New Year's Harmonica-lutions?
Any New Year's Resolutions any of you care to share? Music/blues/jazz/harmonica-related only. No talk about going to the gym more often, losing 10 pounds, or being more polite to your teenage child's boyfriend or girlfriend.
For me: Work on playing fewer notes, and making those I do play count for more.
I've been thinking about this ever since hearing Bob Corritore and John Primer live and in person two months ago. (What an amazing show!) Andy Santana was in the audience, and chattting with him between sets I asked if he shared my opinion that Corritore's secret was that he played absolutely no wasted notes. That Corritore made every note count. Andy agreed.
Fast forward to my recently seeing a video interview of a well-known long-time Chicago player who had started out in the 1990s playing with an iconic guitarist who'd started in the south in the 1930s before ending up in Chicago. In the video this harp player confessed that when he started his career he thought he was hot stuff, and crammed as many notes in as he could, every chance he got. The guitarist took him aside after one of their first gigs together, and told him, "Son ... you need to listen to Howlin' Wolf!" Until that moment, this harp master had thought of Wolf as being a bit "primitive" on the harmonica. Then he really listened. And learned that what Wolf did was the same as Bob Corritore is doing today. I.e., made every note count.
2023: Fewer notes. And make every one of them count!
"Get better" is a prime objective these days, what with this rediculous repiratory thing I've caught, which has me coughing and hacking. Not a harmonica-friendly illness. Yuck.
But re getting better, I'm always surprised to meet folks who have no ambition to improve their knowledge or skills. Case in point: I regularly teach workshops at ukulele festivals, and while the numbers are small, there are always more than a few players who have no interest in new playing skills. They just want to learn as many songs as they can that use only the C, F and G7 chords. No interest in how diminished chords might work, or even in strumming styles beyond their "chunka chunka" that reduces every song they perform to some sort of dirge.
Some years ago I made the mistake at a festival of sitting in with a jam group that was using a songbook of Beatles songs in which every song had been reduced to just three chords. All in the key of C. Had a headache for weeks afterwards.
Greater focus at being deliberate with practice.
Get better.