An education in humility

My friend Agustin has been educating me on the wonderful world of the harmonica in Spain. This week I saw a young guy named Antonio Serrano at this terrific jazz club called Jamboree. It was like seeing John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard in the early 60's. This guy is absolutely one of the greats on the chromatic harmonica. Ripping through everything from straight ahead bebop to nailing the neuvo tango of Astor Piazzola, I was completely beside my self watching this unassuming chico. It was also a pretty good review of how my progress on this instrument is going. Perhaps like the night when Bill Frissell saw John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia at the Hollywood Bowl and decided that he would need to take a different direction on his chosen instrument or hang it up, I too got sort of a wake up call. I probably won't be playing "Flight of the Bumble Bee" anytime soon (and to be honest I can't imagine why I would want to) but I maybe able to develop a nice, round tone and make the few notes I can manage to get out count.

I'm 3/4 of the way though "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." It 's interesting how just taking a little time to focus on just one thing can create other opportunities in seemingly unrelated areas. I was pretty much stuck a quarter of the way though after getting the first few bars pretty quickly. After getting way too frustrated I decided that I needed to:

1. Listen to the piece very carefully, over and over and over.

2. Get the score and...

3. Figure out a way to translate the notation to harmonica tabs (squiggly lines and arrows that tell you when and where to blow and suck).

Well amazingly I realized that I didn't have a copy of Mingus' original version. so off to I Tunes I went to contributed 99 cents to Mr. Job's king of the world campaign. Listening to the tune I realized that somehow I had taught myself the first few bars in the right key. Hmmmm... How do da brain do such things? It was great playing along with Mr. Mingus and the boys for the first part of the tune but as soon as the notes started going up I had to sit down and shut up.

OK time to invoke part 2. Except that for this tune I couldn't find any sheet music for free or other wise on the Internet. Hmmmm... I put a call out to my cyber harmonica buddies. Boom! A file and a chord chart. Thanks guys! Anyway to make a long story short I found another program made by these crazy French brothers that automatically spits out tabs for wierdo harmonicas like mine as well as Latvian Spike fiddle, and Ullean Hose Clamp. 20 bucks! Amazing what's out there!

So now I have a path for the last indecipherable bars of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." Now I am on the way to refreshing my ability to read music. Now I have a program that makes anything, including "Flight of the Bumble Bee", a tab. Now I know where to focus my attention, it's not speed and virtuosity, it's heart and soul. Or is that sole?