The Tao of Harmonica

Ancient Wisdom For the Modern Harmonica Player

The greatest improvisers have one thing in common: total surrender to the moment.

In Jazz, Country, Blues, or Reggae, the best soloists approach the art of improvisation through effortless attempts to be present. Music can be thought of in many ways. Some refer to it as a river, as a landscape, as a chessboard, and more. There’s no wrong answer, and we’re all saying the same thing: it’s a vehicle for existence and expression.

Many of the professional harmonica players I talk to nowadays have their own approaches to soloing. I believe the most powerful (and perhaps most practical) is attempting not to attempt: to play without expectation.

Beginner harmonica players struggle with soloing. It’s the mountaintop of our instrument. Yes, there are players who excel at playing incredible rhythmic lines, are great accompanists, or play beautiful melodies. However, in the beginner's mind, when hopping up on stage at a local jam, the creme de la creme of bragging rights on our humble instrument comes from smooth soloing.

Speaking for myself, I remember being a sixteen-year-old kid and thinking that I was the greatest soloist the harmonica had ever seen. Thankfully, that was just ego and a lot of hormones talking. It takes a long time to develop into a good improviser, let alone a great one. In my years of playing, I have discovered that a great solo is simply a captured awareness of what is going on around you, and responding to it. As the soloist, you reflect back to the people on stage what they are playing.

The other players create the canvas, and you merely fill in the blanks.

The Taoists have a principle called Wu Wei, which is translated as “effortless action” or “action without striving”. This approach is rooted in their belief that humans should align with the universe, rather than trying to fight against it. It is not a discipline of inaction, but of allowing space for action. You allow things in your life to unfold as they naturally do instead of insisting that the world (or you) must be a certain way.

As the great Charles Bukowski once said when boiling down his life’s philosophy:

“Don’t try.”

When it comes to the harmonica, many great players will say they play from a mindset of blankness; they allow their ideas to be expressed not by insisting that they appear from their subconscious, but by allowing room for their automatic functions to apply what they have learned to the musical situation they find themselves in. This is why the process of breaking down solos, scale study, and music theory study is so important. By creating a more robust vault of subconscious ideas, you have more fuel when engaging in a flow state action, such as soloing. Think of it as having more words in your vocabulary. Great writers don’t stop and check the spelling on each word as they word vomit on the page; they just let their ideas flow with the words and sentence structures they have already ingrained in their minds. The prior study lays the groundwork for the present flow.

Forced intention is one of the easiest ways to play a shit solo. The Taoists believed that the easy route to an unhappy life was trying to force outcomes. Again, it's not that you don’t take action in your life; it's that you don’t believe the outcome has to be a certain way. Attachment to an outcome creates a detachment from present ideas.

Beginners make the mistake of putting pressure on themselves to play something great. One of the hardest lessons for beginner and even intermediate players to grapple with is that sounding good on this instrument is a hell of a lot easier once you stop thinking it has to sound a certain way.

As soon as you stop believing in perfection, you allow room for imperfection.

Imperfection creates cracks; flaws in the player that become exposed. It’s from these cracks that we begin to rebuild ourselves as greater players.

As Alan Watts said:

"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music, we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present."

.Improvisation is the art of spontaneity. It is the belief that there is no imperfection we cannot learn from. It is being comfortable with mistakes. The greatest practitioners have understood the Taoist concept of Wu Wei not as some ancient wisdom, but as a way of existing in a musical context.

It’s like a magic trick: we conjure musical lines out of thin air and manifest them in our reality. For the beginner harmonica player, this becomes the hardest skill to learn, and why wouldn't it be? We are like musical magicians; Harry Houdini with a harmonica.

My advice is this: the next time you go up to take a solo, don’t think so much about what you should play and focus instead on being in the moment of discovery.

The musicians around you are constantly creating; respond to them, listen to them, and have a good time. Above all, don’t expect reality to be as good as what you imagine.

That dream solo doesn't exist: it’s a fiction we create to distract us from responding to the music all around us.

The more you believe life or a solo must be a certain way, the more you set yourself up for disappointment.