I did a 190-mile round trip almost to Land's End last night to meet this phenomenal harmonica player from Brittany and play with him at the session at The Star in St Just. He pulls his harmonicas to bit, retunes, rebuilds, breaks all the rules! He was playing what he called his "prototype" octave harp which he's built out of two Hering chromatics (he has to buy two harps for that, but with a lot of deft retuning he gets two octave harps out of them!) The Irish player, Mick Kinsella, already has one of Jean's "prototypes." It looks like an ordinary chromatic until you realise that, er, the button is missing!
He gets an incredibly powerful and deep growly sound from it, very similar to a box with two voices an octave apart. I'm going to get him to build me one! He seems to know every tune that anyone starts (unlike me, sitting there like a wallflower half the time
) and his tone and projection can cut right through the usual session cacophony. He's made some recordings and I think his best is "Harmoníca, Víolon" which is reviewed briefly
here. Great bloke, superb musician - and we're playing again at the Tinners in Zennor on Thursday!
