JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Blues Wax - Part 1 & 2 Date: 06/2009 Writer: Stacy Jeffress

Part 1 & 2

Editor's Note: As president of the Northeast Blues Society, I would always tell the artists we sent to The Blues Foundation's International Blues Challenge that being in the contest is almost as important as winning. I feel the same about the Blues Music Awards. This year Billy Gibson won Blues Harmonica Player of the Year, and he deserves it if for no other reason than his enthusiasm and his absolute joy of performing. That said, Jason Ricci, who was nominated in the same category, is changing the definition of Blues harmonica in a way arguably as profound as Jimi Hendrix's voice on guitar did 42 years ago. In doing so, Ricci is enlisting new, often younger, fans to the base audience, and he's doing that from a position that throws out all the rules of stereotypes. Stacy Jeffress' interview with Ricci offers amazing insight, and Ricci's bald honesty in his answers is what I would expect from him because it mirrors his art. The conversation between Jeffress and Ricci makes for exciting and important reading. 
I became a fan of harmonica sensation Jason Ricci before having heard any of his music. Ricci's tale of an identity crisis generated by his struggle to fit into the African-American Blues tradition and his subsequent immersion into, and recovery from, substance addiction is compelling.

The 34-year-old harmonica sensation was a nominee for the 2009 Blues Music Award for harmonica player of the year. He transcended the dark times and found his own musical voice with his band, New Blood, which expresses itself through Jazz- and Punk-inspired riffs but always comes home to the Blues. Blues traditionalists may not know how to take some of Ricci's music, but considering the journey he's taken to get here, we can trust Ricci to be our tour guide through new musical territory and to return us home safely, enriched by the experience.

Jason's 2007 release, Rocket Number 9 on Eclecto Groove Records (a division of Delta Groove), explored sounds from the sweet and sublime "Sonja" to the irresistible swing of "The Blow Zone Layer" and then propelled us past the pull of Earth's gravity on the title track. This is not your grandma's Blues, but you might catch her tapping her foot to the beat.

Generous by nature, as evidenced by the numerous instructional videos he has posted on YouTube, Ricci recently spent two hours on the phone with me.

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: Tell me about your YouTube videos. I am fascinated by the amount of time you spend sharing your knowledge and love of your instrument with other folks.

Jason Ricci: It's really interesting that was the first question you picked. I think that the emergence of YouTube as a form of instruction is fascinating, and the amount of people in all genres like athletics and art and music and cooking that have gotten fame by doing nothing besides YouTube. I intended to reach a broader audience by making those videos. We already had videos of the band up playing, and they were getting okay ratings and hits, but nothing like the instructional videos.

A friend of mine had started posting instructional videos. His name is Adam Gussow [of Satan and Adam, with Sterling "Satan" Magee]. He was also one of my harmonica teachers. He started making these videos and they started going good for him, and then he started making money off of them, asking for donations and getting PayPal. I didn't want to do that because I already have a career as a performer and what I wanted to do was attract people to other our YouTube videos of us playing and get people out to the shows.

I started having a lot of people at my shows who had never ever been to a bar to see live music before. Their favorite harmonica players were not guys like Little Walter or Kim Wilson or Charlie Musselwhite; their favorite guys were not the most popular harmonica players. Their favorite guys were me and Adam Gussow and Ronnie Shellist and Christelle Berthon. Of those four players, I'm the only one who really plays gigs. The rest just sit at home and maybe play locally here and there, but they make videos, yet these people are famous to these people at home.

I do genuinely love the instrument, and I was trying to fill a niche on YouTube that I felt wasn't there. Adam's and Ronnie's videos were all very basic and I wanted to make a video that was more for the intermediate or advanced guy that maybe already know some or all the stuff that those guys were saying but was really looking for a different way of learning, not only some of the more advanced techniques but some more personal approaches in terms of musicality and training, scale exercises, and how to practice, those kind of more disciplined, a classical approach to learning which I felt really lacking from our instrument. I still feel to this day, this is the only instrument, harmonica, in the world where I hear people consistently saying over and over, "Don't practice, don't learn scales, you're going to ruin your playing" because they're afraid it's going to take the soul out of it.

BW: I hear a lot about young people not being attracted to the Blues and more of us middle-aged types go to the shows, but you could bring in this whole young generation through this medium.

JR: That's absolutely correct. It's been my experience that the demographic that I speak of that comes to these shows. They don't go to see Blues shows, they don't go to see other Blues harmonica players unless those guys are doing something, and they also feel it's cool like Jason's giving us something for free. Let's give him something back. This is all he wants. And it is all I want!

Then once they come to the show, they see and feel the energy of the music. For me it was the same thing. My mom brought me to see James Cotton when I was 15, and I went just to hear the harmonica. We got there and heard the whole thing. I fell in love with the music. It wasn't long after that, maybe a year, when I was playing records that had nothing to do with harmonica and everything to do with Blues, like Albert King and B.B. King, Muddy Waters, he had harp on some of his stuff, but it wasn't why I was buying it. I was buying it 'cause I loved the music. And getting out to that club and being part of that and that whole thing with the audience and the energy of the audience and the energy of the performer, that circle that goes back and forth. Once those kids experience that, they're hooked for life. Not just on Blues, hopefully on Blues, but also on live music and what that's like to go out there and see that.

BW: I think you have 80 YouTube videos posted. How many subscribers?

JR: I think they're almost up to 3,000. I recently got a computer that I can take on the road, and I can film videos. So recently I've been putting up a lot more videos from the road. My new series of videos is called "Ricci Road Videos" - I go out and interview harmonica players and other interesting people.

I think it's an exciting medium. It's free. It's also relevant to mention how much work it does overseas because the record companies only reach so far. I think Delta Groove does a decent job getting our record to England and Belgium and a few other countries, but the thing is I'm reaching people in Vietnam, I'm reaching people in Laos, people in Pakistan that otherwise would never hear my music.

Everybody all the time is like, "Oh man, the world is in such rough shape. It's falling apart." Far be it from me to have the answer, but what I would suggest to people is, I'm not sure that's really true. What I know is true is that we have more access to what's going on in the world everywhere all at once with the click of a button. That's bad and good.

It's easy to see that there are wars everywhere and crime everywhere. That's always been going on. We just didn't know about it because we didn't have this amazing tool. And this amazing tool can also let us know what good things are going on all over the world. When I'm looking for information about something, I'm almost always going to YouTube first even before Google, because Google's just going to direct me to YouTube. If we want to figure out how to make brownies from scratch, you can see it. Anything you can think of - almost - somebody has a video up there of how to do it and tutorials are the most active videos viewed, because people want to feel like they are getting something out of their time in front of the computer.

Unfortunately, there's that whole Internet mentality where people think they can replace their real life experience. What they don't understand is that most of the people making these videos didn't learn from them, from the Internet. They learned from real life experience, from getting out. The reason we have stuff to talk about on the videos is because we had to get this information the hard way, and it's so much more than the information. It's the how do you do an overblow, how do you play a Sonny Boy solo. It's the process of going out and performing and seeing performers and talking to them face to face and being six inches away from your face and blowing the lick right into your ear, and you going, "Oh, yeah, okay." That stuff gets in you. The Internet is great stuff, but it's not the answer to everything.

BW: You have mastery of playing the instrument, and then your technical knowledge is astounding. Where did you learn all of the technical part of playing?

JR: I would say I only have a rudimentary understanding of music theory. Compared to most harmonica players, I'm a Julliard graduate [but] compared to a first-year college student on any instrument who is studying that stuff, I am well behind them. I couldn't even tell you how many sharps and flats are in each key. I've learned everything with what's called the Nashville Number System, which is a musical shorthand still based in theory and based in scales, predominately based off of the C major scale and then all forms of shorthand are really referring to variations of that. I have a slight working knowledge of most chords that I come in contact with in Blues and some Jazz and all Rock and Folk. "Working knowledge" meaning I can tell you what notes those chords are composed of in numbers. I can't tell you what notes they are literally.

I have an understanding of most of the seven modes that exist and what their point is, and this may be gibberish to some of the readers, but it's really all rudimentary. I learned all of this knowledge by being in contact with musicians that needed to communicate with me and had to find a way for me to understand what they were talking about beyond playing me the lick and then waiting for me to figure it out by ear.

The other thing is that I enjoy a lot of other music besides Blues, and from those other music genres there is less of a...well, Blues is a largely improvised type of music, and it's also a music that is composed of quite a bit of machismo, meaning that there is very little communication about what is going to be played prior to it being played for a variety of reasons. A lot of white people playing that music have this idea that the older black performers didn't communicate, they just sat down and did and that's how it goes. That may be true in some cases, but I find that hypothesis disturbingly racist.

There have been many black performers that are old and certainly fit into the old black Bluesman stereotype that I've hung around with whose working knowledge of chords and scales and chord structure is pretty extensive, and they were pretty smart, smarter than me, and knew more than I did. I find that whole idea a little racist and simplified, and again it's the idea that on some level knowledge is going to hurt you. There's this notion in Blues music that knowledge will hurt you, that it will somehow make you less soulful, that the more you know about what you're playing the less there is a chance that you're going to play from your heart. That is absolutely preposterous. It's not true and it's not backed up by history.

When you move into other genres of music, that communication increases because of the lack of that stereotype and that pretense. You don't see that pretense as much in Rock music; you don't see it as much in Country music; you certainly do not see it in Jazz music. Jazz music is an incredibly soulful form of music, yet has performers that play all technical with no soul, and very little technique with tons of soul, and in the middle just like every other form of music. But one thing that's in common with all of that is that Jazz players are very hip and very cool to practicing and to knowing what's going on behind them. There are all these people out there that would say that scales are bad for you and knowledge is going to hurt you and any type of formal training is negative.

Just tell me that Miles Davis's "Autumn Leaves" didn't have any soul. Then listen to it and write me an e-mail and say that solo was overthought. This guy's a genius, and he still plays with tons of soul and knew everything that he was doing, and it didn't hurt him. I love technique, and I love theory, and learning it isn't going to make you a great player, but not learning it will hurt your chances of being a great player.
In Part Two of a three-part interview, Stacy Jeffress discovers that this lad from Maine whose father never opened the CDs his son gave him learned to "overblow" on harp from the late Pat Ramsey in Memphis and never looked back. If you missed Part One in last week's issue, click here to read it in our ARCHIVES, if not, here we go...

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: Did you have formal instruction in any instrument?

Jason Ricci: I had formal instruction in harmonica and guitar, but it didn't really include much theory. I learned the layout of the instrument - where the notes were. I was taught right from the very beginning about people like Howard Levy, who's a really exciting Classical, Jazz, and Blues, and World harmonica player. To my ears, he's the best harmonica player alive, hands down. I never went to school for it. I did do a semester of Jazz improvisation that I signed up for down in Florida, and I got quite a bit out of that course.

BW: How old were you when you started on guitar or harmonica, or just playing on your own?

JR: 14

BW: What was it about 14?

JR: I guess I just wanted to be in a band. My friend had a band and I thought it was cool, and I wanted to be in it. I wasn't a very good singer, so I was starting to get benched a lot because they would write a song, and they would sing the songs. I had nothing to do. So I wanted to be able to do something. So when I wasn't singing, I could still be on stage. I got into playing harmonica and guitar. Then I kind of gave up on guitar. I still use it to write songs, but I gave up on it 'cause harmonica came so naturally to me, and I got good so fast. There weren't a lot of people doing it, so it was not very competitive, and I did have access to some wonderful teachers over the years: [Maine harmonica player, the late] D.W. Gill and Adam Gussow and then most recently, of course, the late Pat Ramsey, who was my biggest influence.

BW: You were born in Portland [Maine], you go to Idaho when you were 18, at what point do you go to Mississippi - in the '90s?

JR: I moved to Memphis in 1995 to study with Pat. I did that for a year, waited tables, and then got a job playing with Junior Kimbrough, and his kids mostly, and then I'd occasionally play with Junior. I'd play with Junior every Sunday at the juke joint [Junior's Place in Chulahoma, Mississippi]. I'd play with his kids in between then and at the juke joint. I also got to play a lot with R.L. Burnside, which was really cool.

BW: How did you know about Pat to move to Memphis to study with him?

JR: I was just driving home one year from college to Maine. I decided to stop in Memphis and I went to Beale Street. I was walking down the street and I heard this amazing harmonica coming out of this club and it was this kid named Billy Gibson, and I was like, "Holy crap!" [Gibson won this year's BMA for harmonica player of the year] He was my age, the first time I'd ever seen a harmonica player my age, everybody was 50 and 40, I was 20. I was like, "You're incredible," and he was, "You think I'm good? Wait till you hear the next guy." I'm like, "Who's that?" Pat got up and played. I never heard harmonica like that ever in my life! Sounded like a guitar player. After he got down, I went up to him. He was really nice, approachable, very humble, and cool. I said, "I'm in college, I'm from Maine. I was going to go back to college, but I'm just going to go home and work and get enough money and move back here and get a job and go to every one of your gigs."

So I just moved back to Memphis. I went to every one of his shows for a whole year and hung out with him, "How do you do this, how do you do that?" Probably annoyed him quite a bit. And then he bestowed some other knowledge on me that I really didn't want to hear at the time and later ended up more or less saving my life. 

"I say if little Walter had known about it,
 he would have done it."

BW: Pat Ramsey passed while you were in Amsterdam [in November, 2008]?

JR: The day before I left. I'm actually a little upset about the whole [thing], not about Pat's death really but, you know, it's frustrating for people that are fans of somebody to see them die, and then suddenly [they] get a lot of attention because they're dead. But this is the first time I've ever seen somebody die and get less attention then when they were alive. 

BW: You quit college to move to Memphis and watch this guy for a year and learn from him for a year. Was your family supportive of this choice?

JR: Not really. My mom pretty much told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, but they weren't going to pay for it, which was cool. My dad, on the other hand, it's hard to say how involved he was or if he even really knew what I was doing. Every time I would make a CD, I would send it to him. Then I'd come home a year or two later, and I'd find the CD unopened. He really never paid much attention to what I was doing. Of course he had a lot of advice about how to do it.

BW: He didn't open your CDs? That is so sad.

JR: Yeah, it is. He was a business man himself and pretty self-absorbed dude, unbelievably intelligent and articulate and a very popular figure in Maine culture. He just basically told me, "I don't care what you want to do. Just don't ever change your name to Blind Lemon Leaddick." And I still agree those are good words to live by. He told me to be myself and not try to be something I'm not, like an old, black Mississippi Blues guy. And I've done that. I've adamantly done that. And it's probably cost me some fans. I think that the fans that I've garnered by being myself are worth more and have more integrity themselves. I think the reason there are a lot of young kids who don't dig this music is because of the fact that Blues is often associated with show.

BW: "Show?"

JR: Yeah, show. There's an act there by a lot of the white performers. They may be excellent musicians, but there's a talk and a kind of inflection in their voice that does not actually come from their background. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to stand up there and wear a suit. You read the article in [Blues Revue]...I'm not from Mississippi, I've never picked cotton.

BW: You said, "I've never 'reckoned' a day in my life," my favorite line anywhere.

JR: There you go! That's the first thing I learned living with R.L. [Burnside] and Junior was that I was never ever going to be one of those guys. They grew up with that music. It's part of them from the time they were little kids, it's their heritage, it's their grandfathers', their cousins', their second cousins', their great-grandfathers'. There are bloodlines that go to [Mississippi] Fred McDowell, that go to John Lee Hooker, that go to Muddy Waters. My bloodlines do not go to those people. I have no history of that. I stumbled upon it accidentally. No matter how much I dream or wish, it's not where I come from. I can dig it, I can talk about it, but I'm never going to be it.

BW: I have what's a really dumb question, but I want to know, what exactly is "overblowing"?

JR: That's not a dumb question. The diatonic harmonica is the small harmonica that most Blues players play. There are two different kinds of harmonicas. There are more than two, but there are two main kinds of reed harmonicas. There's the diatonic harmonica and the chromatic harmonica. Chromatic is a word that refers to all twelve tones of the scale. In western music we have twelve tones that we identify as being notes. In eastern music there are more. A piano has eighty-eight keys, repeated over and over again. A diatonic is limited, that's what the word means. That means there are less than 12 tones. That's what the majority of harmonica players play.

Most of the people that play Blues on chromatic harmonica play the chromatic diatonically, meaning they don't use the twelve tones. They play the music in one, two, or maybe three different keys. And they use the little button on the side that gives them all twelve tones but use a few of them. So overblowing is in essence the opposite of playing the chromatic diatonically, it's playing the diatonic chromatically.

There's a player who came along named Howard Levy, he had been in a band called Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. He's on their first two albums. He rose to popularity through that band, however he had been around for quite awhile and has been doing some recording with some other bands, but he remained in obscurity in the harmonica world as well as in the musical world. He had developed this technique from my understanding sometime in the '70s. The technique came to the forefront of the musical world at the release of these albums with Bela Fleck. From the world's perspective all of a sudden we heard one of those little harmonicas, the Blues harp, playing all twelve tones of the chromatic scale whereas we had been told that it was impossible - the notes weren't there, and they didn't exist. So Howard called the technique "overblowing," and the name was coined.

It is the position of the mouth, the embouchure, that forces a hole to pop into that other note. You hear harmonica players talk about bending notes; it's completely different. It's popping that note which previously was thought to do nothing other than play that note into another note, the note that it lands on happens, by the grace of God, to be that missing note in every circumstance. It's really proof of the existence of God in a nutshell. Adam Gussow was to my knowledge and to my ears the very first Blues player to implement it, and it came out on a record called Satan and Adam Harlem Blues. I got the record, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing because it wasn't a chromatic harmonica. It was a diatonic harmonica. They have two very distinct sounds. Here are these notes that don't exist coming out. I'm like, "What is this?" I find out it's this technique that Howard implemented.

I started learning it, and then this other player came into my understanding, Carlos del Junco from Canada. This guy was playing them all over the place. This guy's amazing! So I start studying these guys, Adam Gussow, Howard, and Carlos del Junco, and I start mixing it in with the stuff Pat taught me. And then next thing you know, I stopped sounding like a generic copy of Pat. Between the study of scales, harmony, chord structure, and this new technique, I was able to get out from underneath the cape of Pat Ramsey. I was a carbon copy up until 1998.

Now I could suddenly play all of these cool Jazz songs that I'd heard. In the past I would say, "I'm sorry I can't play that. The note's not here. It doesn't exist." Then, all of a sudden, I was able to say, "Oh yeah, sure. What note is that? No problem!" I could play anything the piano played, anything the guitar played, anything the violin played. I just had to figure out how to do it. It's all owed from my end to Howard.

There are really only three of us that are doing this on a wide-scale level. There are hundreds of kids all over the world, if not thousands, who can do the technique, mostly kids that are attracted to it 'cause it's new and it's exciting and that's what kids want to do, things that are new and exciting and advanced and difficult and limitless. That's what attracts youth. But there's not very many people doing it musically, and on top of that there are very few people with record contracts on the road doing it. So, it's me, Howard, and Carlos del Junco.

There's a whole mess of harmonica players that don't believe still that the technique has any relevance. "Little Walter, he didn't play that way, so, why would I?" I say, if little Walter had known about it, he would have done it. He'd have been all over it, especially if it was changing the way the instrument is played, which it is. Who wants to be in a band with somebody and have them say, "I can't play that." I don't want to be in a band with that guy. I want to be in a band with a guy who says, "Yeah, sure." It's a really exciting time for the instrument. Being alive now is what it must have been like to be an alto player when Charlie Parker was alive or be a tenor player when Coltrane was alive. To be living at a time when this guy, Howard Levy, revolutionized the instrument.