The Unbearable Lightness of Wind
An Interview with Kim Field

he characteristics of wind are varied and constantly changing: harsh, gentle, punishing, playful, stormy, threatening, light, piercing or subtle. And harmonica, asserts harp historian, writer, teacher, and musician Kim Field, is a wind instrument.

     A native of Seattle, Field was born in 1951 (“I’m a senior citizen now”) and played trumpet in the school band for years before he noticed trumpet might not be the best instrument for popular bands. Just then he discovered the Eagles Auditorium, a cavernous dancehall in downtown Seattle that hosted acts touring north from San Francisco’s Fillmore auditorium. He and friends saw the “Byrds” there in 1968 and went back for seconds – Albert King. Soon after, his life changed when he saw James Cotton’s band with Luther Tucker on guitar. “Cotton was such a physical performer…he’d do somersaults, and he walked right by me blowing harp. That sound really did it! I was just totally galvanized.” The next day Field bought a C Marine Band and played every song he knew in G until he figured out cross harp on his own. A momentous discovery of Paul Butterfield led his musical interest to Muddy Waters and he “never looked back.”

     In ’69 Field moved to New York to attend college and fell into an acoustic blues group, the “Stingrays” which lasted for three years and played some of the same gigs Mark Wenner (the “Nighthawks”) played under the name of “B-Town Slim.” Another schoolmate, Dave Waldman (now a favorite Chicago harper) was also a harp enthusiast and eventually turned Field on to Paul Oscher, formerly of the Muddy Waters band. Oscher introduced Field to tongue blocking and his playing took a giant leap.

     After college in 1975, Field returned to Seattle and knocked around in various bands before packing his grip and setting out to see the country. He landed in Austin, TX two years later, just in time for the explosion of Antone’s blues club and the now-famous Austin music scene. There he spent a year and a half sitting in with a dazzling array of blues artists and befriending Kim Wilson (“Fabulous Thunderbirds”). “Kim was a huge influence on me. I woodshedded a lot and my playing went up a few notches though I never hooked up with a steady band there.”

     Field eventually left Austin to play the San Francisco Blues Festival and return to Seattle. There his old “Stingray” guitarist, Louis Erlanger, had returned from a highly successful run with New York’s “Mink DeVille.” The two formed a new group, the “Slamhound Hunters” and enjoyed great success until Erlanger moved back to New York.

     In 1990 Field followed his wife to Massachusetts where she worked at Holy Cross. Kim’s interest in harmonica and the history of its players had already pushed him to interview several diatonic musicians and consider writing a book. “The fact that there was no book on the harmonica was appealing, but to tell you the truth, the whole thing was just a cheap excuse to call up my favorite harp players…other than the fact that I was a harp maniac weirdo. Then people started calling me up a couple of years later going, ‘Where is that thing?’ and I kinda felt compelled to finish it!” The result was the popular collection of histories and stories about the harp and its masters “Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers” (Fireside, Simon & Schuster, 1993).

     Back again in Seattle in 1996, Field settled with his wife and two kids and now works in the publishing business. Despite the challenges of his job and an active family life, Field maintains a fierce dedication to all matters harmonica and hopes to release a CD in the near future. In May 2000 he released an updated version of “Harmonicas, Harps, & Heavy Breathers” (Cooper-Square Press, 2000) with 30 additional pages describing what has gone on in the harmonica world since 1994: “the highlights of each style.”

     Both books are eminently readable and chock full of information on history, techniques, styles, and masters of harmonica as well as interviews with notable craftsmen in the genre – a treat for players and non-players alike. Field in conversation is at least as engaging as his book and before our talk ended, I believe we both could have been described as “wind instruments.”

CATHI: You worked a lot out for yourself by playing harp didn’t you? At least until you met Paul Oscher in New York? Were there other harp teachers back in Seattle?

KIM: There were just so few in the whole country that played that kind of harp that well and that legitimately. I think I knew all eight of them (laughs). People were teaching each other back then. Paul taught Jerry Portnoy and Rick Estrin and it was all sort of building. Now…well, it’s incredible to me how it’s grown. Before you could explain cross harp or tongue blocking to people and their eyes would just bulge out of their heads (laughs). In New York every time I ran across Dave Waldman, he’d be twice as good as the time I heard him play before. I asked him “Dave…what are you eating for breakfast!?” And he’d go, “I been hanging with Paul Oscher, you gotta get to him.” So I caught him at a gig and asked for lessons. He’d had about a pint of gin and told me to go to hell. So I told him to go to hell too (laughs), but I finally got a lesson from him in a music store, which consisted of him blowing into my face for about an hour. But it was great. I got to hanging with him at his apartment later.

CATHI: So you got the lessons?

KIM: Well “lessons” would kind of be an exalted term for what went on. I paid him twice I think. (Laughs) But you know he plays fantastic piano…learned things from Otis Spann(!) and he is as good at the Muddy guitar stuff as anybody. Anyway, I was a pucker player and he showed me tongue blocking which messed me up because I had to learn all over again. So I kind of developed a hybrid style of playing.

CATHI: I’ve heard that it’s best to have facility with both pucker and tongue blocking.

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. You should have as many arrows in your quiver as possible.

CATHI: Let’s go right to tone…

KIM: I’m obsessed with it. It’s to the point where I actually had to force myself to learn riffs. I get so minimal sometimes, I have a tone devoid of content. But the thing about tone is, if you know two riffs they’re gonna sound good. If you know one hundred thousand riffs with no tone, what’s the point?

CATHI: I particularly wanted to ask about that because Mark (Dufresne) told me once you changed his whole trip by referring to harp as a wind instrument.

KIM: I just relate to wind instruments. Don’t have the brain-to-hand synapses for guitar, but I really do wind instruments. Ninety percent of harmonica players don’t even know they’re playing a wind instrument. I mean they don’t approach it in any kind of a way that you would approach a more legitimate wind instrument like a saxophone or trumpet. And audiences will take crap from a harp player they would NEVER, EVER tolerate for a minute from a sax or trumpet player.

CATHI: Sad, but true.

KIM: A lot of people just basically hyperventilate through the instrument. They don’t have sustain; they don’t lengthen their notes out; they don’t have phrasing; they don’t back up their tone from the diaphragm; they don’t think about how it all works. Most of them just think about “this note followed by that note, followed by that note.”

CATHI: When you play are you thinking about all that stuff or do you have automatic consciousness of all those elements from woodshedding so long?

KIM: Well, it needs to be automatic. But modern musicians have tape recorders! It makes you want to quit (laughs), but you get better a lot faster if you force yourself, on a regular basis, to tape, because it doesn’t lie. The great thing about the harmonica, unlike the trumpet or saxophone, is you have to learn circular breathing. You can breathe while you’re playing so there’s no excuse not to play long lines…play fluidly. You can always catch your breath with a well-placed blow note or something. There’s a lot involved in tone. Your diaphragm is involved, how you breathe, phrase, and then all that stuff that happens from the lips on back, from behind your teeth, what you’re doing with your tongue and the sort of shape you make inside your mouth. The whole idea, I think, is to open up. Pucker playing puts you in the direction of a tight, pinched sound with edgy vibrato and single-note emphasis. And to me tongue-blocking is sort of now you’re finally playing a tune on the piano—whereas pucker you’re trying to play a right-handed kind of thing. There are note guys and tone guys, and I’m definitely in the tone category. Hopefully you get a nice blend—that’s the ideal. The pucker thing—the John McCoy or Howard Levy thing with single notes is the polar opposite of a mindset from the blues approach. They are just two different things and I go with the blues way. Not so much because I’m brain dead and can’t get out of 1955; it’s just that’s the sound that made my ears explode when I was 17 and that’s the kind of tone I want to hear out of the instrument.

CATHI: You played with Big Walter and he’s the king of tone ain’t he?

KIM: Man! After that gig I walked the streets ’til dawn, I was so totally flipped out! I have no photos, but I don’t mind because it’s totally etched into my brain. I once asked Wolf to give me harp tips (laughs).

CATHI: Did he?

KIM: I had just learned tongue blocking from Oscher, so I was OBSESSED with it. I just had to ask Wolf if he tongue-blocked. So I went up and stammered out my question. Wolf just very slowly started at my feet and worked his way up to where he finally locked eyes with me and you know he was the most intense physical being I’ve ever been in the presence of. He didn’t say anything for about 15 seconds, till I was ready to cut and run. Then he goes, “The Wolf don’t tell nobody his tricks. You find out, the Wolf don’t mind, but the Wolf ain’t gonna tell you about it.” (Laughter) So anyway, I got imprinted with a really big sound. The blues thing is really a sound you can apply to all kinds of stuff. In fact one thing that needs to happen is for people to apply that sound to other types of stuff.

CATHI: That’s interesting because you know we’re forever arguing about where the blues is going. If you ask the old timers, they all think it’s got to evolve as long as you stay with the feeling.

KIM: Yeah, look where Muddy came from—Stovall Plantation—and what he did with it. If you just talk about the blues harp thing as a sound and not a technique, it’s real sloppy. It’s not single-notes—it’s big fat, clusters of notes. It’s a lot of octaves…a lot of big blends. And there’s the tuning—there’s “equal” and “just” tuning. I think equal’s the one where you tune to the note, and just is when you tune to the chord. The Marine Bands tend to be tuned that way, and that’s why they sound good in the blues context, because they sound good with clusters and octaves.

CATHI: In addition to your weird obsession with PLAYING the harmonica (laughs), you must have learned an awful lot from your book research and interviews didn’t you?

KIM: Oh man…and the really cool thing about harmonica players too, is how ornery they are. They are like lone wolves; there’s no textbook for having a career as a harp player. You can play it so many different ways and use so many different approaches and almost everybody (at least until recently) was self-taught.

CATHI: Individual explorers huh?

KIM: Yeah. When I first met Big Walter, he gave me his address on Wentworth St. in Chicago and said if I showed up he would tell me everything he knew for $20. He had an x-ray machine in his apartment and he would put his head up to it so I could see everything.

CATHI: (Laughter).

KIM: (Laughs) Now there’s a guy who really put a lot of air in the harp. The other thing everyone does these days is play way too hard. A year and a half ago I spent some time with Little Walter (records) again and I was totally struck by how quietly he plays. There’s no way you can play like him unless you play at a moderate volume and let the mic do the work. I’ve known Kim Wilson for a long time, and one of the few times I talked with him about mic technique he said there’s a certain amount of air you need to put in there to make it come alive—to get the resonance. And not too far after that, there’s a cutoff threshold where the more air you put in, the less you get out of it. That’s the main problem harp players have: they not only don’t know they’re playing a wind instrument, they’re abusing it by blowing so hard all the time. It’s a shame. The real struggle for them, I think, is to train their guitar players! Most are completely untrainable (laughter).

CATHI: In your new book, I’m glad you mentioned the new breed of people who work on harmonicas, because that’s such a big part of the harp world these days isn’t it?

KIM: Yeah, thanks to Rick Epping at Hohner—we should unveil a statue of him somewhere because he’s a fantastic player and a real Marine Band devotee who convinced Hohner to retool at their factories—you can actually play Marine Bands out of the box now. It’s thrilling. So when Marine Band wasn’t so great, we gravitated to people like Joe Filisko (custom harp maker) in the interim, and he’s still the – I don’t know what you’d compare him to in another field.

CATHI: Elvis (Laughter)?

KIM: (Laughs) Maybe. He’s just ridiculous! He opened my eyes and ears. I didn’t know anything about reeds and things before Joe. I think during the War a lot of guys on chromatic harp were forced to learn because harps were scarce. Guys like Charlie Leighton and Blackie Shackner really know how to work on instruments.

CATHI: Charlie’s bad.

KIM: When you write about musicians, you try not to use words like “best” because it’s not appropriate or true, but CHARLIE LEIGHTON IS THE BEST CHROMATIC PLAYER THAT EVER LIVED!

CATHI: (Laughter) Don’t mince around Kim; spit it out!

KIM: He can play anything! His classical recordings, which he put out on CD, are unbelievable! I mean he didn’t play classical music until he was 60! It’s frightening. But his thing is jazz—he’s like the Coleman Hawkins of the harmonica. I really have to watch it with Charlie; he moves me so much I have to go in a corner and compose myself!

CATHI: I love it…Well it seems you’ve been really lucky in befriending most of the great players around nowadays. You’ve come up with Kim Wilson, been through the great days of Antone’s in Austin with Steve and Jimmy Vaughn, played in front of some irreplaceable masters, learned from Oscher, and been pals with Portnoy, Estrin and God knows who all. Not bad.

KIM: I’ve been really lucky. I realize a lot of the younger players these days never even saw Muddy. It makes me feel really grateful.

CATHI: Any words of advice for blues harpists?

KIM: Well, the thing I’ve always loved about the blues is when it’s done right, there are a lot of holes in there. Don’t throw in a bunch of stuff to fill them in. And the ballads separate the men from the boys. Lots of notes just sound bad in a ballad. And then you have to have tone to support more of a subtle musical concept and most guys don’t have tone—that’s where you find out. That’s where you find out the guys that can’t sustain the note for 10 seconds and don’t have any phrasing. I always tell my students: think of it like you are singing it. You would never chop it up the way most harp player chop up their lines. No weird little burst of notes, separated by pauses—too bizarre.

CATHI: Don’t get too windy at any time, in other words, huh? (Laughs)

KIM: Yeah (laughs), but then, I have no problem talking as you might have figured out!

copyright © 2000 Cathi Norton. All Rights Reserved.