11 Question 4....Ken Deifik         

KEN: Hard to say.  Robert David Hall - the singer/songwriter I play for - goes back to filming CSI in the middle of July.  (He plays the coroner, Dr. Robbins, on the CSI show that takes place in Las Vegas.)  We'll have to see about playing weekends and when he gets breaks.  I've heard rumblings about some very interesting offers, but nothing I can talk about right now.

I did meet up with a few producers in Nashville who have since contacted me back here in LA about adding harmonica to their tracks.  I always like adding tracks in my own studio and sending them 2000 miles away for mixing.

I have a few accounts here in LA, and I'm talking with a few acts about signing on for shows.

I feel like I'm entering a songwriting cycle, which I'm delighted about.  I can force myself to write, and often have, but it's always fun to have a creative impulse grab you by the neck take command.  Lots of my friends are asking about when they can get new Ken Deifik music, and I'll have to make some before they can get it.

Q2: You have deep country roots...especially for a native NYer... having been a studio guy in Nashville for quite a few years. Who were your influences then and who are they now?

KEN: My country roots come from the fact that I have listened to and loved many different kinds of music ever since I was a teenager, so though I didn't listen to, say, Hank Williams or Muddy Waters since early childhood, such music has flowed through my inner life for 45 years at this point, and become who I am.  Most American musicians can now say the same thing - we didn't spend our childhoods with the kinds of music we love now, but as you grow up ALL American music comes to influence you deeply.  I'm always amazed and delighted by what has become the Great American Repertoire: that is, there is a whole huge subset of Americans, musicians and fans, who know and love great songs in all the genres.  This didn't used to be so.

The main influence of all the great artists who influenced me was that they each created their own musical universe.  I never wanted to learn to play other players licks except as they represented a jumping-off place.  I had no reason to believe that I could create my own musical universe, but I was young enough to where it never occured to me to entertain any doubt about the possibility of not succeeding - I just plowed ahead.  The great thing is when nobody tells you you can't do something.

As for harmonica influences, I love Sonny Boy 2, Sonny Terry and of course Little Walter.  I learned their licks when I was starting out in the middle 60's, but ALWAYS with the intention of inventing my own music, much as they had done.  Many of my earliest original licks came from trying to copy something they did, only to come upon an interesting new idea before I could ever execute the lick I had set out to copy.

I thought, and think, that Charlie McCoy is as good as any harp player I've ever heard.

Another guy whose playing I loved, and whose style I try to not play in, is John Sebastian.  I loved the Spoonful stuff, but his accompaniments from the middle-60's on all those great acoustic records is outstanding.  Very original, with astonishing taste, using harp the way great chefs use their spices.  He has a ravishing bending style.  I worked very hard ro copy it, and then made sure to never use it.

I liked Mel Lyman's playing with Jim Kweskin, which was also highly original.  But I loved Sebastian.  Imagine having the talent to invent a completely compelling harmonica style AND write timeless hits that compare favorably with the work of the Beatles and John Phillips - all in his early 20's.  Amazing. 

The first blues harp I ever heard was Baby Scratch My Back by Slim Harpo, which was a top ten hit in New York.  Unbelievable.  I still love Slim Harpo, though I never tried to learn his style.

Even when I was 15, I was very interested in adapting licks by musicians playing anything but harp.  I had a Lightnin' Hopkins disk, and I adapted many of his guitar licks to harp.  From the git-go I didn't want to sound like other harp players, but I knew I couldn't invent my own style without starting SOMEWHERE that already existed.  In the late 60's I developed tremendous speed, just about the time I became fascinated with Charley Parker.  I knew I wasn't playing bebop, but through his playing I came to understand what it would be like to play long, speedy, involved lines of straight diatonic blues, so I have to say that Bird was a big influence, even though to this day I do not play Jazz.

The one guy I made an effort to NOT listen to was Paul Butterfield, who was absolutely THE dominant influence on young white blues harp players in the 60's.  Everybody else in my part of Queens who made early progress on their harps basically mastered a few Butterfield licks.  At the time I didn't even like his style compared to Walter or Sonny Boy.  Now that I am not in danger of stealing his licks and thinking I am playing something original I can listen to Butter and admire his music - he was the real deal.

Q4: What or who's music have you been listening to lately, and as a follow up what do you like about it?

KEN: I love Les McCann, The Three Sounds, Odell Brown, Don Covay, Billy Larkin.  I've been enjoying Spider John Koerner, who I also dug as a kid.  Only now I realize just how brilliant and unique he is.  I love Duke Ellington, Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Poncho Sanchez, Jack McDuff, King Curtis, Levon Helm (and of course the old recordings by The Band), David Crosby (a great composer, though I love anything by CSNY in any configuration), Walter Wanderley, Hank Crawford, Junior Mance, Marcos Valle, Sivuca, Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, Edu Lobo, Heifetz, Glenn Gould, Horowitz, Ray Charles perhaps above all --- it'd take forever to list everyone whose music transports me.

Not long ago I wondered about the great musical artists that I was NOT passionate about.  I realized that perhaps the most important key for me is swing.  If music doesn't swing it usually fails to make an impression on me.  Some very, very popular and accomplished artists rarely incorporate swing into their music, and I therefore do not listen to them.  It is not a conscious decision on my part.  I naturally listen gravitate to music that gives me very strong feelings, and if the music doesn't swing I don't usually get much feeling from it.

Among harp players I listen to these days, I have accumulated a wonderful playlist of the early harp players, like DeFord Bailey, who I had the privelege of spending some time with back in the 1970's, Jazz Gillum, Jaybird Coleman, Gwen Foster.  Amazing players.  There's so much to learn from them.  It sounds extremely fresh to my ears, because even though I listened to them in the 60's, it never occurred to listen to them in order to learn from them. I just enjoyed their music.

Q4: You released an album last year "Music for Small Audience".  Every recording has certain parts of their work they love the most: what part of that album make you smile everytime you hear it (and why)?

KEN: I love every note of that recording, because I kept recording every phrase until each one knocked me out.  I play the guitar and the harmonica on it, and I sing the songs and wrote them, too.  Absolutely NOTHING on that recording was a compromise, because I wanted to know what my music would be like if I didn't compromise on ANYTHING.  When you collaborate the whole IDEA is to make beautiful music through compromise, and great collaborations make that happen.  Here it was just me, and I recorded and recorded until each note and phrase was - to me - alive with magic.

I love the solos on that album because I worked very, very hard to make sure that not only was the music alive and swung like crazy, but so that every single idea was something new, something I had never heard before.

When you play on other people's recordings you have to be entirely aware of the genre they are working within.  The country producer Tom Collins used to say that country records could contain no more than 5 percent NEW, and that applies to most pop and rock and roll recordings, too.  Back when you might be able to get radio play, the music you made had to fit into very strict guidelines in order to be considered.  That's the nature of popular music, after all.

But I had no thought of getting radio play with Music For Small Audience.  I was very interested in seeing what would emerge if I just went for being completely creative every micro-step of the way.  I required that the music be easily approachable, easy to understand and I hoped I could make tracks that people would really enjoy --- but they had to be completely new to my ears. My favorite feedback is from fans who enjoy the music AND the quality of newness.

Importantly, I felt that I had something to prove to myself after more than 40 years of playing - that I could invent bar after bar of really enjoyable harmonica music, with nobody else's vision to accomodate.  (I'm delighted to accomodate someone else's vision, I just wanted it all to be on me this time, and I'm glad I went for that.)

To finally answer your question, in the end I guess I love it when I am listening to the CD and one of the solos surpises me and makes me think "I did THAT?  Dang!"

Q5: Wrong part of L.A. is, in my opinion, a really strong cut on that album.  What inspired that tune?

KEN:  Thank you.

My method as a songwriter is to brainstorm a bunch of strong first lines, often 20 or more over the course of a few intense hours. 

I'll then choose the one that excites me the most with its possibilities.  That's what happened in Wrong Part Of LA.  I wrote "The cops came knocking at 4AM, they knocked til the door came down."  I got a kick out of the understatement.  Also the rhythm of the line jumped out at me, and it felt like it promised a rhythmically entertaining three or four minutes.

So I started extending the idea and the picture got grimmer and funnier with every line - I love that kind of contrast - and when I hit the place where the payoff line would go the line just popped out: "We walked out into the morning light in the wrong part of LA."  I laughed for ten minutes, both because I truly loved the understatement, and because I knew I could write 30 verses without a problem, just sketching in the darkest aspects of the city I love in an amusing way.  I don't know if I wrote 30 verses, but I really like to severely overwrite and then choose the best work and shape a song around whatever emerges, and the week I wrote verses for that song was particularly ecstatic.

The music: As with all my songs, I don't write the music with any song in mind.  I just sit and invent guitar parts and licks, and the ones that wound up in Wrong Part were fairly new at that moment and when I finished the lyric I thought the guitar part might fit.  It did, so I developed the melody around the lyric and the guitar part.  This is standard operating procedure for me, though I love writing by any process that gives me something I like.

Your question was about what inspired me to write that song.  This is all to say that nothing ever inspires a song for me.  I cannot write a song "about" something.  I can't start by deciding to write a song on a certain subject.  For instance, I'd love to write a love song for my wife Becky, but it'll have to emerge unintentionally.  All my songs emerge like that.  The main rule: I have to be the first one who is surprised by them, line by line, lick by lick.

Many years ago my closest friends became very, very successful songwriters.  With their encouragement I learned how to write a song around a clever hook, and I can do that pretty well, but it bored me to tears, and I finally stopped writing songs completely for many years.  When I decided to start creating Ken Deifik music, I developed my First Line First process because it leads to much less predictable results, even if it's also much less commercial.  I'd wish it were more commercial, but at least I'm always surprising myself.

My friends who write hits are able to use and re-invent the commercial forms with great brilliance and magic.  I suppose that if I hadn't gotten bored by the endeavor I might've broken through to that kind of writing, but I was in my 20's, looking for creative adventure more than anything else.

The only time I was able to work on somebody else's music in a purely creative way, without thought to radio play, was when I recorded with Laurie Anderson back in the late 70's.  She was mainly interested in making something new - in 2010 she's still doing that.

Q6: What have you been woodshedding on lately?

KEN:  I'm working out in first position, third as a minor, fifth as a minor, ninth and the beautiful twelfth.  Of course I still do most of my woodshedding in second position, because it offers infinite new ideas and I know a vast terrain in that position, so I have more places to explore even further.  I practice finding new ways to switch between extremely simple rhythm bits and sudden elaborate melodic explosions.  That's the best way to describe the style I've been playing in for the last few years, and it also appears to be an endlessly surprising approach.  The thing I wind up practicing is letting go and just being in the moment, but within this two-part approach.  I practice this kind of pure but structured improvisation, and I am always practicing SWING, and improving my swing and my time with a metronome and practice tracks.

I often work to invent a new rhythm that I have never played on harp before, the harder the better, and then practice it until it's easy, natural and unforced.  I'll just bomb along, da capo, with my recording device taking it all in.  Maybe I'll do this for 20 minutes.  Then I'll listen to what I did and often I'll discover something I've never layed before, something that sounds really interesting to me - engaging, pretty, impossible.  I'll extract that from the recording and learn it and practice it and suddenly I have a new weapon in my arsenal.  This is a very good way to invent new ideas.  It's a great thing to woodshed.

Q7:  In a lot of your work, it almost seems you don't want to be flashy, you focus on rythym and chords rather than the solo moments.  Am I imagining that or what?

KEN: Let me come at this from an angle you might not expect.  I am a writer, wrote in Hollywood for years, thought about every aspect of storytelling almost constantly for an entire decade.  So storytelling now infuses my whole approach to playing.  One of the key elements of storytelling is making sure you unfold the story in a very deliberate and crafted sequence that engages, makes sense, and when the audience is ready, surprises the heck out of them.  Finally, a story MUST have a payoff.  This approach is  fully available to the music-maker, and in fact the best music FEELS like it is telling you a story, even when you can't quite say why it feels that way.

Hence, I start a part with very, very simple bits, mainly chorded or single-note rhythms because simple rhythms are very easy for any audience to understand.  The prettier the rhythmic figure, the more they'll enjoy it, too.  So my approach is to seduce the audience with a pretty rhythm, but once they're on my side I'll throw in some neat, simple fills.  And when they least expect it I'll definitely explode with some long melody lines and a bit of flash.  Audiences love all of it, but you have to present these elements like a storyteller.  The big explosions are payoffs, they pay off the simpler stuff.  I'm not the only musician who thinks in these terms, but I came to them on my own. I improvise musical stories.

So there's no question that I am constantly setting things up with simple, pretty rhythms, and they very well may seem like the main ingredient of my playing, but the rhythmic bits are in the service of the melodic bits and vice versa.

Q8: What advice do you give the hot shot harp player who is looking to move to Nashville or NYC or LA in search of studio work?

KEN: I can't say I have any.  There are far fewer opportunities for session cats than there used to be - the business has changed so radically recently.  It's always changing, but the recent changes have presented a great challenge to anyone wishing to make a living in music.

The smartest thing you can do is play at least one other, more commonly useful instrument, at a high level of profficiency.  You have to wonder if Toots Thielmans or Charley McCoy could have made a living if they only played harmonica.  Tommy Morgan is maybe the only guy I can think of off the top of my head who is a fantastically successful studio cat JUST on harp.  A totally brilliant musician.

I won't name names, but many spectacular session guitarists have gotten lots of work as very bad harmonica players because they were hired to play guitar on a session and the producer suddenly decided to lay in some harp, and many guitar cases house a few harps just for this situation.

The best advice is work really, really hard every day to become an incredible player.  Then, even if you can't support yourself as a harmonica player you'll at least live the life of a musician on a real musical adventure.  That's a good life.

Q9: What's your gear of choice lately....harp, Mic, Amp, any effects?

KEN: I'm an acoustical player.  I generally play on whatever mic is put in front of me on a live gig.  I may start looking for a really great mic to use as an accompanist, but over the years I've found that there are so many variables in live performance that having a sensational mic isn't really the key to magic.

I have a special combination of mics that I like to use in the studio.  I've given away this secret before, and won't again, but I will say that I always prefer a combination of mics to using just one in the studio.  I do not own a harp amp, never have used a single effect.  I admire the players who have a broad knowledge of these subjects, and can make good music with these tools, but I'm pleased to try to make strong musical effects with whatever equipment I am given to use.

I have absolutely no skills at customizing harps.  I'm not proud of that.  But by the same token, I have a very strong, experienced ear and play in tune if the harps in my case are pretty close to jake.  I'm always shaping the intonation on my instruments while playing.  All of the modern harp players that I admire do that, no matter how customized their harps are.  Some probably aren't even aware of how much they're doing that, but when you're playing with guitars and pianos and synths, you have to constantly accommodate everyone else's intonation.

For years I used Huang diatonics.  They were by far the cheapest and yet gave me all the control I needed.

I few years back I bought a few Suzuki Firebreaths, and I love them.  They cost me about ten times as much as the Huangs, but it really is nice to not have to fight the instruments to get everything I'd like to get out of them.  But I could easily get by with cheap harps in a pinch, and keep some in my harp case to this day.

If a great player plays a certain harp modified by a certain craftsman, and he makes strong music with it, I'm down with that.  But when a mediocre player makes a big deal about equipment I feel like telling him that all the gear in the world will not make him a real musician.

I don't know at exactly which stage gear becomes important, but it's worth noting that Little Walter may very well have used a different mic and amp at every single one of his sessions - he seems to have made do most of the time and the amazing results speak for themselves.

Q10: You also play guitar really beautifully. Was that your first instrument?

KEN: Thank you.  The first instrument I played was my dad's Echo harp when I was four years old.  I took a couple of years of piano before I turned 10.  I got serious about harp at about 14.  Got a banjo for my 16th birthday and a guitar when I turned 17 because I lied about being able to play one at a job interview - and then I got the job.  (The job was at a Catskill hotel.)

I've played with dozens of the greatest guitarists in America and have no illusions about my technical abilities on the instrument.  However, with that clarity in mind, I like to think I've constructed a unique and useful guitar style based as much on optimizing my technical limitations as on my musical sense.  I'm glad you like my playing.  I'm very proud of it.

Hopefully, it's proof that you don't have to be a chops meister to produce something like real music.

Q11:  Without question the biggest thing most players have shared with me in interviews about what new players need to know is…after blowing good clean notes and knowing how to bend notes…Rhythm, staying in the groove.  Agree? Disagree? Why?

KEN: Absolutely agree.  But this is a big subject.  American dance band music, which is most of what we play after all, is built on grooves.  If you want to be a killer musician you should study the subject of groove deeply.  Learn how to build a rhythm part based on the holes that the other guys are leaving, and which definitely participates in making a compelling rhythmic whole.  This is a lifetime's work by itself, and most harp players haven't the slightest idea that it's one of their main tasks. 

The better you know and play grooves and rhythms, the better your melodic playing will be. 

On this note, it should be said that every player who wants to become a good musician should work with a metronome every day.  I used to think I had very good time, but when I got my first metronome, in my late teens, it seemed to suddenly go faster and slower when I was playing.  It sounded perfectly even when I wasn't playing, so I knew that my brain was playing tricks on me, and certainly messing up the real musical time that I was expressing.  The beauty of practicing with a metronome every day is that after a while your brain keeps good time, and then great time.  When you keep great time your rhythmic work will sound incredible, as will your melodies.  Young musicians talk about their wish to sound like a professional.  The key ingredient to sounding professional (though not the only one) is very, very strong and accurate time.  Get that and it will set you apart from the wannabes.