Will Galison interview

Will Galison joins me on episode 38.

Will first picked up the chromatic harmonica when studying guitar at the Berklee College of Music.  He quickly realised he had an affinity with the instrument, and after spending a day with Toots Thielemans he knew the chromatic instrument was what he wanted to do.

Will went on to record numerous albums under his own name, including a successful collaboration with Madeleine Peyroux. He has been an in-demand session player for numerous years, with credits performing with the likes of Barbara Streisand, Carly Simon, Donald Fagen and many others. On top of all this he has recorded a version of the Sesame Street theme tune used on the TV show. With interests ranging from jazz, to pop and classical, as well as playing some mean diatonic,

Will really delivers a pocketful of soul.


Links:
Will's website:
https://www.willgalison.net/

Takin It Back With Barack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJW67YfLWgs

Odysseus Fantasy:
https://www.willgalison.net/odysseus-concerto

Beethoven Spring Sonata:
https://www.willgalison.net/beethoven-spring-sonata

Will's Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/will-galison/

Hal Leonard Jazz Standards tutorial:
https://www.halleonard.com/product/1335/jazz-standards

Hal Leonard Pop Songs tutorial:
https://www.halleonard.com/product/1090/pop-classics

HarmonicaUK Virtual Chromatic Weekend:
http://harmonica.uk/HUKBlog/chromatic-weekend/

Videos:

Odyssey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPC-fh3jysw

Beethoven Spring Sonata:
https://www.willgalison.net/beethoven-spring-sonata

Toots Thielemans playing Undecided:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMTmKwosSi8

Pocketful of Soul:
https://www.willgalison.net/pocket-full-of-soul

Skylark with Sean Harness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KylY3vQv8Y4&t=105s


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

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

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

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

Chapters

• 1:15 A native New Yorker but has been in Costa Rica over the last year
• 2:49 Piano was first instrument played as a youngster
• 3:20 Started playing guitar next
• 4:33 Been playing soprano saxophone over last year, which is much easier to play than chromatic harmonica
• 5:54 When playing diatonic harmonica always thinks in key of C
• 6:47 Fluidity playing on diatonic compared to chromatic
• 7:26 Will started out playing on diatonic
• 7:46 Picked up chromatic when attending Berklee School of Music at age 17
• 8:34 Discovered Toots Thielemans
• 9:22 Got first gig after only two months of playing chromatic
• 10:06 The young Will accompanied Toots Thielemans in New York as he played recording sessions
• 11:24 Toots described Will as the “most original and individual of the new generation of harmonica players”
• 11:58 Stevie Wonder was another big influence on Will
• 12:12 Will was shown the music scene in New York by a clarinet player
• 12:55 Eivetz Rednow album by Stevie Wonder is one of Will’s favourites
• 13:59 Will’s first album ‘Overjoyed’
• 15:50 Bagdad Cafe film soundtrack and hit song ‘Calling You’
• 17:18 Also recorded Calling You with Barbara Streisand
• 18:02 Will’s album ‘Calling You’
• 18:56 ‘Midnight Sun’ album with a German jazz group
• 19:29 ‘Love Letters’ album with Australian singer
• 19:48 ‘Got You On My Mind’ album with Madeleine Peyroux
• 20:42 Will’s approach to accompanying a singer
• 24:05 Song for Barack Obama 2008 election campaign
• 26:37 Will did all production for his 2011 album ‘Line Open’
• 28:10 ‘Odysseus Fantasy’ album sees Will playing classical music
• 31:41 Beethoven Spring Sonata and classical chromatic harmonica
• 33:56 Intrigued by new harmonicas companies which are springing up
• 34:20 Will has played on Sesame Street, including a version of the theme tune
• 35:41 Two tuition books with Hal Leonard
• 37:15 Value of transcribing
• 39:01 Did some recordings for karaoke tracks
• 39:19 Toots used different keyed chromatics on some songs
• 41:10 Appeared at UK NHL festival in 2008 where immigration hold-up led to a visit to The House of Commons
• 42:59 Will is appearing at the 2021 Virtual Chromatic Weekend festival
• 43:11 Pocketful of Soul song
• 46:59 Ten minute question
• 48:34 Will’s harmonicas of choice
• 50:07 Embouchre
• 51:05 New models of chromatic being manufactured
• 52:21 Amps and mics
• 55:30 Future plans

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Will Gallison joins me on episode 38. Will first picked up the chromatic harmonica when studying at the Berklee College of Music. He quickly realised he had an affinity with the instrument and after spending a day with Toots Teelmans, he knew the chromatic harmonica was what he wanted to do. Will went on to record numerous albums under his own name, including a successful collaboration with Madeline Perrault. He has been an in-demand session player for many years, with credits performing with the likes of Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon and Donald Fagan. On top of all this, he has recorded a version of the Sesame Street theme tune used on the TV show. With interests ranging from jazz to pop and classical, as well as playing some mean diatonic, Will is the all-round harmonica player. Oh, hello, Will Gallison, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13

Oh, hello. Thank you very much for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15

You are a native New Yorker, or at least you live in New York.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19

Yeah, very native. A fourth generation, you could say.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22

But at the moment, you're in Costa Rica. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:24

Yes, I am.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25

And any story behind that?

SPEAKER_02: 1:27

Well, yeah, there's a long story. I'll give you the short version. I came down last March to do some research about something. And I was just here for about a week or 10 days. But during that time is when COVID hit New York very badly. I was with my girlfriend and we decided to stay for a few weeks to see if things got better. They didn't. They got worse. So I stayed in an eco community for about five months, a place called Pachamama. Very interesting place, and we played a lot of music there. Then I've been staying in a town called Nosara for the last six or seven months, enjoying it very much. I'm going to go back to New York very soon because things are getting better, and I'll get vaccinated when I get there.

SPEAKER_00: 2:06

So music-wise, you said that you're able to get into the music scene there. What sort of music are they playing in Costa Rica?

SPEAKER_02: 2:13

Well, this was, I guess you could say, a village or an eco community, they call it, with... Not so many Costa Ricans. It was a lot of Israelis, Germans, Americans, Brits. And they were just doing projects. They had a broadcast that they did. There's a network of related communities. We rehearsed and did a show for that, which was fun. And I did a couple of shows on my own of my own music. I mean, there's no gigging because like everywhere else in the world, restaurants and cafes and venues are limiting capacity. But I found people to play with and managed to keep my foot in it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:47

So back to your early life, you you started off, I think, playing the piano when you were a youngster. That's right, about

SPEAKER_02: 2:53

seven years old. Not very willingly, I might say, but I did enjoy it. Yeah, I think that helped to develop my ear because being very ADD, I wasn't particularly good at reading music and I would fake it by just playing back what I heard, which went into some fairly complicated Mozart stuff, you know, not beginner stuff. I was no prodigy. I was doing everything by ear. Despite my reluctance to practice, I somehow made it through. And then when I was about nine years old, I became aware of the Beatles and the monkeys and all that stuff. And I thought, why would anybody want to play the piano? The guitar is the way to go. So then I started playing guitar around that age. And of course, and you still play guitar now, as you mentioned. I do. Yeah, I still study. It's a terribly difficult instrument. Non-intuitive, you might say, I find, insofar as there's five different ways to play a middle C on it, you know, five different places on the neck. So every phrase you play, you have to make a decision as to how you're going to because there's a dozen different ways of doing it. I also have trouble visualizing it in the same way that I would visualize a keyboard, for example. And when I play harmonica, I do picture a piano keyboard. The piano and the harmonica, for me, have the same

SPEAKER_00: 4:04

geography. Yeah, a lot of people may like compressing, don't they? That linear layout of them, very similar. Do you play any piano at all now? I

SPEAKER_02: 4:12

have a nice piano at home. I use it for composing. I find it gives me more possibilities than guitar when I'm writing songs. songs. You know, I write small pieces, jazz type things, and I use the piano for that. It's always good for me to return to the piano just to, again, to reinforce that map, which is what I see in my mind when I play the harmonica. Actually, this year, I've started getting back into saxophone, which I played in my 20s and 30s, and then I dropped it for some reason. And just before I went to Costa Rica, thinking I was going to come back in about 10 days, I picked up the soprano, which I had, again, just played for a few years. I really enjoy that. It's kind of the same register as the harmonica. I must say it's a much easier instrument than the harmonica is. It really made me appreciate how difficult the harmonica is in terms of phrasing and just agility. You can learn something on the, I can at least learn something on the saxophone in a few hours that it would take me a week to learn on the harmonica. In saxophone, they like to say you're wiggling your fingers. You have to adjust your embouchure, but I think my experience with the harmonica has given me a lot of sensitivity in terms of mouth position, etc. So I think the embouchure comes fairly naturally to me. But to play something on harmonica, you have to move the horn, you have to breathe in or breathe out, you have to have the button in or out. And those are three factors. The devil in playing the harmonica is being able to play phrases legato when it's a physical impossibility to play a legato phrase when you're blowing in and out, because the air has to stop at one point in order to change direction.

SPEAKER_00: 5:46

So do you make that comparison to the chromatic harmonica specifically? specifically rather than the diatonic because of course you do play both

SPEAKER_02: 5:51

yeah no i was thinking more of the chromatic harmonica when i play the diatonic harmonica in fact i always think of the harmonica that i'm playing on as being in the key of c which i think is pretty typical so i imagine it as a kind of slightly altered map the same way as i play the chromatic harmonica when i do overblows and bends you have to superimpose that map onto the onto the general map but i but in a certain sense i'm always playing in in the same few keys you know whether it's first position, second position, third position, 12th position, whatever you might do on the diatonic, even if I'm playing a B flat or an A flat harmonica, I imagine I'm in the key of C. Otherwise, it would be too complicated because I'd need 12 maps, if you understand me. I assume not many musicians, I don't know how Howard Levy pictures when he plays, but probably in the same way. He probably imagines that he's playing on a C instrument because it's overwhelming otherwise.

SPEAKER_00: 6:42

Yeah, and of course, I've had him on the podcast, of course, he's a piano player too. It's an interesting comparison, isn't it, as you say, that that fluidity on the chromatic harmonica. I mean, I play both myself. The fluidity is a lot easier on the diatonic than the chromatic, but I think the chromatic is your main harmonica of choice, isn't it, instrument-wise?

SPEAKER_02: 6:59

It's what I'm known for. I'd say I'm a better chromatic player than I am a diatonic player, although I like playing the diatonic a lot. But the fluidity is there if you play in certain keys and, you know, if you're trying to play an F sharp on a C harp, it's not going to be fluid at all. In my experience, it's not going to be fluid at all. You have to really manipulate every note and your intonation's funny and Your phrasing's funny. But yeah, if you're playing in second position on a diatonic, you can fly along in certain phrases. You started on the

SPEAKER_00: 7:26

diatonic, didn't you? I think when you were younger.

SPEAKER_02: 7:28

Yeah, I did. Never got deeply into it. I found it fun that for some reason I hadn't, as many people do, I had an intuitive sense of where the notes were and so I could play melodies and that kind of struck me as magical. I had no idea what notes I was playing. I wasn't thinking of the piano at that time, but just playing folk tunes and blues things. And it was when I was 17, I went to Berklee College of Music for guitar. I did want to play the saxophone at that time, but I couldn't afford one. So I walked into a music store and I saw a chromatic harmonica for the first time in my life. It was a 260, in other words, a 10-hole honer. And believe it or not, it was about$15 to buy at that time. That's how old I am, 1975. So I thought, okay, this I can afford. And I was really thrilled by the idea that as far as I knew, nobody else in the world was playing this thing. And I was learning the jazz theory on guitar, which I was finding very challenging on guitar for the reasons I said before. And here was a little wind instrument, which is what I wanted to play, which had a more logical layout to me than the guitar did. Guitar is perfectly logical, it's just more complicated. It was then that I was starting to play chromatic, and the people at Berklee said, oh, you must love Toots Tillman. And I said, Toots who? I had no idea. Then I bought some albums at that time, there weren't CDs yet, of Toots, and I was blown away. And I immediately said, okay, I'm going to do that, because it was just so cool that somebody could be playing with people like Joe Pass and Oscar Peterson and, well, later, Jaco Pastorius. Part of the appeal, I must say, was that as far as I knew, there was Toots and there was Stevie, but that was the universe that I knew at that time. And of course, there was no internet, so I didn't have access to other people. And I just started applying the guitar theory that I was learning on guitar to the harmonica. Weirdly enough, within about two months of playing, a piano player asked me if I would play with him at a gig, a weekly gig. So I think I got five or 10 bucks an evening, but that was a thrill to me. I was playing, I knew a handful of tunes and I've always had a good idea so i was able to translate you know pretty much play melodies you know but of course i had to like everybody else learn learn the different keys and you know that's that's how it started for me

SPEAKER_00: 9:45

so you think that's what drew you to the chromatic then is that that love of melodies which are you know sort of come easier on the chromatic than than the diatonic

SPEAKER_02: 9:51

oh yeah no i i was into jazz at that time and i i had no idea that there was a creature such as howard levy or anybody else who played jazz on the diatonic yeah chromatic was what i knew at that point i didn't really touch the diatonic for quite a while after that

SPEAKER_00: 10:05

you met toot stillmans when you were quite young didn't you in new york

SPEAKER_02: 10:09

yeah i did around that time i i forgot exactly how i got the introduction i think it was through a guitarist named wayne wright i told him i was playing harmonica and he said oh you should meet toots i said you know toots sure it was one of the most thrilling days of my life actually i was about 17 maybe 18 i walked with toots as he played sessions along broadway there were about four or five studios between 59th street and 34th street And I think he did five or six sessions that day. He even played diatonic on one session. And I thought to myself, he's not very good at diatonic. But all the other things he aced, he was not a ferocious reader either. I think, you know, I came away feeling that he really did this mostly by feel. I mean, he was obviously a very intellectual musician and knew his theory, but I think he was more likely to improvise and, you know, play something around the melody than read strictly from the paper. I was just so, I mean, that just made me swoon. moon, you know, the idea of playing that kind of sessions day after day. I don't know if he did that every day or every week, but there were five sessions. He was pulling in a lot of money and making great music. Anyway, as a young kid, I was really intrigued and really impressed and it strengthened the idea that that's what I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_00: 11:24

So he said some good things about you, nice things. He said you were the most original and individual of a new generation of harmonica players. Was that a little bit later then? Did he sort of keep in touch with him? Oh, yes. Yeah, we stayed in

SPEAKER_02: 11:34

touch until pretty much until he died, I went to his funeral in Brussels. I must say, I'm delighted about that quote and it stood me in good stead for many years. You know, I mean, I'm no longer the new generation of harmonica players. I'm becoming the old generation of harmonica players. I think there were some other very good harmonica players around, but I think that many of them were trying to imitate the sound of Toots and the phrasing because he was the one guy going. I was just as interested in Stevie Wonder as I was in Toots as far as sound and approach. It's funny, you know, I'm an American kid growing up in New York City in the 60s and 70s, my musical mind was formulated by listening to the radio. And then I had a friend, I should mention, still a great friend of mine at 83 years old, a clarinetist, and he played jazz. He used to take me at the age of 11 or 12. He was a shop teacher at my high school, but he was a wonderful, he still is, a wonderful jazz clarinetist, completely an ear player. But he had studied with Benny Goodman a little bit and got a beautiful sound. And he used to take me down to Greenwich Village when I was 11 or 12 to these bars where I probably should shouldn't have been allowed in, he would be playing with these wonderful, you know, veteran jazz musicians who had probably played with Ellington and Basie and all the other greats, you know, and I got a bit of an education that way, mostly just listening and getting into my head. So he's always been a big influence. His name is Brad Terry. Yeah, so jazz was, you know, what I was focused on, but I loved, somehow I found this record called I've It's Red Now, which is the, you probably know it, it's the Stevie Wonder record, which he made when he was 18, which he plays just chromatic harmonica. I think he also plays a drums and keys on the album. Yeah, that record had a huge effect on me. He played the song Alfie. The Burt Bacharach song. which is one of the most beautiful melodies, I think, in pop music. He just played it so beautifully, so soulfully. And to me, the harmonica sounded like a cross between a violin and a soprano sax when he played that. I recommend it totally to anybody playing harmonica. It's his name, Stevie Wonder, spelled backwards. So Ivitz is Stevie and Red Now is Wonder. But it's definitely worth listening to, to see how gorgeous the harmonica can sound in the right hands.

SPEAKER_00: 13:58

And then getting on to your own recording career. So was it your first solo album overjoyed which is a stevie wonder song yeah so obviously showing your influence of stevie wonder there with that early album from you i adore stevie

SPEAKER_02: 14:11

wonder maybe 20 years later i think his bass player nathan east made a an album with overjoyed and stevie played harmonica on it it's a wonderful song for harmonica in the original key e flat and it was a good idea for me to play it i just loved the song so That record was very slickly produced. I realize now what great musicians I had on that album. Legendary studio musicians, but also performing musicians from that era. A guy from Japan had seen me play and he liked my playing. So it was on Verve, but through Polydor in Japan.

SPEAKER_00: 15:00

And that song, Overjoyed, you won some Apollo nights, didn't you? Some, I think, 2012 with that song. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

that was much way, way after. In fact, I didn't play any of those songs for a long time. When I finished that record I really didn't like it I was I was very upset with the arrangements I thought they were corny and old-fashioned and and I didn't listen to it for about two or three years and I made another album which I also didn't like this is my character but because I'm a perfectionist in a way but it's interesting you know sometimes you look back at the work you did many years ago and you say hey that wasn't so bad I you know I was on to something at that time so I listen to that record now and I appreciate my playing but I also really appreciate the other musicians and the arrangements I don't think that record may a huge splash. Maybe it sold 20,000 copies, but occasionally somebody writes me a letter and says, you know, I used to have that album and I loved it so much.

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

And before that, was it before that you recorded the Baghdad Cafe, which is a film soundtrack?

SPEAKER_02: 15:54

Yeah, that was a couple of years before that. I was in my 20s. I mean, it was one of my first... recording sessions doing a movie, although I may have done the Untouchables before that. But it was a very humble experience. Bob Telson is the composer. It was in his home studio, which was a respectable studio. And he played the whole thing on, I think it was called an M1 Korg, which was sort of the go-to synthesizer at the time. And he played me the track and he said, this is for this little movie by a German director and it's really nothing. I think he was, to some degree, agree trying to lower my expectations on how much I was going to be paid. Had I not been bought out, if I had gotten royalties from that, I would be very rich at the moment, or I would be fairly wealthy, because that song became, as you probably know, a number one hit all around the world, except in the United States, really, called Calling You.

UNKNOWN: 16:56

Calling You

SPEAKER_02: 17:06

But it stood me in very good stead. You know, I was paid 150 bucks or whatever it was for the session. But I did recognize that it was an exceptional song, even though it was all done on one synthesizer with a singer. And then it was covered by Barbra Streisand. I played on her album. That was a thrilling experience. You know, I was in this enormous soundstage where they had actually done the music for the film The Wizard of Oz. Loved that movie. So there was this, you know, old-fashioned, huge soundstage in Hollywood And there was a 90-piece orchestra. So the very opposite of it being played on one mediocre synthesizer, this was played by a 90-piece orchestra with a full orchestra. And she was singing. I made another record for Verve Polydor in around 1993 or 1994. Again, a lot of great musicians on it. It was called Calling You. And there was a few good, really interesting tracks on that. Yeah, that was a more adventurous record than Overjoyed, which is more of a smooth jazz record. There's a few tunes that I'm quite proud of from that second record. Jocko's tune.

UNKNOWN: 18:33

Bye.

SPEAKER_02: 18:37

And I did one of my own songs called New Samba. Yeah, there were nice arrangements. I did a version of Stevie Wonder's Lately, but I had a number of compositions on that record where on the Overjoyed record, I only had one of my compositions, which is called As Close As We Can Get. Yeah, then I made other records over the years in less formal circumstances. I was playing with a German jazz group, wonderful group, which does all kinds of international music, world music. The core of the group was a sax player, bass, accordion and guitar, Midnight Sun. And that was done very informally in Germany. And then I did a record called Love Letters with an Australian. I had four or five trips to Australia where I sort of began to have a little bit of a name. And I was playing mostly with this singer who played jazz piano. And we would tour around Australia and play. That was a lot of fun. We made a record of mostly Cole Porter songs called Love Letters.

SPEAKER_00: 19:48

And then probably on to your, maybe your most well-known album with Madeline Proulx, Got You In My Mind. As

SPEAKER_02: 19:54

far as I know, somewhere around three 300,000 copies have been sold of that, including downloads, because now nobody buys CDs, but it's sold a lot. Still get a check every year from it, amazingly. That record came to be because I had met Madeline, she was playing on the street in New York, and I just recognized that she was a great talent. And I lost track of her for a couple of months, then I saw her again playing at a little bar on Bleecker Street, and I brought my harmonica and guitar and accompanied her, because she was just playing... standards, but with no soloist. So jazz standards are actually very, very brief if you don't have a solo somewhere in there, right? You know, the tunes are about maybe a minute long. That was fun. She was playing guitar and singing and I just thought, wow, this is somebody important.

SPEAKER_00: 20:42

And I think it's something, you know, you talk in a second about playing with a singer because it's something you've done a lot and something a chromatic harmonica player does very well, doesn't it? So what about playing with a singer like that?

SPEAKER_02: 20:51

Oh, that's a great question. I think that's very much maybe what I do best. You have to listen to the lyrics, you have to listen to the singer, you have to listen to the rhythm section and find your way in there. It's almost like skiing down a slalom trail where you have to avoid other skiers and ice patches and rocks and you have to come in and just play a tasteful little line here and there. I love doing that, especially with a good singer. Yeah, I've worked with some great singers. I've worked with Carly Simon and... Barbra Streisand and Ruth Brown and Peggy Lee even. I played on a record of hers. I think it was her last album.

SPEAKER_00: 21:50

I've only got you on my mind album again. You play a little bass harmonica, don't you, on Shoulda Known? Yeah. Representing a frog, I think, doesn't it? It does sound quite a lot like a frog, the bass

SPEAKER_01: 21:59

harmonica. When I was

SPEAKER_02: 22:14

producing that song, what happened with that record, by the way, is it's a long story that maybe some of your listeners know. I don't want to get into it now. We made a seven song album, Madeline and I. I wanted to make it into a full album, but at the time you could make a seven song CD and sell it for 10 bucks. And we did at our gigs. But it turned out that there was another agenda at play and that Madeline and her lawyer were intending on using that album produced by me as a demo for getting a big record contract with another company. They misrepresented to that company that Madeline was the only owner of that record, which was wasn't the case. We were co-owners of it. And so when I made motions that I wanted to put it out, you know, in official release and distribute it, things went very ugly, very fast. I was in court for quite a while defending my right to sell the record and to dispel rumors that I had done something wrong. I finally prevailed. In fact, I did better than prevail because Madeline, I guess she saw that she had done the wrong thing and she was beginning to have a very lucrative career herself and she gave me sole ownership. So now it belongs to me, which is nice.

UNKNOWN: 23:20

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 23:40

But we did seven songs. And then when Madeline wasn't available to make a full CD, I think one of the reasons that she did seven songs was that she and her lawyer figured I couldn't put out this as a commercial album with only seven songs. But if we had 11, I could have. So I surprised them by, I think, doing four pretty good tracks, which I added to the album. And that got you on my mind.

SPEAKER_00: 24:05

Another really interesting thing you did, you did a campaign song for Barack Obama in 2008, taking it back with Barack, which is great. And there's a YouTube video, which I'll put on the page of the podcast. I think you co-wrote the lyrics as well. It's quite political. So how did you get involved with that?

SPEAKER_02: 24:22

Yeah, I wrote the lyrics. I think I gave my nephew credit because he was about 10 years old and I thought it was a nice thing to do. But I was excited about Obama, as many people were at that time, and thoroughly disgusted with the war in Iraq and Bush. I've always been fairly It was just one of those things, you know, it comes, as you may know, from a Louis Jordan tune called Take Me Right Back to the Track, Jack. And somehow in my perverse mind, I twisted that to Taking It Back with Barack, Jack.

SPEAKER_01: 25:06

And

SPEAKER_02: 25:11

then I came up with a whole lot of rhymes for the sound Ack, which is what makes the song charming. Put it together, I got a wonderful band. That video is actually lip-synced, if you will, because we recorded it in studio to get a good sound, but it looks very authentic. And those are pretty much the guys that played on the song, except for the bass player. But yeah, and then I was lucky to find this really professional, high-level videographer who was a Barack Obama fan too and she did the session took a few hours and about a week later I'm walking down the street after I put it up on YouTube and somebody says hey aren't you the taking it back with Barack guy you know which is pretty funny and it ended up getting something like 800,000 hits which is you know at that time was a lot of hits now things are getting a billion hits the biggest thrill about that is that my brother happened to be in touch with David Axelrod who was the campaign manager, I believe, for Barack Obama. He's somebody you see on CNN a lot. Somehow my brother got a copy of an email from David Axelrod to either him or to a mutual friend where he said, oh yeah, Barack got a real kick out of the song. And then I learned that Barack Obama's sister was using it, projecting it on a big screen and using it at fundraisers in Hawaii and other places. So I like to think that I had a little bit of a part in getting him elected.

SPEAKER_00: 26:33

Oh, definitely. Yes. Well, it's a great song. It's really got a great feel about it yeah and uh and then uh i think he did a completely self-produced album in 2011 line open you played harmonica guitar you compose lyrics and you sing i think i'm you're the only singer on the album i think are you

SPEAKER_02: 26:48

well every song is a vocal song yes i think i have harmonica snuck harmonica in on every song maybe there's a couple that don't have it either diatonic or chromatic um i didn't want to make it a harmonica album but it felt like that was something i could do and i could present myself with and it would give me some uniqueness a little bit the way Stevie Wonder, you know, uses harmonicas in his songs. You know, they're not always a soloistic instrument, but they play a role. And I co-produced that with a guy named Steve Gabori, who's music director for Cyndi Lauper. and somebody I had played music with many times. And it took a long, long time to make because Steve was always on tour with Cindy, so I could only work on it when he was back in town. But that was really my labor of love. The other albums I produced that got you on my mind, and I was pleased with that, but that was done really only in a few days as well. This one I really worked on, and I made a lot of decisions and judgments, and Steve was super helpful. I mean, I couldn't have done it without him. But it was sort of my most personal album. I think. And I was just in the stage where I was writing songs. So actually, I'm quite proud of that record, I must say. Maybe most proud of that record of all my...

SPEAKER_00: 28:10

And then you're playing, as well as playing jazz and pop very well. I think you do pop songs great. And that's what I really love to hear in chromatic. I think a lot of people go down the line of playing jazz and classical, but pop works fantastically well, of course, as Stevie Wonder's demonstrated. But you have done quite a bit of classical. And in 2019, you did this Odysseus Fantasy, which is with a It was great. I

SPEAKER_02: 28:37

was massively impressed listening to that one. trying to be a virtuoso jazz player.

SPEAKER_00: 29:05

Yeah, I think you've got to devote your life to it, and just jazz if you're going to do that, haven't you? You do indeed,

SPEAKER_02: 29:09

yeah. I love playing jazz, but anyway, I had broader interests. So I was so impressed by this, and she said, oh, that's a composition by my friend Karim Maurice. So I said, wow, I'd love to meet him. Maybe he could write something for harmonica. So I did meet him and played with him a bit, and he really liked my playing. And we started working on this project. He wanted to do a whole suite of pieces, illustrating various adventures of Odysseus in the Homer epic. And I love that idea. And the first thing I did is listen to Ian McCullens narrating the entire, you know, every night I would listen for a couple of hours to the Odyssey, which is a wonderful thing to do. Got really into it. And the first thing we did was a video of the first movement. I must say that I'm much more pleased with that video and the way I played on that than what happened with the album. You know, sometimes you go into the studio and you're nervous or you're tired or you're... And you don't play as well as you want to. There's a very nice video, which was beautifully filmed of me playing with the orchestra. And that performance, I stand behind. And funny, because that was more of a spontaneous performance. But I didn't feel like I really aced it in the studio. Then I brought it back to New York. I had the background tracks, and I spent two months re-recording, to my most perfectionist standards, all the seven pieces in the suite. But by that point, they had already mixed the ones that I had recorded in France. I put the versions that I had done in New York, where I really felt I nailed it, and I worked on it. I had to sculpt it, in a sense. But it was with, unfortunately, a version of the orchestral background that was not mixed professionally so it's a little bit crude sounding but the performances are much better and they're on my website and Odysseus Fantasy you can hear my preferred version with unfortunately a less polished orchestral sound

SPEAKER_00: 31:25

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, people can check those out. I mean, I thought the album was great. I mean, I'm sure to your ears and you practiced it a million times, you know, it's, but yeah, it sounds great. And yeah, no, I think I probably did listen a little bit to the ones on your website as well, but yeah, I listened more to the album on Spotify and I thought it was good. Yeah. So, and you've done other, you know, there's also a Beethoven spring sonata on your, on your website, which is, which is great as well. So, you know, you definitely like your classical playing as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 31:49

Well, I started getting interested in that. I learned the Bach cello suite that everybody plays at the Prelude which incidentally I've heard some Chinese young people playing recently on chromatic like Cy Young who's terrific and boy he nailed it he did it in the original key and I corresponded with him and told him that I had tried to play it in the original key but the low notes and the harmonica wouldn't respond well enough and he said yeah he had that problem until he bought a very expensive custom-made harmonica from a company called Cremona and he said then then those notes would speak in a way that made it possible. So I played it in C where it's composed in G. Yeah, I learned a bunch of other Bach violin pieces and didn't record them all. But then I heard the Beethoven and I thought, wow, I just as a challenge, could I possibly learn that? Now for a classical player like Psy or Tommy Riley, they do that all the time. Of course, learning Kareem's piece was a big effort for me. There's a lot of difficult stuff in there. And so I felt like I was primed to learn some more classical. And I would like to revisit the Spring Sonata because I think that's a really good vehicle for harmonica. It's interesting, violin does so many things well that the harmonica can't do. If I had started all over from the beginning, I probably would have chosen the violin just because it's such a universally expressive instrument and you can play any kind of world music on it almost. And it's just so versatile in terms of phrasing where the harmonica is very constrained, you know, but the harmonica sounds like a harmonica. And to the degree that people like the sound of a harmonica, it's the only thing that does that. And I thought it had a certain charm with the Beethoven. And so that's something when I get back to New York, I'd like to continue. I'm in true by these new harmonica companies that are coming out and improving the instrument. I've always tried to improve the instruments myself by doing various procedures on the harmonica to make them more airtight, et cetera, and make the reeds more responsive. But now there are some companies that are really putting serious engineering into improving

SPEAKER_00: 34:16

the instrument. So going on, you know, going from classical, another great thing you did, which I'm very jealous of, you played on Sesame Street.

SPEAKER_02: 34:24

Yeah, I did a lot of sessions for them. There was a wonderful studio in new york where they used to record called nola

SPEAKER_00: 34:30

and that's that's a new york program it's based in new york isn't it

SPEAKER_02: 34:33

it was yeah it still is but now i believe it's become a corporate entity and it's a very different animal than when i was involved

SPEAKER_03: 34:41

yeah

SPEAKER_02: 34:41

i adore that show and and of course toots played the original theme song yeah and then on the 25th anniversary probably in the 90s i think it was toots couldn't make it and he was on tour or something so they asked me if i would do that and i played and and i don't know how many years they played the version with my harmonica playing. It was a more of a salsa kind of Latin version, very cool. That was a thrill. I probably did 10 or 20 other sessions with them for skits, you know, for the little Muppet things that they did. And it was a really, really nice group of people, and they're always wonderful arrangements. It was just really fun being associated

SPEAKER_00: 35:29

with that. For me, you've made it as a chromatic player, because like you said, Toots played the theme tune for that, which is so great. You know, to play on that is fantastic as a chromatic player, I think. That's a pinnacle for me, Sesame Street. You've also had some instructional books with Hal Leonard, where you played all the tunes for that, a a jazz one and a pop standards one.

SPEAKER_02: 35:48

Yeah, Hal Leonard asked me if I would do a book or two and I took it very seriously and I did the very best I could. I kind of fashioned solos that would be accessible to, I didn't want to make it just for beginners because there are plenty of harmonica books for beginners, you know, with diagrams of how to play Susanna and stuff like that. So I thought, well, I didn't know of any, I'm sure there are other books with more advanced playing, but I thought I would play at a high level. I mean, nothing that a good player couldn't play. and something that people could aspire to in any case. And I wanted it to sound good as an album, regardless of being an instructional album. So... They gave me the background tracks. I didn't record that with the band. And I, in my home studio, again, kind of sculpted solos that made sense and had a continuity and demonstrated certain principles. And I wanted to write with each piece a few paragraphs about what I did, how I conceived the solo, what were the techniques involved, tongue blocking, etc. But they didn't want that, so...

SPEAKER_00: 37:05

All your playing's notated, is it, in the books?

SPEAKER_02: 37:07

Yes, then I had to notate it, which was...

SPEAKER_00: 37:09

You didn't say so yourself, did

SPEAKER_02: 37:11

you? Yeah, I had to listen to them and transcribe all the solos. Transcribing is a very important thing for students of jazz and music to do. And I've done some. In fact, when I was 15 or 16, I had a wonderful teacher. His name was Betjeman. He was the son of the poet, of the British poet Betjeman. He was a music teacher, a very advanced musician. And we listened to Charlie Christian's big band arrangements. He was a guitarist who played with the Benny Goodman big band for a few years and is considered sort of the father of electric guitar and i transcribed every part from that that big band you know an 18 piece band and well yeah charlie's solo and then a bunch of smaller group stuff from benny goodman septet so i i really love that i have done some transcribing in my life it's difficult to do but it was it was interesting trying to transcribe my own solos and uh yeah you should be able to get your own

SPEAKER_00: 38:03

but yeah what did i play there then

SPEAKER_02: 38:05

there was the pop one um yeah which again apologies to hal leonard if you're listening But I felt it was kind of neither fish nor fowl. It was the first one. They just said, here's a bunch of jazz tunes, pick ones, the ones you like and record them, notate them and we'll put the book out. And I was proud of that book. The second one, it was like, well, here's what we want you to do. We want you to do the Midnight Cowboy theme and the harmonica part from Love Me Do and Bluzette. And I'm thinking, Jesus, if somebody needs a book to play the, you know, the harmonica part to Love Me Do, they're never going to be able to play the blues, you know, Yeah. did because they couldn't get the original tracks obviously for karaoke so they redid the the whole rhythm section except for the vocals and i don't know i did about 10 of those and at one point a french company asked me if i would do a karaoke, do the harmonica part of Toots playing La Vie en Rose, French song, and then they modulate to the key of E major. And Toots plays this ripping solo in E major. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how he was doing it. You know, certain runs just didn't seem to fit on the harmonica, but I soldiered through it and I managed to put a good approximation of his solo on the karaoke track. It was at his funeral, I was talking to a bunch of other harmonica players who were there and one of them mentioned that Toots used to play different key harmonicas. And if he came to a session where there was something that, you know, didn't sit nicely on a C harmonica, he had no shame in pulling out a B harmonica or an E harmonic, you know, chromatic. I realized at that point, I went home and tried to play it on the B harmonica and I realized, okay, that's how he did it. You know, because it's the key of F on a B harmonica, which is much easier to play jazz on than the key of E major, which is... I never realized Toots did that. I always thought he played a C. Yes, it's a good insight. In fact, there's some wonderful videos of him playing in the early 60s on a TV show where he does Undecided.

SPEAKER_03: 40:37

Undecided

SPEAKER_02: 40:46

does very quickly. It's wonderful because he's just absolute genius. But I was trying to figure that out and I realized that he was doing that on a G harp. And apparently one of his records he did on a B flat harmonica, which he did with the tenor player. So he had no compunction about using a different key harmonica when that would make the resulting sound better.

SPEAKER_00: 41:09

And I have seen you play, Will. In 2008, you came to the UK and played at the NHL Festival in Bristol. Yeah. Yeah, so you had a bit of a problem in integration as well. Roger Trowbridge was telling me the story about how you had troubles getting through customs, but eventually got through with the help of a UK MP. And you got to visit the House of Commons and House of Lords, yeah?

SPEAKER_02: 41:30

And I'll tell you, his name was, do you remember his name? Very unusual name. Lembit Opik. There you go, Lembit Opik. The prologue of that story is very funny. After I had played in Bristol and had a wonderful time, I went back to London to go back to New York. He invited me to the House of Lords, I guess the Parliament building, to have lunch with him. And had I known more about British politics, I would have recognized everybody around there. I was in a very high-level company at that point. And at one point, we run into a guy in the hall, and Lambert says, Oh, David, this is my friend Will Gallison. He is a great harpist. harmonica player, one of the best, blah, blah, blah, whatever he said. And the guy said, oh, very nice to meet you, shook my hand. And then we walked away and he said, well, that's the minister of defense. It just struck me like, you know, what does a harmonica player, you know, have in common with the minister of defense? I felt a little bit... Because Lembit did play harmonica himself. That's right, yeah. But he sure saved my butt. They were dragging me to the airplane. I mean, I wasn't putting up a fight, but... they had two burly guys with their hands on my arms and forcing me to walk quickly down the hallway to get on the airplane back to New York when London faxed a note saying, oh, we can guarantee that Mr. Gellison will not be paid for his services. And that was good

SPEAKER_00: 42:55

enough for them and they let me into the country. Yeah, it was a work permit thing, wasn't it? And so I'm with the NHL, now called Harmonic UK. You're appearing at this year's Chromatic Virtual Weekend and that's at the end of June. I'm going to link on to that so yeah people can come and check out your your workshop there as well so i just want to quickly mention another song you did which is a real fun one is the pocket full of soul which you play in a diatonic harmonica and you're singing it's all about the harmonica being a great instrument a pocket

SPEAKER_01: 43:25

full of soul

SPEAKER_00: 43:26

so

SPEAKER_01: 43:26

and let me tell you I'm a one man traveling band every place that I go I got the music in the palm of my hand and when I feel it coming on I just sit back and let the spirit take control you know I plug into the socket when I play my little pocket full of soul I used to sit around and hope I never thought that I would come to anything I wish here on my road. And you could say that my step had lost its spring, so I collected all my dough and went and bought myself a shiny new tent hole. And now I take it like a rocket when I play my little pocket full of soul. Well, I tried picking up the piano, but the piano was too heavy for me. I tried the slide trombone, I tried the saxophone, but they never fit So if you're feeling kind of low And there ain't no one around to keep you company And you got no place to go And where you're at is just the last place you should be Take a pointer from a pro It doesn't matter if you're young or you are old better put it on a document and buy yourself a pocket full of soap

SPEAKER_02: 45:22

I did that just as I've done many songs, just for fun of it on my little home studio. But in this particular case, I had two guest artists. Well, I got the drummer, Chris Parker was the drummer. He played in many, many famous bands and James Taylor and with a group called Stuff, which was a great funk band in the 90s. So he happened to be a friend. So he played on, I gave it to him and he afterwards put the drums on. And then I had Lou Marini. So in the Blues Brothers, right? He was in the Blues Brothers, right. And he is a buddy too. I mean, I'd done some Sesame Street sessions with him, and he lived in the neighborhood. So he came by with all his saxophones and played baritone, tenor, and alto, and did this wonderful, totally off-the-cuff saxophone, kind of classic saxophone background. And then I called up Lisa Fisher, who's famous for being in a movie called 20 Feet from Stardom. She sang with the Rolling Stones and one of the great background singers, one of the great singers. And she was kind enough to come and put the background vocals on there. So I was in very good company with that track.

SPEAKER_00: 46:23

I mean, it is a great fun, as I say, a great harmonica song.

SPEAKER_02: 46:26

Oh, I know why I did that one, actually, because there was a movie that came out called Pocket Full of Soul about harmonica, which apparently I'm featured in. So this movie came out, the director, producer of the movie asked harmonica players if they would make a theme song. And it was one of a few times in my life where somebody's given me a project, you know, write a song about this. And of course, the phrase Pocket Full of Soul is a catchy, nice sounding phrase. So that's why I wrote the song. in the first place. And it didn't get selected, but Mad Cat Ruth wrote one, which I haven't heard, but I'm sure it's very good.

SPEAKER_00: 46:59

A question I ask each time, Will, if you had 10 minutes of practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_02: 47:04

I think on harmonica and any instrument, really, I'm doing it now with the saxophone. Well, with harmonica, the big challenge is making things fluid, legato, and sounding like they're not chopped up. I practice arpeggios a lot, up and down in all the 12 keys. Maybe you could do, no, you probably couldn't do in 10 minutes. Well, let me put it this way. I've never been a very systematic practicer, so it's very nice when I have a piece of music, a jazz standard, which I need to learn, or in the case of the French, the Odysseus piece, something like that. It's nice to have a goal. If you're just sort of between things, and one thing I do, which is kind of a warm-up, is I play a augmented scale, a whole tone scale, that is, starting on a C and just going up, because that scale happens to be in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, right? So it gets your lungs moving in a controlled but very quick fluttering manner. So it kind of increases your speed and accuracy. So that's one little thing I do, for example, before I play a gig sometimes. And you can get pretty arcane on the harmonica. There's some jazz harmonica players who have taken it into pretty out there realms. I'm more of a melodic player. So it's important for me that I can play all these seventh chord arpeggios up and down in every key, the semblance of fluidity. So that might be something that I would practice.

SPEAKER_00: 48:34

So yeah, so we'll get onto gear now. First of all, talking about the harmonicas that you play. So I have seen at one point you were endorsing Suzuki Chromatics. Is that still the case?

SPEAKER_02: 48:43

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. I met with them a few years ago at NAMM, and they wanted me to sign my image and my endorsement. endorsement in a very general kind of way. And I said, well, what do I get in return? I said, you know, I would like to get one of those new bass harmonicas that you make. And they said, no, no, no, that's too expensive. I was a little put off. So I didn't sign the thing. I had endorsed Hohner for a while. I think both Hohner and Suzuki have done great work. Sometimes for recordings, I'll use a Hohner because frankly, this is important. I like the sound of the Hohner Reeds more. And I can hear it on a recording. But the Suzuki reeds last, I would say, 10 times as long. I've replaced hundreds of reeds in my life and I just got tired of doing it. And I decided I would play the Suzuki's because they were more comfortable to play and I wasn't afraid of breaking the reed every time I played. And maybe because I play hard, you know, some people I'm sure can play a honer their whole life, but I would practice hard and I would play hard. And if I wanted to squeeze the note, I would squeeze the note. So I started playing the Suzuki's. I mean, the Suzuki's sound fine. And if you play them through a good mic with a good eq and a good reverb it sounds perfectly nice the and the difference is that the suzuki reeds are made of phosphor bronze and the uh honers are made of some kind of brass alloy and for whatever reason they sound richer

SPEAKER_00: 50:06

and talking about what about embouchure do you use on the chromatic

SPEAKER_02: 50:10

i like tongue switching and that's a big part of my playing and that was a a lot of that i was improved by my playing classical it's really pretty necessary when you play the beethoven or the bach and it makes certain for is much easier to do smoothly. Of course, Toots never did that. And as far as I know, Stevie never did that. So you can play perfectly wonderful harmonica without doing that. But I felt that it really helped me in many ways and enabled me to do some things that maybe Toots wouldn't go for. But on the other hand, sometimes just whistle position or spit position, whatever you want to call it, you know, pursing your lips for certain kinds of bending, for example, that you get more of a grip on the note when you can do it that way. So I'm constantly switching between between, I don't know what you call it, spit position and tongue switching position. Yeah, I haven't heard it

SPEAKER_00: 50:57

called spit position before. I like that one. I call it puckering, but I like spit position. I don't know where I picked that up. And like a good New York one, I think, probably. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 51:05

Yeah, I wanted to mention a couple other things regarding gear. There's a Chinese company called Wills Make. Have you seen them?

SPEAKER_00: 51:12

No.

SPEAKER_02: 51:13

You might look it up. Wills, like W-I-L apostrophe S, Make. And they're doing some really inventive stuff with chromatic harmonicas. He's out of China. He's an engineering student and he's an expert on machining. And they've made beautiful harmonicas, which are mostly around a thousand bucks, but some of them have an ebony or wooden cover plates and some very innovative designs. I haven't actually played one, but if they play anywhere as good as they look, then there will be something. And then there's this other company that Cy Young told me about called Cremona, which I'd like to look into as well. But those harmonicas are very expensive, more like 3000 bucks. But But boy, I mean, Cy Young is a tremendous player.

SPEAKER_00: 51:55

Yeah, and I mean, it's very popular in China, isn't it? The chromatic harmonica. So they're obviously very innovative with what they do.

SPEAKER_02: 52:01

Yes. Have you heard this little girl? There's a little girl who's

SPEAKER_00: 52:04

about nine years old.

SPEAKER_02: 52:05

I'm forgetting her name, but she tears it up on both the chromatic and the diatonic. It's really scary. It's scary, isn't it? How they do it at that age. If you ever want to be dissuaded of doing anything in life, just go on YouTube and find an eight-year-old Chinese kid who can do it ten times better than you ever will, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 52:21

I'm one about equipment wise amps and microphones what do you like to use

SPEAKER_02: 52:25

yeah I've gone through a million little little amplifiers because you know you don't want to lug a huge part of the charm of the harmonica is that you can put it in your pocket so you don't want to lug a stack of marshals around and one might one amplifier that I found that does very nice things for the harmonica is ZT makes an acoustic amplifier it's very tiny it's about seven inches by ten inches by seven inches or smaller than that it has a little six inch speaker inside and it just does something nice to the sound to me sometimes it really sounds just like a louder version of the harmonica like somehow it really replicates the sound very faithfully i use that and uh there's another company shirkler and i tried one of their amps at a nam show and i thought it was really special it's got a wooden cabinet they've got they've got different sizes but this one i think had an eight or a ten inch speaker And that I thought was really special as well.

SPEAKER_00: 53:21

Microphone-wise?

SPEAKER_02: 53:22

Well, Mike, I've been using Greg Hoyman's Sawed-Off 58, if you're familiar with that, with a volume control. And I found the volume control, I hate playing without it now because it's just really useful. I like the way that fits in my hand, and I prefer the 58 to the 57, both for sound and the way you can hold on to the ball of the 58. But for recording, I kind of got obsessed and bought a bunch of fairly high-end mics. There's a track on Got You On My Mind, which is called Flambe Montalbanese. It's that French... accordion sounding song. I always thought that was the best harmonica sound that I've gotten. And I asked the guy what microphone he used, and it was a Neumann 54, which is a rare microphone from the 60s or 50s. The Beatles used it actually on a few records, but it just smooths out the, it's got a nice high end, but it smooths it out in such a way that you don't get anything harsh from the harmonica. And that's a lovely microphone, but I think they're, I bought it for about a thousand bucks, but now they're like four or five thousand dollars, so good luck to anybody who wants to get

SPEAKER_00: 54:57

that. It's crazy how much those microphones cost. I've got my little home studio and I keep looking at these really expensive microphones and how much these microphones cost. It's crazy, isn't it, how much they cost, some of them.

SPEAKER_02: 55:07

But I think there

SPEAKER_00: 55:07

are

SPEAKER_02: 55:08

some lower end ones that are, you know, very good. And some of the mics, like a rare if you want to get real technical, R-O-D-E. Some of their mics are too high end, too much high frequency response for me. But other ones, if you replace the tubes, because these are Chinese made harmonicas, if you get better tubes, you can improve the sound of the microphone a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 55:29

Final question now, Will, and thanks so much for your time. But just what about your future plans? Like you said, you're heading back to New York. I know you play with Sean Harkness. Are you going to go back to play with him and any other plans?

SPEAKER_02: 55:39

Yeah, I think Sean is just a tremendous musician and guitarist and we had a really good chemistry. I mean, the last I played with him was a few years ago, but I would definitely like to pick that up again, maybe add a bass player and a percussionist or something like that. Yeah. And I would like to get back into playing some more classical. I don't know if I have the chops to... Well, I think if I give myself time to practice, I can be somewhat on the level of the people who are playing classical. That appeals to me. Again, I like playing jazz. It's just a really tough world. You go out and you play from nine to four in the morning and you get paid 50 bucks and yeah it's a labor of love isn't it to be very honest i i like to play in central park with a bunch of very good musicians who are between jobs or sometimes they just do that and i love playing in the street i find it gratifying and you get a big crowd and you get to play so i get a portable amp and i play with a little ensemble in the park make a little money but it's it's a lot of fun and you and you're in the open air and it's quite pleasant

SPEAKER_00: 57:07

well it's great to hear you still love to play so thanks very much uh will guys for joining me today well thank you yeah man and thank you for doing the podcast it's great that's it for episode 38 thanks again for joining everybody and thanks once again to Will Gallison to showing us and taking us through his very varied and exciting career he's done loads of great things with the instruments remember Will will be appearing at the Harmonica UK virtual chromatic weekend later on in June this year so be sure to come along and check out his workshop and gain some more insights from So now it's over to Will to play us out with Jealous Guy.

SPEAKER_03: 57:52

Jealous Guy

UNKNOWN: 58:12

Thank you.