Harmonica...funk?

January 27, 2015 9:12 AM

I really like songs like this and this and this. Who/what else should I be listening to?

Aside from "music from tv shows about drugs, apparently."

posted by phunniemee to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Sonny Boy Williamson 2
He is generally considered on the greatest blues harmonica players.
Chess records made some great recordings of his music
posted by Flood at 9:32 AM on January 27, 2015

Little Walter is another great Chess Harmonic...ist. I first heard Trombone Shorty on another David Simon show; it seems sort of parallel to the harmonica funk.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:39 AM on January 27, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks! I should clarify. I'm not looking for harmonica or straight up blues, I'm looking for whatever this specific genre is that I don't know.
posted by phunniemee at 9:39 AM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, you've got three very distinct genres going there, is the thing. The first is pretty straight (but slightly funky) blues harp, the second is basically krautrock (Can's "One More Saturday Night" or Kraftwerk's "Ruckzuck" with some basic blues harp thrown in), and the third is a generic be-harmonica-ed soundalike of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side."

I don't really have any suggestions for you aside from "google funky blues harp," but, well, I'm just gonna link the Philharmonicas playing Powerhouse, because I suddenly have the flimsiest excuse to do so.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:23 AM on January 27, 2015

Your second and third links remind me a lot of Captain Beefheart's harmonica playing. E.g., Plastic Factory and Diddy Wah Diddy.
posted by bricoleur at 1:01 PM on January 27, 2015

I don't really like G. Love and Special Sauce, but you might.
posted by box at 1:32 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Those Son of Dave tracks kind of remind me of the tin-can rumbas of Tom Waits. No harmonica, though.
posted by hydrophonic at 5:12 PM on January 27, 2015

The first of those reminds me of bit of RL Burnside's album Come On In. That one drives blues purists crazy, as it's really a bunch of remixes of Burnside's country blues as done by Beck producer Tom Rothrock. But I like it. Try this one: Been Mistreated.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:56 AM on January 28, 2015

To me it sounds like in all three of your tunes, the tempo and rhythm and bass lines and horn/harmonica parts pull pretty heavily from the New Orleans brass band style (although I can't really find a link that demonstrates that at the moment.) But of course the artists you've linked to aren't brass bands, so I don't know if you've really gotten hold of a specific genre so much as just found some (more-or-less) "rock/blues" tunes that have a common influence. Which is to say I don't know if you're really going to find bands that actually sound like this most of the time, but you might be able to locate quite a few individual songs from a variety of artists.

Seconding that Tom Waits tends to draw from this well fairly often.

Maybe try some of the New Orleans funk of The Meters, or some of Dr. John's tracks.

I want to say that a variety of Southern roots-rocker/Americana/modern blues musicians (like James McMurtry) have also had tunes with these elements, but, again (sorry), I'm not really finding any specific links.

Maybe your best shot is to seed a Pandora station or a Spotify playlist with some of these songs/artists, and see what the matching algorithms come up with.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:27 AM on February 15, 2015