Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Laurent Maur joins me on episode 75. Laurent is a jazz chromatic player from France. He first started learning diatonic before moving on to the chromatic to pursue his love of jazz music. He had some lessons with the French classical chromatic player, Claude Garden, helping to advance his technique. Laurent played with a few different bands, touring and recording albums with them before releasing...

Richard Hunter joins me on episode 74. Richard has immersed himself in harmonica ever since he first picked it up at age 15 and has been pushing the boundaries of the instrument ever since. His first release was a solo acoustic harmonica album, composing most of the songs himself and making extensive use of alternate tunings and counterpoint, followed up by a second album along the same lines. Ric...

Adam Gussow joins me on episode 73. Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there. Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album. Satan & Adam enjoyed great success, playing togeth...

Paul Reddick joins me on episode 72. Paul is a singer, songwriter and harmonica player based in Toronto, Canada. He rose to prominence with his band: Paul Reddick and the Sidemen in the 1990s. Paul describes himself as not a typical blues harmonica player, often using his sparse notes with heavy delay, while also making the use of complex patterns to build interesting rhythms.  Paul developed his...

Juzzie Smith joins me on episode 71. Juzzie is an Australian who has a one-man band act with the harmonica pivotal to the sound. He has had over 200 million views of his online videos, starting out when a passer-by recorded him busking at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.  Juzzie started his one-man band after playing as the harp player in a blues band, and then teaching guitar and harmonica. This ga...

Ricky Cool joins me on episode 70. Ricky hails from the Birmingham area of the UK, and drew great inspiration asa teenager from the American folk festivals which brought some harmonica greats to the city. Under his alter ego Ricky Cool, he went on to lead several successful rhythm and blues band, with Jamaican music also brought into the set. He also played harmonica in a band with Led Zeppelin’s...

Herbert Quelle joins me on episode 69. Herbert is a German who worked as a diplomat for 40 years. This included 10 years as the German Consul in the US, where he met several distinguished harmonica names. With a deep interest in the harmonica, Herbert has researched the instrument to great depth, using this information to litter facts into his two fictional works centred on our beloved instrument....

Cheryl Arena joins me on episode 68. Cheryl is a blues player and singer from the Boston area. She integrated herself into the local music scene there by setting up a jam session near Berklee college, drawing in the great musicians from there. And then set-up another residency with guest musicians joining the house band. Her deep love for the music has taken Cheryl far and wide, and gave her the o...

Erik Lekholm and Jason Keene join me on episode 67. Where we talk about the innovative DM48 midi chromatic harmonica, designed by Erik initially as a means to practise silently. He posted his creation on a harmonica forum and it soon gained interest, with people eager to purchase it. So Erik and his father started building and sold the first ones in 2017, with the updated version, the DM48X, comin...

Joel Andersson joins me on episode 66. Joel is an Irish harmonica player from Sweden, while also building one of the best reputations in the business for his harmonica customisation skills.  Joel first fell in love with Irish music on the harmonica when he heard Rick Epping’s playing. He spent time in Ireland with Rick, learning both the music and the art of fine tuning harmonicas. Joel went on to...

Joe Powers joins me on episode 65.  Joe started out playing diatonic harmonica along with blues records as a teenager, before deciding to study music composition at college, taking up the chromatic there. Joe’s passion for dancing led him to Argentina and tango music, where he has become the current leading exponent on harmonica. He believes the chromatic harmonica is the perfect instrument for ta...

Paul Barry joins me on episode 64. Paul is our resident expert on William Clarke, and is currently writing a biography about him. Bill (as he was known to his friends) was born in a suburb of Los Angeles, and starting going to the blues clubs in the south of the city, age 17. Bill met his great inspiration, George ‘Harmonica’ Smith, in 1977, with George showing Bill how to play that big old chroma...

Jens Bunge joins me on episode 63. Jens is a German chromatic player who started out playing the tremolo, before discovering Stevie Wonder. He then found Toots Thielemans and he started teaching himself jazz by ear and joined the local big band. He released his first album in 1991 with members of this band, and has since released a number of other albums of mostly original material, as well as gue...

Tom Ellis joins me on episode 62 for something a little bit different as we do a retrospective of the legendary Paul Butterfield, with Tom our resident expert.  Born in 1942 in Chicago, Butterfield frequented many of the South Side blues clubs located there and even had the audacity to hire Howling Wolf’s rhythm section before going on to record his seminal album ‘The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’....

Will Wilde joins me on episode 61. A sixteen year old Will stole his first harmonica while at a party and proceeded to put the rock into the instrument. He first started performing with his sister, Dani, as the harmonica player in her band. But Will has always had ideas of his own and soon formed his own band, with elements of rock and a heavy, driving blues style. Will has a very active YouTube c...

Wade Schuman joins me on episode 60. Wade is the singer / songwriter and leader, and of course harmonica player, of the New York based 8-piece band, Hazmat Modine, with the harmonica playing a pivotal role in the sound of such a big band. In fact, there is often a second harmonica player in the band. Wade absorbed many musical genres from a young age, which helped shape the eclectic styles of musi...

Gerhard Mueller joins me on episode 59. Gerhard is the Product Manager for Hohner harmonicas, a role he has held for 28 years. His father worked as a gardener at the Hohner factory in Trossingen, and as well as getting his son harmonica lessons, he even had a hand in helping Gerhard land his dream job at Hohner. Gerhard talks us through the fascinating history of Hohner and how it was established...

Bertram Becher joins me on episode 58.  Bertram is the Product Manager at Seydel harmonicas. He first landed this dream job when he made a name for himself by creating a software tutorial called The Interactive Blues Harp Workshop.  Bertram tells us about the history of Seydel and how their use of stainless steel reeds led to the creation of the ‘new’ Seydel around 2007. As Product Manager for har...

Mathias Heise joins me on episode 57. Mathias is a chromatic player from Copenhagen in Denmark. He started out playing diatonic, aged eight, before moving across to the chromatic, with which he was the first player to attend the Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.  Mathias won the World Harmonica Championship in Trossingen at the age of 20 with his own composition, Sudden Ascent. The album containin...

RJ Mischo joins me on episode 56. RJ hails from the twin cities of Minneapolis-St Paul, where he developed his craft with a little help from local player Slim Lynwood. He then teamed up with Mojo Buford to perform around the cities, including recording an album with Mojo. With numerous albums out under his own name, RJ has also made a career out of performing gigs with ‘pick-up’ bands when he goes...

Jim Conway joins me on episode 55. Jim is an Australian harmonica player who rose to fame at the age of 19 in the jug band: The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, with the first two albums from the band receiving gold record status. Jim also played kazoo with Captain Matchbox to great effect. The band evolved into the Conway Brothers act, before Jim decided he couldn’t continue after being diagnosed w...

Tom Ball joins me on episode 54. From Los Angeles, but long time resident of Santa Barbara, he started playing guitar in the popular local folk scene before Sonny Terry turned him on to the sound of acoustic harmonica. He then met Kenny Sultan, to form possibly the longest surviving acoustic blues duo. They have now been performing together for over 42 years and have recorded eight albums together...

Billy Boy Arnold joins me on episode 53. Today we have a little part of blues harmonica history, as Billy lived through the heyday of the blues in Chicago and was a peer of the many great players at the time, being born just five years after Little Walter himself. He took a couple of lessons with John Lee Williamson, aka SBWI, at just 12 years of age.  Billy released his first record at the age of...

Rick Estrin joins me on episode 52. Rick grew up in San Francisco and starting sitting in with bands in the city.  He was friends with Jerry Portnoy, who persuaded him to spend some time in Chicago. Here he met many of the harmonica greats, and missed the golden opportunity for the harmonica chair in the Muddy Waters band.  It turned out this wasn’t a bad thing though, as Rick forged his own path...

Richard Gjems joins me on episode 51. Richard hails from Norway, with its many blues clubs demonstrating how popular the music is there.  Richard is a real student of the blues, and the place of the harmonica within it, and he is involved in archiving music at the National Library in Norway. Richard has incorporated pre-war styles into his contemporary approach to playing the harmonica, where he c...