Bet On The Blues

Of course, most blues harp fans know that Paul Oscher's blues validation ticket was punched once Muddy Waters tapped him to fill the harmonica chair in his band. He certainly had big shoes to fill, following in the footsteps of Little Walter, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Big Walter Horton. Muddy hired him on the spot, after showing up at a gig at the Apollo without a harp player and allowed Osher to sit in for a few songs. Oscher played with him from that 1967 gig through 1972. A big deal was made of the fact that Oscher was the first white musician to be in his band. I don't think that Muddy thought in terms of black and white, but just that this white boy could blow his brand of blues.

Oscher hung his hat out as Brooklyn Slim back in the seventies and today carries on the blues tradition mainly as a solo act with a racked harmonica and guitar; sometimes with keyboards and melodica thrown into the mix.. He manages to get something out of his harp that eludes most racked harmonica players-that nasty ol' amplified tone. I've heard that he refuses to divulge the secrets of the contraption that he uses in order to maintain that essential element to the good ol' ChiTown sound.

He'll probably refuse to divulge his Three Card Monty techniques also, but he does share a tale about Luther Boy "Snake" Johnson introducing him to Little Walter for the first time and the warning to Walter to not play cards with this boy. That humorous narrative opens the title track from Oscher's newest release, Bet On The Blues. It also carries an "explicit language" warning for Osher's colorful choice of words decribing a classic moment in time. And that's all it is, a narrative and not a song cut. It is also one of only two original tracks on the album, but he wonderfully covers a variety of artists and a variety of styles, the majority of them being deep blues. The biggest surprise is his cover of Thelonius Monks' "Round Midnight" with Kid Andersen on standup bass and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith brushing the drum skins. The song exposes his lack of vocal range for this jazzy composition, but he makes up for it with the deep welled vibe set up by his big butt bass harmonica.

The "Kid" and "Big Eyes" hang with on few of the cuts, such as the biographical (IMHO) "Robin Lee". His dirty, nasty distorted guitar sets the stage for a low down woeful blues tale of the pains of love. His vocals match up better with this gutbucket style of blues and the listener can feel the pangs of depression in his voice. The same musical cohorts, along with Bob Welsh on piano, take Freddy King for a short ride (1:57). He slips the slide on and wails on "Slideaway (After Hide Away) and it rips. The highlight for me is Welsh getting down on the ivories.

Osher obviously is satisfying the blues harp aficionados in the audience with his "live" solo rendition of Little Walter's "Juke".  Of course, he's got that sorta stuff down pat and it is apparent that he got some glee from breaking the Master's piece out on stage. This is one of several live cuts mixed in with the studio stuff just mentioned.

He continues in the Little Walter vein to things with "Mean Old World". It's actually a T-Bone Walker song, but when Little Walter transformed into Chicago blues mode, he changed enough that it is credited to him. Johnny "Ace" Acerno and Per Hansen support him on bass and drums, respectively. Oscher pulls out all the stops by sucking the harp tones out of his harp for all it's worth. He throws down some Muddy type slide licks into the mix.

"Jesus, Won't You Come by Here",  "River Jordan", and Mississippi John Hurt's "Lisa Jane-God's Unchanging Hand" spins some spiritual music into the programs mix and adds a bit of contrast to the "Devil's Music", which he keeps crankin' out by cover his ex-boss's "Rock Me" and "Sad Sad Day". He pulls up a darned good approximation of the unique guitar tones that Muddy Waters innovated. He's also pretty darned impressive with a chromatic harp in this neckrack; illustrated by his take on George "Harmonica" Smith's "Bues in the Dark".

So, Bet On The Blues represents a fine additon to the catalog of a veteran bluesman, who cut his teeth with the best that ever played it. For some fine reading and listening, go over to http://www.pauloscher.com/ He's got some great photos of his travels of the blues over there.

Bet On The Blues

Paul Osher

VJM CD1004

Houston Harmonica Lessons

Good friend and harp ace, Sonny Boy Terry has a revamped harmonica site up and running now. Click Here Hit the harp fest button when you get there for the latest and greatest information regard the Down Home Texas Blues Harp Festival.

Lone Wolf Harp Break

Yipee Ki Yi Yay II! Randy Landry, over at the Lone Wolf Company, has been in his mad science lab again and has another winning pedal to help us harp players achieve the tonal nirvana that we all seek. This time, though, I've got my hands on his latest creation called the Harp Break--and the best part is that it was FREE! Followers of my posts here have read my glowing reports of his inventions and possibly listened to the linked demos. I've been very, very tempted to buy one or more of his gizmos, but my playing out days are so limited that I've just haven't done it. My loss.

He ran a contest for the new Harp Break and I won--I didn't have to play harp better than anyone, he simply drew my name from his hat. Luck of the draw, thank goodness. The Harp Break is a distortion type pedal designed to add grit, grind, and fat to an amp that's a bit too clean sounding or to plug directly into a p.a. for a tone that has more mojo or just to twist a little variety into your favorite harp amp. Click on the link in my opening sentence and check out his site and scroll down to the Harp Break in the sidebar and take a listen to the demos. Houston harp whiz Dave Nevling shows just how well the Harp Break performs through his p.a. at a live gig and Ron Sunshine puts the pedal through its paces plugged into a Fender Bassman Reissue. I'll let that web page fill you in on the pedal's details and I'll fill you in on what my impressions are here.

First off, it is very simple. I like simple. The Harp Break has three knobs--drive, volume, and bass boost. Plug and play baby. The true bypass feature makes for seemless A/B testing. The first thing I stuck it to was my Ol' Smoky amp (described in one of my very early posts). It is a Bell Sound 3725 p.a. amp, driven by two 6L6 tubes, that I rejuvenated quite some time ago, but never really got it to produce the tone that I wanted. Enter the Harp Break. Using my JT30 style 5 meg crystal mic to push my harp notes, the Ol' Smoky suddenly sprang to life with the pedal. The volume increase before feedback was significantly substantial--the presence jump out at me and the bass boost gave it more whomp. That really caught me by surprise. I played around with the drive knob and it added or substracted the amount of grit that I wanted it to put out. The only trick is to balance the drive with the volume to avoid too much clipping or feedback. I wound the volume wide open and eased the drive knob up to get some great tone and then I backed the volume down and wound the drive knob up to get something slightly different going on and achieve a bit of tonal variety. I got what I liked best with the bass boost up 3/4, the drive a bit past a 1/4 and the volume up at slightly less than 3/4. The Ol' Smoky was smokin'.

I pushed this all through a couple of less than optimal 10" speakers, just to see if I could get a decent tone from them for a change--and they came alive with the Harp Break. Once I plugged the rig into my 4x10 cab with Webers, I had a tonally different animal on my hands. It rocked!

My experimental session moved on to my old Voice of Music amp with two 6V6 tubes, which also had something lacking in the tone department. Again, the first thing I noticed was the volume boost. The sound just leaps from the speakers. The Harp Break transformed the amp from one that was so-so into a blues harp amp that I enjoy playing now.

I then put the Silvertone 1483, which I heavily modded for harp, through the test. Of the four channels, I've got a couple that are set up more for crystal or ceramic mics and they need absolutely no help getting the vibe going. The 1483 gets my favorite tone when plugged into those with a crystal mic. I can't play my controlled reluntance or controlled magnetic microphones through those because the tone gets clipped too hard and chops the notes off. They sound decent through the other two channels,especially it I tack my J-Phat impedance matching box into the signal chain. So, channels one and two were excellent candidates for the Harp Break to work its magic. And, man, did it ever. Those channels rival my crystal mic inputs when the Harp Break kicks into action. The bass bomp from the cystal channels always seemed to be missing on channels one and two--not any longer. Now my CR/CM mics can get those cranking with the Harp Break cranking. Oh, and my crystal mics are just as awesome through those channels, because the pedal performs the same buffered impedance matching as my J-Phat.

Okay. That's my story. Not the end. Just the beginning. The Harp Break got me off my butt and has me practicing like I should have been doing all along. Long live Lone Wolf. I thought Randy would have run out of ideas for pedals by now, but he just keeps coming up with winners. Check 'em out. Anyway--

The Harpmaster

I had my television tuned to the satellite blues channel while I worked on a few novel revisions and suddenly superb blues harp tones caught my ear and I had to stop and listen before it dawned on me who the heck had those kind of chops. There just ain't many that can lay it out there like those notes that were being produced. Jerry Portnoy came to mind and sho' nuff that's who it was.

It then dawned on me that I really haven't given Portnoy his due here at Back In The Day. I mentioned his Legendary Blues Band recordings in an earlier post and lauded him a bit--but just having my head whipped around at the first fat notes sucked on that tune today reminded me that, yes indeed, he is one of my favorites--me and Eric Clapton, anyway. Darn it, though, I wish he would get more prolific and put that stuff to work on some new stuff. It's been awhile since Down In The Mood Room-which I thought needed more nasty Chicago licks thrown onto it.

Of course, by now, EVERY harmonica player has a copy of his Harpmaster instructional CDs and has improved their chops considerably if they let him sink in to their soul and practiced what he preached. He put it all out there for us. If not go over to his website and order a copy. I haven't visited the website in quite sometime, but I noticed that he has a signature custom Marine Band that he's hawking. Now, that peaked my interest. I'll have to investigate that offer a little more.

So, here I was listening to Jerry Portnoy and it caused me to check around and see if he had anything new recorded that I didn't know about. The first thing I stumbled across was this video and he just knocked my sock off, playing with an Italian band called Guitar Ray and the Blue Gamblers. So to make amends for not praising Portnoy enough around here, well, check this out:



Wow! What a tone monster, huh? Anyway--

Rick Estrin and the Nightcats

Rick Estrin
& The Nightcats
Twisted
Alligator Records


He's baaack! Seems just yesterday that I plugged Rick Estrin's On The Harp Side and his DVD just before that and now he's back with a new Alligator release with his version of the Nightcats. Twisted. Now that title perfectly fits Estrin's personality.This new Nightcats' recording adheres more or less to the old Nightcats' formula--instead of Charlie Baty leading the guitar charge and shining on jazzy or swinging instrumentals, Kid Andersen turns loose his different flavored chops. Where On The Harp Side was an Estrin vehicle, Twisted does the ensemble band thang that we've grown to love about a Nightcats' release. Estrin's still front and center as always, but he certainly allows Andersen to stretch out and put the pedal to the metal on occasion--such as on his instrumental, Earthquake where Kid approximates what Freddy King might have sounded like on meth. Rockabumping stuff, indeed. Oh, and Estrin gets the shaking going right along with him.

Estrin's witty lyrical behavior lives up to his reputation as an astute observer of real life stories, siphoned through his wise ass demeanor. The opener Big Time takes off where his last CD left off--with some nasty, honking Estrin licks. The amped up tone sounds very similar to what he squeezed out on the solo release. He aims his message at those folks who think that they are 'big time' and basically tells 'em to get out of his face with the attitude. The tune rocks. No, really. Kind of an old time rock and roll vibe kicks things off right.

Back From The Dead answers the song he wrote called Circling The Drain from that great, last Nightcats' CD, Nine Lives. That tune had Estrin ready to throw in the towel, this one has him saying that even though some may have thought that he did---well, he's got news for them because he's back from the dead despite the laundry list of reasons he offers why he should have croaked by now. Hilarious stuff and with the Kid slinging hash with his guitar, I think it should be on every Top 40 play list. Riiight.

UBU is another about minding your own damn business as he says "Let me be me and you be you" on this driving shuffle and Catching Hell is about, well, catching hell and slows the pace down with Kid showing off what he can really do with blues licks. P.A. Slim Is Back jumps the boogie with Estrin's harp leading into a tale about a cool daddy hitting town again after fleeing cold Chicago winters.

And so it goes and if you know Estrin like I know Estrin and his work with the Nightcats, then you know what the rest of the program is all about. He does keep his harp stuck to his mouth throughout the proceedings a little more so than on a typical Little Charlie and the Nightcaps release and he sucks the tonal variety out of the instrument, as usual, to keep things sounding fresh. He does the sweet and low chromatic thing on the Cool Breeze instrumental, gets his exquisite Sonny Boy II style going on You Can't Come Back, and displays some original acoustic licks during the brooding, Someone, Somewhere (which also showcases the Kid's acoustic flair).

The rhythm section of J Hansen (drums) and Lorenzo Farrell (bass) rode along on Estrin's solo release and they prove adept at swinging the variety of rhythmic changes thrown at them--or hell, maybe it is they who set the vibes. Regardless, they prove to be quite the groove monkeys. Hansen is turned loose on rough-hewn vocals on his own, I'm Taking Out My In-Laws, which is right up the Nightcats' alley.

Can't say enough about Kid Andersen, though. This ex-Norwegian seems to pretty much play "in-the-moment", sort of like a twisted Hubert Sumlin might or Junior Watson and it ain't no telling where he's coming from, going, or ending up. Darned unpredictable. Then, again, so is Estrin--even when you think you know what he's all about, he'll pull his own stunts with a harp in his mouth. He plays outside of himself everytime he takes a solo and way outside of what a wealth of other harp can achieve. Hurray for this one!

Anyway---This may be my last post for awhile. I'm going to try like the dickens to finish typing my novel before leaving for a Grand Canyon/Bryce Canyon trip June 14-23, which should be a great ride. I'll see if I can stick something up here before pulling up stakes and heading that direction.