Harmonica brings blues, inspires students

At one point during his hour-long set on Friday night at the Center for the Arts concert hall, harmonica player Mark Lavoie took a break from playing blues classics to speak to the audience about the current state of blues music. If you go to any blues festival and look at the festival audience, he said, the majority will be comprised of people over 40. He continued on to explain that that’s why he’s interested in getting youth involved in the blues.

“It’s important to preserve blues as an American art form,” Lavoie said.

He has a point. But as I scanned the faces of the 50 or so members of the community that assembled to hear Lavoie play, I could count on my fingers the number of people who weren’t going gray or balding. Granted, the CFA is not the most popular place to be for students at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, but it was nevertheless clear that the demographic of blues listeners in the Middlebury community is heavily slanted towards adults and seniors.

Lavoie’s performance was originally intended to be part of a music department-sponsored Blues Weekend that would include a performance by jazz guitarist Paul Asbell on Saturday night. However, after the Asbell concert was cancelled, Lavoie’s harmonica performance became a standalone event. As a result, Lavoie’s performance was the only exhibition of blues last weekend for interested Middlebury students.

For the most part, Lavoie put on an enjoyable, entertaining show. Equipped with a modest setup (two stools — one for sitting and one for his harmonica case, a microphone, two speakers, and a bottle of Vitamin Water), he took listeners on a journey through blues old and new, vocal and instrumental, original and borrowed. He played several songs by blues great Sonny Terry, along with others by Paul Butterfield, Willie Nelson and Billy Dixon.

I grew up listening to blues music, as my dad is an avid harmonica player himself. For the most part Lavoie’s live performance held up well against the harmonica players I’ve heard, as Lavoie had solid tone and breath control with the harmonica, producing sounds with pleasant pitch and timbre. He also displayed an impressive command of both the instrument’s history and its intricacies, as he delivered a combination music history lesson and harmonica clinic between songs, explaining how to make the mouth positions necessary to produce certain sounds. Although he threw in a few too many plugs for his private lessons (available through the college), he managed to keep the audience interested in his tidbits and asides.

After hearing Lavoie play an original blues song about coffee (containing the endearing lyric “Vermont coffee — it’s for friends”), there really was no denying that he is a talented harmonica player. However, large segments of his set felt repetitive — he changed keys and registers from song to song, but that didn’t stop each song from blending into the next. While that complaint might be more of a criticism of blues in general than of Lavoie’s playing, it was difficult to fully appreciate his skill when the song structure and sounds from tune to tune were virtually interchangeable.

The highlights of Lavoie’s performance, thus, were the details and artistic embellishments he appended to the presentation of his music. Lavoie’s hoarse baritone provided a nice counterpoint to the sounds of his harmonica, especially in his version of Sonny Terry’s “Long Way from Home” when he mixed short chords with feral yips and shouts. Lavoie also dropped subtle musical puns for those who were paying attention -— during one song he followed the lyric “Maybe he’s crying for you” with a long, mournful, wailing note that sounded almost like a sob.

Towards the end of the set Lavoie provided some intriguing insight about how to best play the harmonica.

“Play it the way you feel it,” he said. “Find a way to make the harmonica speak to you.”

Lavoie seemed to be searching for a way to encourage the younger members of the audience to become interested in blues by emphasizing the opportunities it provides for self-expression. Whether or not such a strategy in fact will interest more young people in blues remains to be seen. Regardless of any agenda Lavoie may have had, his mildly enjoyable performance spoke for itself and delivered an engaging, but not necessarily paradigm-shifting, evening of entertainment.