“He not busy being born is busy dying” . Bob Dylan

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.” – Andy Dufresne

I am feeling very inspired this morning by a movie I never saw: “The Shawshank Redemption”

I read the short version of the movie, which I will now make even shorter:

The hero of this movie is Andy Dufresne, an innocent man who goes to jail and eventually escapes. He does this by digging a tunnel through the prison walls and crawling through a sewer to win his freedom in the dead of night.

He had to come up with a plan to do this, and then chip away at it for several years.

I love stories about people overcoming huge obstacles and dealing with unfair conditions. I think it is the story of everyones life in a nutshell.

When It comes to playing the harmonica, I often feel like I am in a prison compared to where I want to be: improvising with nothing holding me back at all.

And I am reminded that people break out of prisons all the time when they have a plan and chip away at it, day after day, a little at a time.

The prison I am talking about now is the “I can’t do this” or some other story that sucks energy out of you and stops you from even trying.

When It comes to the freedom to improvise I am convinced that you find this by planning and then daily chipping away, digging a tunnel from where you are to a new level of freedom.

One of the best ways I have learned to feel this freedom is by deciding to limit the area that I play in. I’ll explain. When I think of trying to have the spontaneous freedom of a Charlie Parker playing in any key in a torrent of ideas, I get depressed and quit. But if I work at playing inside of a 12 bar blues using a pentatonic scale as my main pathway, I loosen up and start having fun and all the happy accidents that make improvising happen.

It is the limits that set the stage for my freedom. Weird, but true.

Last night I played along with a D minor jam track from Dennis Gruenling. I played a 16 hole chromatic harmonica and just focused on the notes that were easy to play. It was fun.

When I try to improvise on a harmonica in a key that is hard for me to play, it is not fun at all. I just bumble around doing a lot of unhappy accidents.

So rather than trying to be the Charlie Parker of the chromatic harmonica, playing the blue blazes in any key, I’ll stick to D minor for now.

This idea of setting firm limits so I can be free is one of those weird ideas that makes more sense to me the older I get.

And the same thing works for me now, inside of part of a 12 bar blues. I will start out my improvisation by limiting myself to two or three notes, and then repeating those notes a few times before changing a note or two.

So to circle around, I get busy being born by picking a small area to improvise in, and play there till I start feeling free. I am convinced that if you take this approach, you will begin to feel free and “busy being born”.

I think Andy Dufresne first felt his freedom while he was still in his prison cell, chipping away at the walls a little at a time. He had a plan and a narrow focus, and he believed he would be free.

And I believe that if you want to feel freedom as you improvise music you can do the same thing. Pick one small area to chip away at. As you get comfortable inside of playing two or three notes, then you can change a note here, an accent there, and start having “happy accidents”. Then you will find your way to the next miniature playground, the next two or three notes.

Over time, your playground gets bigger. And sometimes you may feel like you just broke out of a jail into a wide world of new experience. When you reflect on this, you will see a lot of little steps that you took before you had this “jailbreak”.

All you need to get on the road to improvising music is a plan (the limits that you choose) and the willingness to focus on one little area till you loosen up and can “play” with the notes. A good teacher can help you to choose a good “miniature playground”. Or you can do this yourself.

It beats the crap out of being “busy dying”.

I hope you choose freedom today. It comes in small steps.

Harpe Diem!

“The bird doesn’t sing because it has something to say. It sings because it has a song”. – Arab Proverb

The first time I went to see Joe Filisko I took a train from Philadelphia to Joliet Illinois. In my lap was a box full of harmonica prototypes made of brass stock screwed together with these insanely tiny screws, reed plates with the reeds attached with screws and nuts, the result of several years of trying to build a harmonics that would bend blow notes and draw notes the same way, “just like a Marine Band” harmonica.

It turned out i was not the only one who discovered the ideas I was working on. The years marched on, and Rick Epping got the patent for the harmonica now known as the XB-40. The XB 40 uses the same basic idea I was chasing down using  pairs of reeds, two for each blow note & two for each draw note. Close one pair or the other off with valves, and tune them so you can bend blow notes the same as draw notes. Except that it does not sound “just like a Marine Band”.

As so often happens in life, we go looking for one thing and then find something else that is more like what we really want, only we didn’t know it until we found it.

I went looking for a way to build an experimental harmonica, and I wanted Joe to help me. I ended up becoming a harmonica technician and found a whole new world of passion and people obsessed with new ways to play and tweak the harmonica.

For about a decade, Joe and I inspired each other, challenged each other, annoyed each other and generally tested the hell out of every idea we could find that might make a harmonica play better, and ended up with what became known as the “Filisko Method” of upgrading harmonicas.

In the middle of this time period, Jimmy Gordon joined us as a co-conspirator and asked a lot of questions and threw in a mess of ideas that helped refine and advance the art and science of making a harp respond like never before.

Joe also had another passion in his life that he was relentlessly working on. Playing and teaching the harmonica. Learning the classic harmonica recordings and transcribing them line by line, song by song, until he had worked his way through most of the entire recorded history of the blues harmonica one note at a time.

I remember one time visiting Joe and he had a room in his house dedicated to nothing but transcribing recordings into harmonica tab. No distractions. Nothing but  paper, pens, pencils, and various devices for slowing down recordings so he could analyze them in microscopic detail.

Joe has been doing this transcribing for twenty years or so, and teaching regularly all this time as well. He is damn good at playing, teaching, and explaining how you can follow his path to greatness as a harmonica player.

Joe had finally started to make his teachings available online as downloads. This is huge, folks. If you have any intention of getting better as a blues harmonica player, you MUST check out what he has to offer.

And if you go exploring his website, you will find several free PDF downloads with distilled insights on playing the harmonica.

Here is the link to his free stuff:

http://www.filiskostore.com/page/421719578

I can guarantee you that what he has for sale over-delivers. Joe made it a point of waiting until he was more than ready before launching his website.

BTW, Joe did not ask me to do this, and I don’t get any commission for doing this. I just want you to know about great resources when I learn about them.

Enjoy!

Today I have a couple of links for you that need a bit of explaining.

I have talked before about how the same things that make me a better harmonica player also make me a better human being.

Yesterday I got this link to a talk by a guy with the last name Amen. It is about brain health. I found it entertaining, disturbing, inspiring, and long (it is about 90 minutes long). You can listen to it if you are doing the dishes or something like that. I listened to it once and then watched it once yesterday with one of my daughters and my wife.

I remember hearing years ago that when Kim Wilson comes to a town, one of the first things he does is find out where there is a good gym so he can work out. David Barrett is now a 3rd degree black belt and he told me that being a musician helped him to do this and being a black belt made him a better musician. Joe Filisko goes to a gym at least 3 times a week even though he does not like to do it, because he likes the results, and it gives him stamina for being on the road and playing music.

I could go on and on about the great musicians I have met who swear by exercise and other health regimens as part of their way of being ready for the muse and able to keep hitting higher levels of creativity. Taj Mahal is another one. He brought his own weights on tour one time when I opened up for him. He noticed I was drinking ginseng and said to me “if more of those old blues guys drank that stuff instead of alcohol, they would still be around today”.

Anyhow, you have been warned – this video can be scary and in your face. It is also very funny in some places….

The video:

http://www.highperformanceacademy.com/amen

A checklist on brain health:

https://tbitac.norc.org/download/amen_checklist.pdf

BTW, this is not any sort of affiliate marketing. I ain’t makin a dime off of this, I just feel the urge to pass this along.

Till soon,

I’ll be plying twice in the charming town of Millheim this weekend.Located in Amish country, the traffic includes horse drawn buggies.

The first gig is a solo gig on Friday Nov. 25th 7:30 – 8:30 at the Green Drake, a Gallery and Arts center created from a former hardware store. More info is at: http://greendrakeart.com/

The Jive Bombers Elk Creek Cafe, Millheim, PA
Jerry Zolten and Richard Sleigh and a strong possibility of a great drummer will be playing their favorite American Roots music. For more info on this great venue, please check out the website: http://www.elkcreekcafe.net/
Start Time: 4:00
Date: 2011-11-27

I have gotten a variety of responses to the rhythm exercise idea, ranging from “I don’t need this.” to “Wow! this is realy cool!”.

I also got enough questions about exactly what to do that I will describe it again as clearly as I can.

You sit and cross your arms near your wrists so you can tap your right knee with your left hand, and your left knee with your right hand.

You tap both knees at exactly the same time, and tap both of your feet at the same time you are tapping your hands. Both feet and both hands coming down at the same time. It does not matter if you are tapping your heels or your toes, as long s you keep the beat.

This will help you rapidly absorb a rhythm or help a student that is having a hard time with keeping a beat. I have done this as part of my own practice for time signatures like 5/4 that I don’t use a lot, and it gets me in the groove fast.

I started doing this with students that claimed that they could not keep a beat, and many of them were amazed at how much of a difference it made in less than 5 minutes.

Why does this work? The least technical explanation I can give you is this: We have a left side and a right side to our brains and they don’t always work together. There is a bundle of nerves at the base of the brain that regulates “cross talk” between the left and right sides of your brain.

The left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body. When you cross your arms and tap the opposite knees, you are creating signals that promote cross talk, and this makes it easier to get both sides of your brain and body on the same page as far as the beat.

You can also do variations of this discreetly under a table if you are in a meeting (for example)and starting to feel “disconnected”. Just tapping opposite legs with your fingers can promote more whole brain thinking, bringing logic and intuition more together among other things.

We will know that this sort of understanding of the brain is becoming really mainstream when we start hearing country radio tunes with lyrics like this:

“My left brain done left you, don’t want you no more,
But my right brain still loves you, can’t walk out that door

I’m left with a left brain that has left you behind
But darlin, I can’t quit you when I’m in my right mind”

Well, anyhow, even if you think this is all a bunch of nonsense, I hope you find it amusing.

Happy December!

Today I have a very simple exercise that you can try with someone who claims that they can’t keep a beat. Or someone who can’t keep a beat, but they don’t know it. Or someone who is trying to learn a new and tricky rhythm.

I will get into why this works in a later message. My experience with this process is that it works, and that is enough for me.

Here is what you do: Sit facing your friend or student (or just sit if you are doing this by yourself), and you both cross your wrists so that your hands are resting on the opposite knee. Right hand on left knee, left hand on right knee. It also helps to tap both of your feet or toes in time along with your hands.

You then tap your knees to keep time to a recording or a drum track of the song that you are working on. Do this for a few minutes, and then try playing the song again together, tapping your feet.

Try this out and ask yourself if there is a difference in how well you or your friend can keep time.

I have done this a number of times with people who claimed that they could not keep a beat. I maintained eye contact to keep them engaged, and after one session, I noticed a real difference in their ability to kep a groove.

I have also done this by myself when I have worked on a new rhythm to speed up the process of getting the feel of it.

The short explanation is that this speeds up the process of getting both sides of your body and mind on the same page. I’ll break out the fancy language in the next email.

Let me know if this makes any difference to you!

Thanks!

Lay Down My Burden – Grant Dermody and Friends

Grant Dermody is a Seattle based harmonica player, music instructor, vocalist and song writer who has honed his skills over the years playing with acoustic bluesmen John Jackson, Guy Davis, Honeyboy Edwards, John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, Louisiana Red, bluegrass guitar wizard Dan Crary, and a variety of top notch old timey and folk / blues musicians. In recent years he has been touring with Eric Bibb and appears on two of his CDs “Spirit I Am” and “Booker’s Guitar”. He also plays in an acoustic trio with Orville Johnson and John Miller, in a duo with guitarist Frank Fotusky, and in the eclectic acoustic old-time band “The Improbabillies”.

Lay Down My Burden is a recording that is drenched in the blues, and has some hard-core blues on it, but it is not a blues record. If you need a label, you could call it American Roots music. It is the music of immigrants who came to America for a new life, strangers in a strange land, freedom seekers, slaves, indentured servants, the lunatic fringe and the divinely inspired. They all brought musical traditions that collided and created a rich landscape of new musical expressions.

Grant dives deep into this musical landscape through his mastery of the diatonic blues harmonica, and a kind of blues that can seep into an Irish fiddle tune, a modal Appalachian melody, old-timey music, gospel music, and popular music of the last few hundred years.

This song cycle took form during a time in Grant’s life when he lost of both of his parents, his wife Eileen, and a couple of close friends. You might expect dark, melancholy music to come out of a time like this, but instead what you have is music full of the joy that is the essence of the blues.

I heard a two-word phrase in an interview with Coleman Barks that nails this essence of the blues. Coleman translated thousands of poems by the Persian mystic, Rumi. He described the timeless quality that Rumi and his fellow Sufi mystics brought to their work with the phrase “ecstatic grief”. Ecstatic grief sounds at first like an oxymoron, an impossible state, but it describes a wholeness that feels good, excludes nothing, is full of darkness as well as light. To feel the deepest emotions from sorrow to joy at the same time, and to live to tell about it.

As Grant puts it: “You just find yourself reaching down for strength you didn’t know you had. Or if you thought you had it, you didn’t know where it was. A lot of it is just showing up and doing what you have to do. You persevere, you look for joy where you can find it – and that’s the blues.”

There are two songs back to back on this recording that express the extremes of this ecstatic grief that is the blues.

“Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” has the late John Cephas on vocals and guitar, Grant on harmonica. This was John’s last recording and he expresses the almost unbearable heartache and desolation of Skip James with an immediacy that could only come from a lifetime spent living the blues. Grant meets him right where he is with his Marine Band harmonica, following him note for note into this haunting sonic landscape.

There is an extra-long pause after this cut, and I assume it is there on purpose to give you a chance to catch your breath and let what just happened sink in.

What follows is an ecstatic romp called “Rain Crow Bill”, two harmonicas chasing each other through a delirious version of an old-timey / blues harmonica instrumental by Henry Whitter. Fat chord rhythms, fox chase whoops and hollers, and melody lines with the exuberance of first graders pouring out of school for recess. Mark Graham joins Grant on this and somehow they manage to get through it without falling down laughing.

Grant recorded with twenty six of his friends on this project, people with incredible chops in a wide range of musical styles. The combinations range from duets to a full band with drums. Grant got his start working with other musicians at the age of 18 in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks was at that time a wild renaissance town, a creative outpost of folks building their own houses and going back to the land. They also had a vibrant music scene with a dozen places to hear live music on any given night. Everything from Blues to Bluegrass, Old Timey, Irish, to straight ahead Rock ‘n’ Roll. Grant found a way to play it all on the harmonica, how to back people up, how to learn things on the fly, when and how to take a solo.

There are many highlights on this recording: Grant sings lead vocal on 8 of the 16 songs, including the Reverend Gary Davis tune “I’ll Be Alright” with Eric Bibb on guitar, a lonesome banjo and harmonica version of Dirk Powell’s “Waterbound”, and an a cappella arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”. Grant also wrote 3 of the tracks including the title cut “Lay Down My Burden” a riff tune that built into a full band arrangement.  Grant’s work as a harmonica sideman with blues greats John Dee Holeman, Louisiana Red and John Cephas is raspy, raw, and right in the pocket. There is also a righteous harmonica duet with harmonica master Joe Filisko, “Twelve Gates To The City”,  a gospel tune with a heavy dose of Sonny Terry style harmonica.

The last track takes us to yet another level. As Grant put it “This started as a record I wanted to do with people I respect musically, and it turned into something cathartic, something healing, something to help Eileen and me during the hardest thing we ever went through. It was becoming a prayer and I thought what better way to end the record than with an actual prayer by my Buddhist teacher, Kilung Jigme Rinpoche.”

Orville Johnson’s dobro and Grant’s harmonica meet this prayer with startling harmony.

This is a fitting end to this musical trip that will grow on you and with you every time you listen to it.

For more information on this CD and others by Grant, go here: http://www.grantdermody.com/cd.html

A while ago, there was a lively debate on Harp L about who were the real geniuses. The general direction that this thread was going in was that some people were geniuses, and others were not, and that this would be a good thing to argue about.

I insist that we all are geniuses, once we dig deep enough. If you dig what I am saying, then you may enjoy the reply that I decided to post as part of the genius thread:

Genius is a verb, too….

The thread about genius has finally made me want to throw in my two cents, as I believe that there are some good questions to ask about the debate. One is What is the point of this discussion? Another is “What are the assumptions we are making here?”

People who do research on accelerated learning and human potential (Donna Cercone, Brian Tracy, Dennis Waitley Win Wenger among others) claim that genius is a way that we use our minds and can be learned.

When we do this “who is a genius” game, It puts us in the position of being passive judges of something that we don’t have and others do. The idea  that we cannot access genius is poisonous and just plain wrong. It is an example of “learned helplessness” – I’m not a genius so why bother trying to be one?

A baby elephant tries over and over to break free of the rope that has it tethered. It gives up eventually after hundreds of futile attempts. The same elephant grows up with enough strength to easily break free of the rope, but never tries because it “knows” that it can’t do it.

We tend to do the same thing with our own potential as musicians (and in many other areas where we are “stuck”). We learn early on that we are not “geniuses” and we accept “reality” instead of relentlessly working at creating genius as our reality.

Instead of debating who is a genius, wouldn’t it be more fun to check out people who spend a lot of  time in the genius mode and ask “what are they doing?” “How can I do that?”

This is what I see going on over and over again at SPAH and other events like it. People come here and start relaxing and unwinding and after a certain amount of sleep deprivation and hanging out with inspiration, start having flashes of their own true genius. Something in the air makes them forget their usual self imposed limitations and they cut loose and play brilliant, alive music. With some it comes in flashes and then they get self conscious and it goes away. With others they get on the good foot and stay there for a while….. Some folks live there most of the time, and they get the label “Genius”. Sometimes.

That is one of the reasons that I love SPAH. I love being around people who are experiencing genius. Especially their own, even if they don’t choose to call it that.

Thats my story, and I’m sticking to it!

Harpe Diem!

I would like to reflect today on how terrible I was for a few years at tuning harmonicas. I have come up with a short list of some of the really dumb things I have done when tuning harmonicas.

There are plenty more mistakes that I don’t have space or time for today, trust me….

Here they are, in no particular order:

#1. Tuning to A 440. The first few times I tuned harmonicas, I used a guitar tuner and just tuned the notes to the tuner. It seemed odd to me that almost all the notes were way sharp, but I trusted the needle on that tuner. After all, it always made my guitar sound great.

I could not believe how horrible the harmonica sounded once it was “in tune”. I can;t remember where I first learned that you tuned harmonicas sharp. I read it somewhere.

#2. Tuning all the notes to 0 on my tuner and expecting smooth chords. I had no idea why the chords sounded smooth on a harmonica that was “out of tune”. This drove me nuts for a couple of years. I just had no idea where to look for information, and the few people who had some idea of what was going on could not put it into words that made any sense to me.

#3. Being wimpy and indecisive while tuning. This is what happened to me after I started to learn about the difference between tuning a harmonica for smooth chords OR melody notes. I would get the chords smooth, and then play some melody notes and want to “tweak them just a little, not enough to mess up the chords”.

Then I would get individual notes sounding right,  go back to playing the chords, and whoops! – a little too rough, gotta make those chords sound smoother. Back and forth, back and forth. I wanted a harmonica that had really smooth chords AND magically changed into a harmonica melody notes that were in tune when I played fiddle tunes.

This lead often to mistake #4:

#4. Tuning the harmonica while pissed off and playing harder and harder and filing and scraping reeds harder and harder, working ten times harder than I needed to end up with a harmonica that was way sharp because I was flattening the reeds from playing too hard.

Sometimes I would break reeds when I got really mad, and then I would get really REALLY mad…..

And then there is #5 – staring at the tuner like a deer hypnotized by headlights. I still do this at times and I don’t really know why – I guess I expect the tuner to suddenly change it’s mind if I just wait another second. The truth is, 95% of the time I can see immediately that the note is sharp or flat. I just don’t trust myself sometimes. At first I did not trust myself at all…..

#6 Yeah I know, I am going over the limit…. Playing a cold harp with hot breath and making the reeds all wet with water piling up on the reeds. This makes for a harmonica with the blow reeds very sharp, because that is where most of the water vapor collects.

The good news is that you can avoid all of these mistakes, at least most of the time.

I will tell you more about how to do that in future posts. Right now I’ll tell you how I deal with #4 – how I keep from getting crazy / mad / too frustrated….

I break the spell by doing neck rolls and dropping my shoulders about every 5 minutes, sometimes even more often. It is hard to go completely insane if I let go of stress and bring my attention  back into my body with these simple moves. I have just made this a habit, and it really makes a difference.

Using a stopwatch and glancing at it also breaks the spell without taking me out of the flow. Tuning becomes a game with a way of keeping score.

Avoid these mistakes, and watch your accuracy and efficiency jump up a few notches…..

One of the wonderful things about playing blues harmonica is learning how to improvise over a 12 bar blues or some other structure that becomes familiar to us. Improvising is related to being creative, and “being creative” becomes a problem for some people, mostly because they do not believe that they are creative. Or that they are sometimes, and other times they are not, and have no control over the process.

So they get all hung up about being creative, being able to improvise, don’t believe they can, and then a funny thing happens. They are unable to see that they are improvising all the time and there is no reason for this to stop just because they have a harmonica in their mouth.

Yesterday I ran across an article on creative writing that gave me a new way to see this process of improvisation, or being creative with music. It has to do with realizing that “creativity” is the wrong word. Once we start using the right words, it is amazing how clear things can be.

The article was written by Eugene Schwartz, a copywriter. Copywriters have to be “creative” on demand. So does a good blues harmonica player.

It is a long article, so I am quoting the most important two paragraphs. Here they are:

“What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s
a lousy word that confuses what you really do to
perform a simple little procedure. Creation
means create something out of nothing. In the
beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay,
only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re
human. So let’s throw creation out, and let’s
talk about connectivity. What you are trying to
do is connect things together. You’re trying to
practice connectivity. You’re trying to get two
ideas that were separate in your mind and
culture before, and you are trying to put them
together so they are now one thought. You want
something new to come out, but new doesn’t mean
it never existed before, it means never joined
before. New – in every of discipline – means
never joined before.

You’ve got to trick that conscious mind because
that conscious mind isn’t big enough to connect
all these widespread phenomena. So what you do
is you take your conscious mind and you focus it
on making a new cup of coffee! That holds it
there, and then ideas can kind of bleed into the
back of your mind and come into the front of
your mind.”

Eugene then goes on to insist that we can turn ourselves into idea machines by just plain working at it, practicing techniques that anyone can practice. The more you practice, the more ideas you get, the easier the whole process becomes.

The dance of improvisation for me has always been about going from structure, melody, to a surprise version of element of the structure or melody. Back and forth. How this happens, I don’t know. I just know it can and will happen.

When I get someone to believe that they can surprise themselves with new musical ideas while they play, and they learn some way to distract their thinking mind at the right time, they start improvising.

I believe that learning to improvise music, to jam, to be “creative” while playing music is a natural ability that we uncover, and that we all have it.

Getting better at improvising it is a process of learning new ways to trick the conscious mind to get out of the way. Getting into the body through conscious breathing helps a lot. Getting the body grounded in the pulse of the music helps a lot. Physically relaxing helps a lot. A tightly focused conscious mind usually results in tight muscles somewhere. Relax those muscles and some part of your mind opens up at the same time and surprises you with new connections of musical notes, things to say.

And if you don’t believe you are “creative”, maybe the best thing to do for a while is to stop using the word creative, and disconnect it from the idea of improvising. Improvising is making new connections.

I hope these ideas inspire you to approach improvising music in new ways. You may be surprised at what you find.

I hope so!