Hugh comes to my assistance with kind words to assuage my wounded pride at having been passed over for mention in the local press - they mentioned all the famous-with-the-public guys, and Dave Barrett for putting it on, and Larry Eisenberg for winning the Saturday night contest, leaving me as the only unsung content provider. A trend understandable in the public press, but when it continues on harp-l . . . (Try the whine, I think you'll find its presumption amusing.)
Anyway, Hugh asks about the Golden melody with the suspiscious looking button. Well, when I went to the World Festival in Trossingen in '93, a Hohner type was trying to sell one of these to some French guys, and told them it was for "Wah Wah." A few weeks before, at the SPAH convention, some older chromatic players had returned some of these harps to Farrell in disgust - the button didn't make the note go up a semitone - - it made the reed bug out in some weird way, or had no effect at all.
Well, when I heard it was for Wah Wah, I had to step in, despite a 3-way language difference, and explain in my rudimentary and very bad French that what it did was to make the note go up - but only if you knew the technique - with examples. I then turned my beady eyes on the hapless non-harp-playing Hohner employee who had made such a lame guess as to the function of the Bahnson Overblow harps he was attempting to sell.
An overblow is produced by a draw reed responding to a blow breath and sounds a semitone above the draw reed's regular pitch - if you can get the blow reed to stop sounding and get rid of that horrible noise that an overblow attempt can produce. What the slide on Dr. Bahnson's invention does is to block off the blow reeds for overblows, directing all the breath to the draw reed, creating a much more stable environment for the overblow - it not only makes getting the overblow much more of a sure thing, it also makes the tone of the overblow stronger and makes it possible to bend it up several semitones. But it never caught on - the handmade prototypes were too expensive, Hohner tried marketing them in a tepid sort of way, then invited Dr. Bahnson to spend his own money to tool up. Rrright.
Hugh says I can overblow as well without it. But he heard me playing some state-of-the-art (at least for the time) Filiskos and Richard Sleighs in a smoke-filled room shared by Hugh, Norman Ives and David Michelsen at the 1995 SPAH convention. And a Bechstein makes even my piano playing sound good. The real test is when you sit down to plunk on that hacked-up schoolroom spinet over there. Of course then, you get into the Manly-ness of playing your harps "out-of-the-box" without any sissy alterations or setup. Catch fish with your bare hands. Suck bourbon through a lit cigar (if you suck hard enough, the cigar will stay lit while passing the bourbon through). Shoot pool while making love - in a Ferrari (an actual quote, that, from jazz drummer Tony Williams, in downbeat, ca 1968).
He [Lee Oskar] does however have an array of interestingly tuned harps he slips in there when you aren't looking, and not just the ones he sells.
I've caught Lee at that. He seems a little surprised when I mention it, and sort of shushes me when I ask about it out loud, saying under his breath, "I'll tell you later." He never does. That's OK; I can figure it out.
