Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Paul Lamb, Joe Filisko and Adam Sikora join me on episode 125, for a retrospective on one of the legends of the diatonic harmonica, Sonny Terry, whose real name was Saunders Terrell. Sonny was born in 1911 (or 1912), in Greensboro, Georgia (or it could have been North Carolina). Growing up on a farm in a rural community, Sonny was left blind by two accidents in his youth. Unable to work on the far...

Shima Kobayashi joins me on episode 124. Shima is a classical chromatic player originally from Japan, who has been  living in the UK since 2004. After winning the World Harmonica Championship in 1995 she was awarded a bursary by the Japanese government to study with the great Tommy Reilly over a twelve month period.  Shima has two albums to her name. The first has a number of pieces composed for c...

Jerry Portnoy, Steve Guyger and Louis Erlanger join me on episode 123, for a retrospective on Paul Oscher. Paul was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and has a place in history as the first white player in a major black blues band, with Muddy Waters. Joining Muddy’s band gave Paul the best grounding in Chicago blues, he lived in Muddy’s house where he also learnt from the great Otis Spann. After leaving Mu...

Ross Garren joins me again on episode 122.  Ross lives near Los Angeles, where he has established himself as a leading session musician for harmonica recordings on movies, including Marvel’s Logan and the new Joker film, as well  on albums with numerous pop artists, including recently on Beyonce’s album, Cowboy Carter.  Initially a piano player, Ross came to love the harmonica from the age of twel...

Jim Zeller joins me on episode 121. Jim is from Montreal, Canada, and first starting playing harmonica at age twelve after stealing one from a school friend. He ran away from home at age fifteen and learnt harmonica as he hitch-hiked around North America. Jim has a very distinctive energetic style of playing on both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica. He developed this style by emulating guitar...

Grant Dermody, Ross Garren and Pete Dammann join me on episode 120 for a retrospective on Paul DeLay. Paul is a harmonica player who may go under the radar for some but his unique approach to both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica, as well as his powerful vocals and his insightful and humorous songwriting have placed him firmly in the hearts of harmonica and music fans in the know. Paul was fro...

Yeore Kim joins me on episode 119. Yeore is from South Korea, where she first picked up the tremolo harmonica at the age of six. Her mother is a piano teacher, so she also learnt piano and other instruments, including trumpet, before focusing on the chromatic harmonica from age 18. Yeore has released two albums of duets with different pianists. She moved to France in 2018 after meeting her guitari...

David Barrett joins me on episode 118. David is based in San Jose, California, where he took   lessons from Gary Smith from age 16, in addition to learning from great harmonica recordings. He started teaching harmonica himself from age 18 and has become one of the foremost harmonica educators around, with his BluesHarmonica.com website an invaluable resource. He ran the School of Blues for twenty...

Yvonnick Prene joins me on episode 117. Yvonnick was born in France and has been resident in New York for seventeen years after first moving to the city to study at the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music. He started out playing blues and jazz on the diatonic and took lessons with some of the great French players, before focusing his attention playing jazz on the chromatic. Yvonnick is a...

Isabella Krapf joins me on episode 116. Isabella is from Vienna, Austria, where she started teaching and performing concerts in her late teens and has had a career in the harmonica ever since. Isabella is a collector of harmonicas and puts on exhibitions. She played a part in keeping the Seydel factory in business when it was looking for new investors in the early 2000s, by ordering 1000 ‘boomeran...

Pat Missin joins me on episode 115. Pat’s knowledge about the harmonica is unsurpassed, with his website at patmissin.com , a definitive source of information for over twenty years. He gives us an insight into some of this knowledge, starting with how free reed instruments were the predecessor of the harmonica and the questionable history of who actually invented the harmonica as we know it today....

Seth Shumate joins me on episode 114. Seth is an Old Timey and pre-war harmonica player originally from Arkansas, now living in Tennessee. Seth has deeply researched the early history of the harmonica and has written an Old Time Harmonica Handbook which contains lots of great information, as well as techniques on how to play authentic Old Timey harmonica using various tongue blocking techniques to...

Andre Godoy Coelho (and Brendan Power) join me on episode 113. Andre is a Brazilian who relocated to Portugal in 2018, performing and recording two albums with the Rio Grande band in Sao Paulo, before recording a recent album in a duo in Portugal.  Andre quickly became interested in harmonica customisation when his first harmonica didn’t quite perform as he wanted. This has turned into a full time...

Harmonica group Svang join me on episode 112. Svang are a harmonica quartet from Finland, who have been performing and recording for over twenty years now. They first formed in 2003 when Jouko was teaching at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and suggested forming a harmonica group with two of his students. The group doesn’t play the typical harmonicas of a harmonica group, with a harmonetta used i...

Episode 111 is part 2 of the ten minute question, from the remaining podcast guests up until this point. As per the last episode, I’ll say the name of each guest before they respond to the question: “if you had 10 minutes to practise, what would you spend that ten minutes doing”. Podcast website: https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com Donations: If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support...

Something a little different for episode 110 (and also episode 111 so I can keep the length around the one hour mark). The next two episodes are a compilation of all the ten minute question answers from the series so far, in this, the 110th episode (get it?) Not every episode had a ten minute question, such as the retrospectives, but most did, 96 in fact. So I hope you enjoy listening back to this...

Clint Hoover joins me on episode 109. Clint is originally from Minneapolis and has spent a life immersed in music and the harmonica. He’s reached great heights on both the chromatic and the diatonic. Early on he also studied guitar and saxophone and attended a jazz course in New York City where he also took chromatic lessons from Robert Bonfiglio.  His eclectic mix of interests has led him to reco...

Roly Platt joins me on episode 108. Roly is a Canadian player who has recorded countless sessions over his 45 year career. He started out playing in a country band which set the scene for him playing a diverse range of genres throughout that time. Roly has recorded 1700 individual session cuts, with the numerous bands he has played in, and also various film, tv and commercial jingles. Roly ecorded...

Yotam Ben-Or joins me on episode 107. Yotam is a chromatic player who attended the Tel-Aviv Music Conservatory, making a name for himself on the Israeli music scene before winning a scholarship to study at The New School for Jazz in New York, age 21. Although predominately a jazz player, Yotam is keen to emphasise the diverse range of genres this encapsulates, including world music and South Ameri...

Eddie Martin joins me on episode 106. Eddie has been described as the ambassador of British Blues, having released seventeen albums over his near fifty year career, with many of the songs self-penned by Eddie. He started out as a one-man band, but also performs as part of his own bands too. In either format Eddie makes extensive use of rack harmonica, and is one of the leading players of using a r...

Paul Barry joins me again on episode 105, for another look at the life and career of the great William Clarke. Paul has now released his biography: Blowin’ Like Hell: The William Clarke Story, writing it from insights he gained from Bill’s wife Jeanette, and Bill's children, and the musicians who played with him, as well as many others. Bill dedicated his life from the age of sixteen to becom...

Mike Turk joins me on episode 104. Mike is a Boston-based player who started out playing blues harmonica, inspired by the great Paul Butterfield, before becoming interested in playing jazz on the chromatic. He recorded some session work in New York and recorded through the 1970s with various artists, with many of those tracks available on anthology albums Mike has put out. He released his first so...

Konstantin Reinfeld joins me on episode 103. Konstantin is a German who comes from the overblow school of harmonica, studying music at a conservatory and taking lessons from Howard Levy as part of his early development. He released a jazz album at age 18, with two more albums to follow before releasing a classical album played on the diatonic harmonica, for which he won a German Grammy award for c...

Christian Marsh joins me on episode 102. Christian is an Australian who plays both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica. Starting out playing diatonic, Christian drew inspiration from players such as Norton Buffalo and Charlie McCoy, absorbing as much harmonica as he could lay his hands on  . He picked the chromatic up a few years later after hearing Toots Thielemans play, and even went on to main...

Tom Ellis interviews Neil Warren on episode 101. Neil started out playing blues harmonica in his hometown of Blackburn (with it’s 4000 holes). He progressed into learning jazz, taking jazz chromatic lessons for several years, and then folk music. Neil currently plays in two bands around his local area, an acoustic act playing blues and folk, and an electric band playing different genres, such as s...