figured it out anyway. Well, of course, now we have Max Diallo's book with Cher, which is a jazz publishing company, so clearly there was some merit to the idea, but because I was getting these sort of casual rejections, that kind of put the fire in me, and I thought, okay, well, If they don't see it, I can show them. And desktop publishing had become a thing, and I had access to it, so I started putting out my little magazine. And one of the reasons I did it by myself at first, I don't think I'd seen the NHL publications yet, that came later, but I had seen Harmonica Happenings from Spa, and I had seen the things that Hohner USA put out, and it was always the same writers publishing the same thing individually. in every available outlet. And it was a view that didn't take into account a lot of what I was seeing. And some of this reflected, you know, the generational thing at Spa. So I thought, I'm going to do this on my own, and I'm going to do something that isn't what they're doing, and I'm going to shine on areas that they're not focusing on. I don't want this echo chamber. I want new voices. And that turned out to be mine for the most part. So I did that for a few years until it just became too hard to sustain while working a day job and everything else I was doing. But I'm glad to have done it.

SPEAKER_00:

And so these magazines are still available via your website? People can purchase the PDFs, yeah? Yes, they can. They're still available. Did you publish five editions of the

SPEAKER_02:

magazine? I did publish five out of the projected six, and I'm still a little bit embarrassed about that. Maybe I'll take some of the Toots Tielemans interviews, which I did, and I did, I think, three of them.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that'd be amazing, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And publish those online as a gift to everyone who didn't get their full six issues.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, no, fantastic effort. That must have been a tremendous amount of work. As you say, you had a day job as well, so you must have been putting a lot of extra hours into getting those out. Yes, yeah, it was a lot of work. But that, you know, made you known as a harmonica educator, right? I guess that led on for you to doing Harmonica for Dummies, for one thing.

SPEAKER_02:

It did, to a large extent. The other thing, of course, was, again, the rise of the internet. Of course, now we have things on Facebook. We've got all the various things that are going on. But initially, it was just a little listserv called HARP-L, or HARP-L, where people send an email to a forum, it appears on the forum, and then people can email replies to the forum. And that's still going. But it was started at the University of West Kentucky by a guy named Chris Pierce, and subsequently taken over on a volunteer basis by various other people as successors. And so I was very active on that. And that, I think, helped also with just sort of my reputation as a

SPEAKER_00:

knowledgeable person. So great. So let's go on a bit more to your playing side. We touched on this album that you released in 2006, Harmonica, Northern Traditions Reimagined. So on this, lots of traditional music, as you touched on, Scottish and French and other sort of roots music.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I have. So you're sort of composing these songs and you're using all sorts of different types of harmonicas and different tunings. So you've got a wide interest in all these different approaches, different genres. You're doing some blues, some jazz, obviously we talked about traditional already, some band stuff, even some psychedelic trance music. and alternative tuning. So, yeah, you've got a wide range of music you're putting out here showing your diversity of interest in the harmonica, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sort of a person, I sometimes say I've got eyes like a fly where you've got, you know, 500 images per eye and only the thing is something different appears in each one of those little lenses and so my attention is constantly flitting from one thing to another. And that includes styles of music. You know, I hear so many things of interest that I explore a lot of different things a lot of different stylistic aspects and you know what can the harmonica do in terms of what the instrument itself does but also what settings can you place it in and do something that's musically worthwhile that's kind of reflected in all of those sorts of things and when I'm doing video I find a tendency to create some sort of a narrative whether it's through images, through actually speaking through a narrative, or through just adding text, or sometimes a story song like the Rounders Rag, where I tell a story in the lyrics, and then I also have a succession of images to illustrate that. Shivering wet with no place to go In the middle of the night down on Old Skin Row He'd be thankful for a blanket and a warm pair of shoes And I use a lot of found images, a lot of found video from ancient copyright submissions from over a century ago. And there's a lot of fun stuff to be done with that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I know, some great and really interesting stuff. And again, you're using different tunings. One of your latest releases is called There It Stood.

UNKNOWN:

There It Stood

SPEAKER_00:

This is played in sixth position on a B-flat harmonica that's in the key of A. So that's an example of the sort of things you're exploring. And you've also got some jazz music. You've got a sort of jazz outfit playing with, haven't you? You're playing with a violin player.

UNKNOWN:

VIOLIN PLAYS

SPEAKER_02:

That, unfortunately, is no longer possible, being that she's passed to the other side of the veil between the living and the dead. But Tula Tossavainen-Kotter was a wonderful violinist who grew up playing Finnish traditional music. We met in the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers. When we realized what an affinity we had, we started making music together. So we were drawing partly on her Finnish tradition, partly on her classical background, and partly on her on more my interest in jazz. Some of which dovetailed with the Finnish traditional music, because Toots Tielemans and the Swedish violinist Sven Dasmussen had adapted one of those tunes to a jazz setting. And so we did a lot of music together.

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

So we touched on your YouTube channel earlier on, so you've got lots of content, and the thing you've talked about recently is the Troculus, the Game Changer harmonica, which is a diatonic with a slide. Well, there are

SPEAKER_02:

actually three different forms of this. I mean, they all use the same actual form factor, with different coloured combs to indicate the different tunings. The blue one is tuned exactly like a diatonic harmonica, with the slide raising the pitch one semitone, as one would expect from a chromatic harmonica. That in itself is not new. The original chromatic harmonicas were tuned that way the first things that the ten whole ones that honer came out with as far back as 1910 the starting dates for marketing seemed to vary but that seems to be the earliest date. And until 2013, they were still producing that in the Koch 980, but it was kind of leaky. It had no valves. So the JDR folks came up with a new way of constructing a slide harmonica with this thing with this trapezoidal shape, and it's almost as small as a diatonic. The blue comb, yes, is just like a diatonic with a slide that raises the pitches semitone. Then they've got a chromatic variant, which is tuned exactly like a standard chromatic harmonica. It has a yellow comb. Oh, there's a variant on that. Those who know the chromatic harmonica will know that you've always got two C's side by side wherever two octaves meet, and that's a way of keeping the blow-draw relationship from shifting the way it does in the top octave of a diatonic harmonica. Well, there's a variant on that called C6, where instead of going C-E-G-C and then C-E-G-C in the blow notes, having two C's side by side, it'll go C-E-G-A. So you get an extra way of playing A as a blow note instead of a draw note, and likewise for be flat when you press it in the slide but then they've got this red combed version which is quite unlike anything else now there's a variant on standard diatonic tuning where blow three on a C harmonica is G and so is draw two and there's a variant called Paddy Richter which was popularized on the name especially by Brendan Power where the blow notes in the first octave go C E F A so you don't have the duplicated G and you've got that A that's very hard to bend in tune and especially at fast tempos like in Irish music from down from the draw B so slide out okay it's in Patty Richter tuning but when you press the slide in unexpected things happen the goal with this particular tuning was to give you a complete chromatic scale without having to bend over three full octaves. Now on a standard chromatic, you need 12 holes for three full octaves. The 10-hole chromatic tuned trochilus doesn't have the top two holes. It doesn't give you a full three octaves. So in order to do that, and be close to standard diatonic tuning, the slide does some unusual things. In most holes, it goes up a semitone. In hole two, it goes down two semitones. In hole three, it goes down three semitones on the draw note. And then in hole 10, the blow note goes down a semitone from C to Bs because bending that note down one semitone in hole 10 blow is pretty difficult to achieve in tune let alone at all. So you've got a complete chromatic scale throughout three octaves, but with a slide doing rather unusual things in three places. And if you're used to playing chromatic and diatonic, it could be pretty confusing, especially in those first three holes, but there are also sorts of cool opportunities. And so I've recorded a few things, and I'm still working on some things, that reflect some of the cool things you can do with what that strange tuning can accomplish. This is the red tuning.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and there's a song you put out recently called Oceana. That's played on the blue one, isn't it? It

SPEAKER_02:

is, yeah.

UNKNOWN:

Oceana

SPEAKER_00:

So is this a favorite of yours, this game changer? Is this becoming your main harmonica, or what do you think?

SPEAKER_02:

No, it's not going to become my main harmonica. It's definitely something I'm exploring now and will probably remain in my arsenal of harmonicas. I'm looking at my desk as we speak, and there are probably 30 different harmonicas of various kinds scattered throughout. I mean, there's some diatonics, there's some chromatics, there's an XB-40, which was Hohner's attempt to produce an all-bending harmonica and a very great, it was a wonderful instrument. It's unfortunate that it didn't survive in the marketplace.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I had an XB-40 and I interviewed Rick Epping, of course, who was instrumental in that. So it is a shame, but you record a song called Windermere on the XB-40, don't you? Yes.

UNKNOWN:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I think he was feeling as if maybe it was just a little bit too big for people and all those bends were maybe a bit confusing. Well, and this is

SPEAKER_02:

something that I've noticed, is that diatonic players, in terms of their instrument, whatever their politics might be, are very conservative. They want it to be the same size and shape as a standard diatonic, and they want it... do the expected things. So, for instance, Hohner recently came out with, a couple of years ago, the pentaharp. It plays the sixth note, not the five note. They didn't call it a hexaharp. I guess that didn't sound as good. But it plays the sixth note minor blues scale. And, of course, that's a radical change in the note layout. And players pick it up and go, what? This doesn't do what I thought. Well, of course not. It's something different. And I'm very happy to explore those sorts of things, even if I don't end up, you know, making it my main harmonica. And the XP-40 had a note layout exactly like a standard diatonic. Its form factor is the same as that of a ten-hole chromatic. But yes, it's bigger. And because the blow notes all bend... Now, when I first picked up an XP-40, I found out that I was accidentally bending the blow notes. Because if you apply bending technique, like, say, to draw four on a standard diatonic, and you leave your oral cavity in the same position and play the blow note, you won't get any appreciable result from the blow notes. note it'll stay the same I mean unless you've got something that's well adjusted for overblows and you pop out an overblow by accident but you pick up an xb40 and it's sensitive to all of those things so you had to modify your playing technique a little bit to make that work and then that's exactly what I exploited in Windermere because when you go to the four chord and it's sort of in a 12 bar blues format and sort of not all of a sudden you're bending blow one two three and four all down a semitone as part of the melody so that was my way way of having a little fun with that along with sort of a lot of other stuff about playing in bar bands and uh eulogizing some little town that's sort of a minor celebrity in in

SPEAKER_00:

the local tourist culture don't have my xp40 anymore i'll maybe have to get one again and uh are they still available to buy on you do you know uh you can find them

SPEAKER_02:

probably on on ebay and maybe on amazon yeah there's definitely a used market for them i i have all of the ones that i originally acquired in one or two since but it has sort of fallen out of use as my main diatonic.

SPEAKER_00:

You also do a lot of teaching online and in person, yes? So people can contact you if they're interested in getting lessons from you, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, they can, definitely.

SPEAKER_00:

you have taught, or do you still teach harmonica at the jazz school at Berkeley?

SPEAKER_02:

No, unfortunately. They found that, again, with the rise of the internet, people weren't signing up for an eight-week course for$300. It just wasn't attractive to people. So they took that off the syllabus, and for a while, until COVID came down, I would go over to Berkeley on the weekends to teach in person there, and they would rent me studio space at the faculty rate. But then, of course, COVID came down, and all of that And since then, I've just been teaching online, which I find

SPEAKER_00:

to be very effective. And also you've run the Harmonica Collective with Jason Rich here, which is a kind of convention or a concentrated teaching sort of event, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and we haven't done one since 2018 for a variety of reasons. And since then, others have come up as well. But initially we did that because we felt that the intermediate and advanced learning market segment, if you want to call it that, wasn't really being served. Most of the harmonica teaching events that were specifically teaching events were really geared towards the permanent beginner. In other words, there's always a class of people who have the money to go to something like that, but who never received Yeah. And those were a lot of fun to do. And a lot of organizing that came really from my experience with SPA, negotiating with hotels and structuring things and so forth. And then we did one in New Orleans in 2018 with Tom Watson as producer, which was wonderful to be in New Orleans. It's such a wellspring of musical culture. And we haven't done one since. We were trying to do things sort of during COVID. In fact, we had to cancel an event because of it. I don't know when we'll do another one. But we shall see what the future holds.

SPEAKER_04:

hey

SPEAKER_01:

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_00:

so a question related to teaching is a 10 minute question so if you had 10 minutes of practice what would you spend those 10 minutes doing I mean, there's so many different

SPEAKER_02:

things to play around with and explore. And sometimes they're purely musical and not specific to the harmonica. You know, ways of structuring notes and then maybe getting around among those notes on the harmonica. I mean, I might work on some of my teaching subject ideas. I might pick up this new chromatic from a specific company that they've sent me and say, gee, how does this feel to play versus some of the other ones that I like?

SPEAKER_04:

me me

SPEAKER_02:

It's hard to say

SPEAKER_00:

what I would

SPEAKER_02:

spend

SPEAKER_00:

those 10 minutes on. Such varied interests, yeah. So great stuff. So we'll get on to the last section now and talk about gear, which we've obviously already touched on you quite heavily. So let's talk about some more about the harmonicas you use. So you've talked about you playing a wide variety of harmonicas. Playing chromatic, diatonic, you've got this game changer, XB40s, the pentahord, bass and chords. I think you even have a harmonetta, yeah? So it's just a case of what's got your interest in that day, is it, what you pick up? Pretty much, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

With special tunings, I do use them. I tend to pick one up and say, okay, what kind of chords will it produce? Rather than how can I get around and bend these notes and so forth. I do all of that, of course, as well. But I still find myself coming back to the basic solo tuning on chromatic and the basic standard tuning on diatonic.

SPEAKER_00:

do you have a brand of choice or again is you got such a varied amount that you're playing from lots of different manufacturers

SPEAKER_02:

I am playing from a lot of different manufacturers and I've been approached at different times about being an endorser for specific companies but I just feel that as a reviewer I have to have the trust of my audience and how can you really have that trust if you say this is the best and I'm going to ignore all of the others I totally understand where people are endorsers. But for me, I feel my responsibility to others in terms of being a reviewer and an influencer requires me not to throw my lot in with someone who will benefit me economically. The other thing is that I just enjoy so many things that limiting myself to being an endorser to one thing wouldn't really be all that much fun. I'm a friend to all those who make good products

SPEAKER_00:

So let's talk about some more playing techniques. You do use overblows, Jan. I'm reading about that you knew Will Scarlett back in the 1970s and he sort of put you on to overblows. So you've been playing them for a long time since then, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Well... Now, he showed me how to overblow in 1974. I heard him do it, and I thought, how is he getting that note? And so he told me, and I walked away from that. I mean, I was 19 years old and thought I knew everything, so this was like, oh my gosh. But at the same time, it didn't seem practical on the harmonicas that were available at the time. And you have to remember that... And Hohner was the only game in town in those days. The instruments they were producing at the time weren't really friendly to things like overblows. Now they are. In fact, most harmonicas are. It just didn't seem like a practical technique. It seemed more like a curiosity to me. And it wasn't until Howard Levy came along where I heard that, oh my gosh, this is a viable technique. And he really started the overblow revolution. You know, Will had been doing it since the 60s. Toots Thielen was recording overblows in the 1960s. And of course, we've traced it back to 1929, but with big gaps in time between those three points. The third being, of course, Howard coming up with it and really putting it on the map. So it's something that I, since then, I've incorporated into a lot of what I do. And I find it just a useful technique. With a lot of alternate tunings, you can get the notes that would otherwise require overblowing, but sometimes it's nicer to use the overblow for a variety of reasons. Some time ago, I attended a solo concert by the Swiss player Roland van Straaten.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_02:

and he was playing some Lee Oscar natural minor diatonics. Now, of course, you can get that minor third in the second position scale, withdraw seven which is you know tuned down but he was playing the overblow six instead and i asked him afterwards roland why why are you playing that note when you've got the other one that's easier to get he said i just like the sound of it sometimes it's down to those sorts of artistic choices it's nice to have those choices in your technique arsenal and maybe in your repertoire you know your bag of tricks of different

SPEAKER_00:

tunings and so what about your embouchure i know you like some time blocking you're puckering as well in a different situation so

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and I will move fluidly back and forth between puckering and tongue blocking in the course of playing a phrase, depending on what it is I'm doing. I really notice myself doing that in a lot of the traditional music. A lot of Scottish tunes have wide leaps in them, which on a violin might mean simply crossing the bow over from one string to the next. But on harmonica, it might mean moving several holes. And so tongue blocking and corner switching between the right and left corners might be very useful for that purpose. But then sometimes you get these quick art articulations like which are very cumbersome to do with your tongue on the harmonica so I might corner switch to a note which I would then pucker in order to deliver that quick articulation and then back to tongue blocking so for me it's a very fluid situation I've briefly experimented with u-blocking where you shape your tongue into more or less of u and there are some great players who u-block but for me it just doesn't do anything so it's not one that I use but definitely using the lips only because people get into saying oh don't call it pucker don't call it this, or there's some variations on it, like the one where you form the lower lip into a sort of a trough and aim the harmonica down into it, which I don't do. Again, I don't find it particularly useful. But between lips only and lips and tongue, to put it most broadly, for me, using whatever's available is the most versatile way to get as much out of the harmonica as you can.

SPEAKER_00:

And what about amplification and microphones? You've got much variety in the harmonicas you play. Do you you do you like to use amps or keep the sound clean or

SPEAKER_02:

well because I'm not presently playing out I mean I have a clean amp and I have a sort of an all-purpose pedal one of the ones that Richard Hunter has recommended the RP 355 or whatever series it is with effects built in so I'll use that when I'm playing out and I'm not somebody who's always you know tapping on this pedal or that I recently saw Jason Ritchie play a show and he was constantly you know tapping this or that on his pedal board and getting some very different audible effects. At some point, if I do start to play out more, I might get more deeply into that. Now, microphones can color the sound, obviously, and some players want something that sounds fairly neutral, and they'll use a vocal mic, as most jazz players tend to do. You know, they'll use the SM58 or something similar. They'll cup it, like a blues player might, but it's not in order to drive the sound into distortion. You know, they want a fairly neutral sound, maybe with a little bit of color, and the SM58 does do that, or Greg Heumann's chopped down 58, the ultimate 58 with the volume control, And I tend more in that direction. Now, I recently bought his chopped-down version of the 57, which can deliver a lot of color from the microphone. Most of the recording I do at home, and I'm speaking through a 58 right now, and I will play about as far away from the microphone as I am speaking, and then use a lot of effects in post, because that way I can color it after the fact and shade the coloring, you know, when I'm recording. And I find that a versatile way of editing Just

SPEAKER_00:

final question then, just about any future plans you've got, what's coming up with your harmonica life?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh heavens, continuing to do the many things, trying to figure out what to concentrate on in the immediate moment. I will be doing more videos, more instructional stuff. Recently I've been putting out videos that I stumbled on from another harmonica band from 1997 where I had Joe Felisco and a variety of other players playing with me as a five harmonica, mostly diatonica ensemble playing old Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt stuff. So I've been putting those out. Bunch of Guys. The Bunch of Guys. Well, it was informally termed that by the then president of Spa, Bob Williams, who said, oh, and Winslow and his Bunch of Guys will be doing something. So we just sort of said, okay, that's the name of the group. And we had Richard Slay in that group at different times, of course, Dennis Groenling, Larry Eisenberg, the late Chris McCulloch, Michael Palaquin, I'm probably forgetting one or two different people, Alan Holmes. So there were some really fine players who were part of that at different times. Again, it was something that hadn't been done before. We weren't using chord and bass, we weren't doing the traditional harmonica band repertoire, and we were very much using diatonic-specific instruments. techniques drawn from blues harmonica in order to deliver a very different kind of music. So it was fun doing that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, nice. So yeah, lots of stuff. Great being able to do all these stuff online and putting your stuff out on your YouTube channel. Yeah, so we can look forward to that. Very interesting stuff. Definitely recommend people check it out from what I've been doing to prepare for this conversation. So thanks so much for joining me today, Winslow. It's been amazing to speak to you. One of the most knowledgeable people on the harmonica people definitely want to check your stuff out.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Neil. And thank you very much for having me. It's always a joy to talk to people who are knowledgeable and interested in this fascinating subject of the harmonica.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. And be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Many thanks to Winslow for joining me today. He has a wealth of knowledge about the harmonica and has done and continues to do great work in sharing that. Check out the links on the podcast page for where you can find Winslow online. I'll sign out now with Winslow playing one of his compositions using the pentaharp. This one is called Strawberry Flutes.

UNKNOWN:

Strawberry Flutes

SPEAKER_04:

Thank you.