This past Friday night, I had finished my gig at a restaurant and was sitting at the bar having something to eat and drink. A goateed man, probably in his early 60s, was also sitting there and drinking good Scotch. He asked about the music and I told him sorry, but he had just missed it. He asked what instruments I played and I told him I sing and play guitar, harmonica and percussion.”I’m a one-man band,” I said.
“You’re just like Bob Dylan,” he replied.
I wanted to set him straight but without offending him if he was a Dylan fan. “Actually I’m a lot better than Bob Dylan,” I said. I told him that I admired Dylan’s guitar-playing and songwriting, but that he is a really poor harmonica player. “He just kind of blows in and out on it, the way a little kid does when you give him a harmonica.”
The man didn’t get offended at all, but became intrigued by the idea that there could even be such a thing as one harmonica player being better than another, or such a thing a skill applied to the harmonica. “What kind of range does a harmonica have?” he asked.
“Not bad for such a little instrument — three octaves,” I said. I pulled out a harmonica and showed it to him.
“Is that a small harmonica?” he asked.
I explained that there were various specialty harmonicas of different sizes, but that this 10-hole diatonic was your basic full-sized model, same as what every player uses.
“Can you play Beethoven’s Ninth on the harmonica?” he asked, skill skeptical that it was a real instrument.
Now…it just happens that he made the perfect request. I don’t know a lot of classical pieces — even to recognize and name them, let along to play them on the harmonica. And many classical pieces, even if I were familiar with them, would involve sharps and flats that would make them difficult to play on the diatonic harp, especially without having worked on them in advance. But Beethoven’s Ninth’s familiar “Song of Joy” theme is all “white keys,” very simple to play on the harmonica, you can even harmonize it in fact since it stays on the chords that are built in. I’ve played it before, just for my own amusement, and it is definitely the only classical piece I have ever played at all. So I said “Sure,” and picked up the harp and played a bit of it, astounding the man, the other barflies and the bartender. When they recovered, they started making requests for Schubert, Mozart etc, but I just smiled and put away the harp, saying, “You’ll have to pay for a full concert. That was just a little sample.”
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