Jon Gindick runs a thing called Harmonica Jam Camp, where players at various levels hang out, learn from a team of instructors, and play, play, play.  It’s a concentrated weekend of harmonica, and a great experience for all. I’m one of the instructors at Jam…

There are two big lessons in the blues: 1)  Get it any way you can. 2)  Making art from your life will get you through the deepest misery imaginable.

One of the things that impressed me at SPAH was how many players were using special tunings, and how radical some of those tunings were.  James Conway’s “Drone harp,” which had the bottom note doubled and the first 5th tripled, was one example.   That’s a…

There are a few things on my mind about SPAH.  The main thing on my mind is this: there are a lot of good things about this event, but it’s on a downward slope, and if something doesn’t change it’s going to run right into…

I forgot to mention in my various notes from SPAH that one of the best players I heard at the blues jams was Ben Nathanson.  Great ideas, great tone, very original playing.  I know I’ve heard of him before, but I don’t know where or…

I spent, like, half an hour setting the gaps on my Seydel Blues Soloist Pro today.  The harp plays a lot better.  But I couldn’t get it set up to both honk loudly in the middle register and overblow easily in the same place.  And…

One of the pleasures of SPAH is checking out the gear.  I bought 3 new harps at SPAH: a Seydel 1847 ($80), a Suzuki Harpmaster ($16), and a Seydel Blues Soloist Pro ($35).  A few impressions of each follow. The 1847 is expensive, but it…

Last night Buddy Wakefield, the president of the Newport News Harmonica Plus club, told me that he and some of his friends were going to teach 180 school kids how to play the harp this morning, after which they were all going to walk around…

I stopped by the Harp Depot store this morning and spent a little time at the Suzuki table.  I ended up checking out some of their new harp prototypes, which I really liked.  (They asked me not to discuss them in detail, and I won’t.) …

Thursday night was fun, but it could have been more fun, I think.  Or maybe not.  The folks who run SPAH are obviously well aware that they’re catering to at least two different audiences–the blues/rock (diatonic oriented) crowd, which tends to  be younger and like…