BY ERROL NAZARETH
Every culture, it seems, has at some point in its history disowned an instrument and then embraced it fully. Take, for example, the 12-string tiple in Colombia.
"Musicologists never took note of its existence as a different instrument and have always referred to it as a sort of 'small guitar,'" tiple virtuoso David Puerta told me a few years back. And for the longest time, the exquisite-sounding santoor was considered too folksy for the classical Indian music world. Pandit Shivkumar Sharma single-handedly changed that and now he's considered a god. Interestingly, the mainstream in their respective countries only got hip to those instruments after both Puerta and Sharma developed new ways of playing them. Here in the West, players of some instruments are still fighting to get respect. As familiar as we are with images of Neil Young and Bob Dylan blowing harmonicas, the harp is still fighting for love.
"When I tell people I play the harmonica, they ask what else I play because to a lot of people it's not a real instrument," harp wiz Carlos del Junco says. "Part of my mission, aside from playing music I love, is to make people aware of it."
Many will tell you that if there is one person in this country who is doing a great job of raising the profile of the harp, it is del Junco. The evidence is in his virtuosic playing, his eclectic recordings, live shows and his winning of the Maple Blues Award for Harmonica Player of the Year four times in the past six years.
Blues Mongrel, his just-released fifth album, puts him in a league of his own -- not just among harmonica players but among his blues contemporaries in Canada. The scene here, for the most part, is boring as a Canadian winter and equally hard to endure. Clichés abound and few are as adventurous as del Junco.
Blues Mongrel couldn't have been christened better. Blues bumps with ska on "Skatoon," gets Latin-ized on "Let's Mambo" and "Our Man Flint," and generally goes down roads it's never travelled before.
The album never sounds contrived nor does it ever sound like someone trying really hard to separate himself from the rest of the pack.
"Too many people are doing the same-ol'-same-ol'," del Junco says. "I hear things a certain way and I like eclectic music. It's like taking the best of all the things I like and putting them on a record so every song is a tasty morsel even though it might be in a slightly different genre.
"I love taking things and mixing them up," he says, with classic understatement. "On [1995's] Just Your Fool, there's a Little Walter song on there, a real old Chicago blues song called 'Just Your Fool,' and I had this idea to turn it into a New Orleans shuffle.
"And my last record [2001's Up and at 'Em], which was jazzier and two-thirds instrumental, was really all over the map, whereas this CD is saying, 'I've returned to my blues roots or this is as close as I'll ever get because I never really like to do things straight up.'"
For this outing, del Junco surrounded himself with some heavy hitters, including Kevin Breit, one of this country's most innovative guitarists and someone del Junco calls "ridiculously amazing."
"A lot depends on the players you have," del Junco says. "We went into the studio basically without knowing the material. I had all these ideas, I had some sketches for some of the songs and we'd rehearse them and just put them down. And that kept it fresh."
Del Junco -- who says he's "not as much of a songwriter as I am an interpreter" -- intends to "to get more into songwriting rather than taking other people's tunes and trying to do something with them.
"I sometimes joke that I'm the Anne Murray of the harmonica because I don't think she ever wrote a song in her career yet she's a household name," he says, laughing. "If I could elevate the harmonica to such a lofty status, I'd be thrilled."
