Until recently, jazz has been an idiom largely neglected by harp players, for several reasons. First, there haven’t been many players with the technical ability needed to play modern jazz, and until very recently, most people with that ability were interested exclusively in classical styles. In addition, the harp itself is not designed in a way that makes jazz easy to play. Jazz requires a smooth, legato attack, and accents in a jazz line can fall on any part of the beat. It’s hard to play the harp legato because of constant breath shifts, and even harder to accent freely. That’s why some very skilled harp players have said that they doubt that it’s possible to play jazz on the harp. Richard Hunter doesn’t agree. He majored in music at Harvard University before working with a variety of jazz and rock bands. He says of Jazz Harp: “It was meant to inspire harmonica players to reach for the same goals as their counterparts on other instruments.” Music, exercises, theory, and technique in the jazz and pop styles of Stevie Wonder, Toots Thielemans, Tom Scott, King Curtis, and others are included in this book/CD pack, along with note-for-note solos for chromatic and marine band harmonica.
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