Chicago Blues & Finnskogspols, with Richard Gjems
About the episode
This week I’m joined by Norwegian Harmonica player Richard Gjems.
I’ve been a fan of Richard’s playing for many years. He’s been one of the most respected harmonica players in the Norwegian blues scene for a long time, and since I started out in the blues myself, I quickly became familiar with his work there. But Richard isn’t just a blues musician, he has been working in pretty much every musical genre there is, and a lot of his style comes from mixing different genres and techniques in an original way.
Recently, I discovered that he has also been doing a good bit of research into the topic of Nordic Folk Music on the harmonica, and that was just the excuse I needed to invite him to the show! The harmonica has traditionally been a very popular and common instrument in the Nordic countries, largely because of how portable and inexpensive it was, but today there are very few Nordic traditional musicians treating the harmonica as a serious instrument.
Our conversation can roughly be divided in two parts. The first part is all about Nordic folk music on the harmonica. Different styles, techniques, players, recordings and so on. Richard also has a bunch of harmonicas with him, so he plays and demonstrates quite a bit during our conversation. In the second part, we go into all kinds of different topics like similarities between the blues scene and the folk scene, what it even means to play the blues in 2020, how to balance tradition and innovation, branding, and a bunch of other things. Classic podcast conversation in other words!
Links
Harmonica albums (Spotify links)
