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David Barrett (musician)
David Barrett (born February 6, 1973) is an American blues harmonica player, author and teacher. Early years Barrett started playing the harmonica at age fourteen. At age sixteen Gary Smith took Barrett as a private student. Smith also introduced Barrett to the local blues jam scene and even invited him to participate is some of the local harmonica blowouts. At age eighteen Barrett was studying music theory in college (De Anza College in Cupertino, California) and started teaching private harmonica lessons at local music stores and institutes in the California Bay Area. Since 2002 he has been teaching at his own School of the Blues in San Jose. Author Barrett has authored a number of harmonica instructional books with Mel Bay Publications. He also runs a website, BluesHarmonica.com that teaches harmonica and is the founder and head instructor of Harmonica Masterclass Workshops. Barrett also teaches, judges and performs at events around the world, such as Hohner’s World Harm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Howard Levy
Howard Levy (born July 31, 1951) is an American multi-instrumentalist. A keyboardist and virtuoso harmonica player, Levy "has been realistically presented as one of the most important and radical harmonica innovators of the twentieth century." In 1988, Levy was a founding member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, with whom he won a 1997 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for the song "The Sinister Minister". He also won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in 2012 for "Life in Eleven", a song written with Béla Fleck for the Flecktones' album ''Rocket Science'' (2011). He has worked with Arab-fusion musician Rabih Abou-Khalil, Latin jazz saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, Donald Fagen, and Paul Simon. Music career Levy was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied piano and pipe organ. For two years, he went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and participated in the jazz band. He is the Harmon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rusty Zinn
Rusty Zinn (born April 3, 1970 in Long Beach, California, United States) is an American electric blues and reggae guitarist and singer-songwriter. Zinn released six albums between 1996 and 2009, on Black Top, Alligator, Bad Daddy, and 9 Above Records. He has worked with Mark Hummel, Kim Wilson, Larry Taylor, and Sly Dunbar. Biography Zinn was raised in Northern California, and was introduced to music via both his mother's and brother's record collections. He bought blues recordings himself, intrigued by guitar players such as Robert Lockwood, Jr., Eddie Taylor, and Jimmy Rogers. Having practised the drums as a youngster, Zinn purchased his first guitar at the age of seventeen, and then witnessed Luther Tucker perform in concert with Rogers. Within twelve months, Tucker invited Zinn onstage and gave him some guitar playing advice. By the late 1980s, Zinn was playing in several Bay Area bands, and had backed both Rogers and Snooky Pryor. A spell in Mark Hummel's backing band Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nick Moss
Nick Moss (born December 15, 1969, Chicago, Illinois, United States) is an American Chicago blues and electric blues musician. He has released thirteen albums to date, all on his own label, Blue Bella Records label. He has played with Buddy Scott, Jimmy Dawkins, Jimmy Rogers and the Legendary Blues Band. More recently he has performed fronting his own group, Nick Moss and the Flip Tops until 2008 and then shortening the name in 2009 to Nick Moss Band. The music journalist Bill Dahl stated that Moss possesses "mastery of the classic Chicago sound." Biography Moss originally learned to play the bass guitar. He joined Buddy Scott's backing band when he was in his late teens. He played with Scott for two years. After that he played with Jimmy Dawkins. By 1993, he had joined the Legendary Blues Band and played bass on their final album, ''Money Talks''. The band's frontman, Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, suggested Moss should switch to lead guitar, and he spent over two years there be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Junior Watson
Junior Watson is an American jump blues guitarist and singer. Career Watson is a West Coast blues guitarist. He was a founding member of the blues band The Mighty Flyers and, starting in the early 1980s, he performed with the band for a decade. He also performed with Canned Heat throughout the 1990s. Watson has performed as a backing musician in performances and recordings for a number of blues musicians, including Big Mama Thornton, George Smith, Jimmy Rogers, Luther Tucker, Charlie Musselwhite, Mark Hummel, John Németh, Michael "Pink" Arguello, and Kim Wilson. Discography As leader * ''Long Overdue'' – 1994 (Black Top 1099) * ''Back To Back'' – 1998 (Crosscut CCD 11059) with Lynwood Slim * ''If I Had A Genie'' – 2002 (Heart & Soul 10799) * ''Jumpin' Wit Junior'' – 2012 (Regal Radio Records 10038) * ''Live From Outer Space'' – 2012 (Bluebeat Music 103) with The Red Wagons * ''Nothin' to It But to Do It'' – 2019 (Little Village Foundation 1033) Session works (in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dennis Gruenling
Dennis Gruenling is an American electric blues harmonicist, songwriter, record producer and radio DJ. He has released seven albums since 1999, with his most recent being 2016's ''Ready or Not''. His contributions to other musician's albums has included stints playing the harmonica, audio engineering and mixing, production and album sleeve artwork. Gruenling has also been employed for over a decade as a DJ on WFDU college radio. His dynamic harmonica playing style has been inspired variously by Little Walter, Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet. Gruenling, who plays both chromatic and diatonic harmonica, has been awarded the title of 'Best Modern Blues Harmonica Player' three years in a row by ''Real Blues'' magazine. In 2007, Adam Gussow described Gruenling as having "limitless potential". In 2019, he won a Blues Music Award for 'Instrumentalist - Harmonica'. Biography Early days Gruenling was born in New Jersey, United States. He acquired his first harmonica in his teenage years ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lazy Lester
Leslie Johnson (June 20, 1933 – August 22, 2018), better known as Lazy Lester, was an American blues musician who sang and played the harmonica and guitar. In a career spanning the 1950s to 2018, he pioneered swamp blues, and also played harmonica blues, rhythm and blues and Louisiana blues. Best known for regional hits recorded with Ernie Young's Nashville-based Excello Records, Lester also contributed to songs recorded by other Excello artists, including Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Slim, and Katie Webster. Cover versions of his songs have been recorded by (among others) the Kinks, the Flamin' Groovies, Freddy Fender, Dwight Yoakam, Dave Edmunds, Raful Neal, Anson Funderburgh, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds. In the comeback stage of his career (since the late 1980s) he recorded new albums backed by Mike Buck, Sue Foley, Gene Taylor, Kenny Neal, Lucky Peterson, and Jimmie Vaughan. Biography Leslie Johnson started playing the guitar around age 11 and began performing in his t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carlos Del Junco
Carlos del Junco (born May 17, 1958) is a Cuban-Canadian harmonica player. Career Del Junco was born in Cuba and moved to Canada with his family in 1959. He started to play harmonica when he was fourteen. He graduated from Ontario College of Art where he majored in sculpture. He plays a ten-hole diatonic harmonica using an "overblow" technique developed by Howard Levy of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. In the 1980s, Del Junco performed with Eyelevel, Ontario College of Art Swing Band, and for six years with the rhythm and blues group the Buzz Upshaw Band. In 1990, he formed the blues/jazz fusion band the Delcomos. He has recorded with Marcel Aymar, Cassandra Vasik, and Oliver Schroer. In addition to leading his band the Blue Mongrels, he has worked with Kevin Breit, Bruce Cockburn, Holly Cole, and Kim Mitchell. He wrote music for ''Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing'', a play by Tomson Highway that was produced in 1991. At the Hohner World Harmonica Championship in Germany ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rob Paparozzi
Robert Steven "Rob" Paparozzi (born October 14, 1952) is an American Grammy-nominated harmonica player and vocalist from New Jersey. In the early 1970s, Paparozzi fronted the Psychotic Blues Band, a blues rock group which played extensively in the New Jersey area, opening several times for Bruce Springsteen. He has toured with Dolly Parton, George Jones, and has contributed to works by Whitney Houston, Judy Collins, Cyndi Lauper and Bobby McFerrin, among others. He is a former member of The Original Blues Brothers Band and is the singer for the reformed Blood Sweat and Tears. When not touring with Blood Sweat and Tears, Paparozzi leads his own band, the Hudson River Rats, which sometimes features famed funk drummer, Bernard Purdie. The Hudson River Rats have released two CDs, ''First Take'' (1994) and ''Get It While You Can'' (1999). In 2009 Paparozzi released a solo CD entitled, ''Etruscan Soul''. In 2019, Paparozzi continued to tour Steve Cropper and the Blues Brothers Band a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snooky Pryor
James Edward "Snooky" Pryor (September 15, 1919 or 1921 – October 18, 2006) was an American Chicago blues harmonica player. He claimed to have pioneered the now-common method of playing amplified harmonica by cupping a small microphone in his hands along with the harmonica, although on his earliest records, in the late 1940s, he did not use this method. Career Pryor was born in Lambert, Mississippi, United States. He developed a country blues style influenced by Sonny Boy Williamson I (John Lee Williamson) and Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck Ford "Rice" Miller). In the mid-1930s, in and around Vance, Mississippi, Pryor played in impromptu gatherings of three or four harmonica players, including Jimmy Rogers, who then lived nearby and had yet to take up playing the guitar. Pryor moved to Chicago around 1940. While serving in the U.S. Army he would blow bugle calls through a PA system, which led him to experiment with playing the harmonica that way. However, most historians cred ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sam Myers
Samuel Joseph Myers (February 19, 1936 – July 17, 2006) was an American blues musician and songwriter. He was an accompanist on dozens of recordings by blues artists over five decades. He began his career as a drummer for Elmore James but was most famous as a blues vocalist and blues harp player. For nearly two decades he was the featured vocalist for Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets. Biography Myers was born in Laurel, Mississippi, United States. He acquired juvenile cataracts at age seven and was left legally blind for the rest of his life, despite corrective surgery. He could make out shapes and shadows, but could not read print at all; he was taught Braille. He acquired an interest in music while a schoolboy in Jackson, Mississippi, and became skilled enough at playing the trumpet and drums that he received a nondegree scholarship from the American Conservatory of Music (formerly the American Conservatory School of Music) in Chicago. Myers attended school by day and at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Oscher
Paul Allan Oscher (February 26, 1947 – April 18, 2021) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist. Primarily a harmonica player, he was the first permanent white member of Muddy Waters' band.Norman Darwen, "Obituary: Paul Oscher", ''Blues & Rhythm'', No.360, June 2021, pp14-15 Background Oscher was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was married to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, from 2001 to 2011. Career He first began playing harmonica at the age of 12. His career as a musician began at the age of 15 when he played for the musician Little Jimmy Mae. He named John Lee Williamson as a major influence. Oscher met Muddy Waters in the mid-1960s. After Big Walter Horton failed to show up for a gig, Oscher played harmonica as a member of the Muddy Waters Blues Band from 1967 until 1972. He was the first white musician in Muddy's band, and lived in Muddy's house on Chicago's South Side, where Oscher shared the basement wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
