Washington Post: ARTS EXPLAINED: More Than Meets the Eye, and Ear (part 1)

Reprinted from the Washington Post, January 1, 2012

ARTS EXPLAINED
by Erin Williams

Harmonica player Frederic Yonnet has been making music since he was a teen, and his talents have led him to work with artists such as Erykah Badu, Anthony Hamilton and Stevie Wonder. On Saturday, he’ll play at THEARC as part of “A Mighty Stream,” a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. that includes the National Symphony Orchestra and recording artists Shirley Murdock and Byron Nichols. Here, Yonnet discusses how his instrument can do more than the rest.

Also, read ARTIST EXPLAINED where Yonnet talks about Erykah Badu’s eye for the harmonica.

“My cousin on my father’s side gave me a harmonica for Christmas, and then I lost it. I had to find another one, and I discovered that there were so many different harmonicas. I started to do that crazy journey about finding the right instrument for the sound I had in my head. I really, really liked the fact that it fits in your pocket. It’s inexpensive — if you lose it, you can just buy another one and start over. And the lifetime of a harmonica is rather short, anyway. When you play it a lot, it will break on you, so you can’t really become attached to it like you will with a saxophone or a more expensive instrument. It’s convenient . . . people really like the idea of that little pocket friend.

“There’s one way to play the harmonica that is very basic and will give you some pretty fast rewards. If you play it in music that the musical structure is rather simple to access — like a blues song or a country song, bluegrass or a folk tune — you can just grab the harmonica and play three holes, and you will be in the key of the song, and you feel like you’re doing something. That’s what 99 percent of the harmonica players out there are doing on the diatonic harmonica, which is the one I’m playing. And then there’s this almost scientific group of nerds who have decided to just find the limits and expand them . . . which really [is] in the mind of the player more than in the instrument. It’s about expanding the limitations.

“I have learned [from Stevie Wonder] that an instrument doesn’t have to sound the way 99 percent of the people make it sound like. Stevie plays a harmonica called a chromatic harmonica, which is a harmonica that has two harmonicas built in one body. It has a harmonica in the key of C and another one in the key of C sharp.

“My instrument only has 19 notes on three octaves, so to create all the missing notes, I have to bend them. I have to artificially create those notes. It’s almost like playing a violin: When you look at the neck of the violin, there’s no frets on the neck, and you have to be extremely precise in the way you position your fingers. That would be the equivalent of what I’m doing.

“I definitely hope to expand the way that people think about the harmonica. Within that message, I hope that people will extend the way they think about things that seem to be limited in general. Because once again, the limitations are not in the instruments; they are not in the tools we are using. They are definitely in the minds. [With] politics around the world in such a conflicted state, we definitely need to be reminded of that. There’s always a solution, and it’s not only in somebody’s agenda. We should definitely keep our minds open. And if you don’t find the solution to a problem, you are part of the problem.”

NSO & NEWorks: A Mighty Stream

Yonnet will perform at 5 p.m. Saturday at THEARC Theater,
1901 Mississippi Ave. SE, the District. Adults, $15; children younger than 12, $10; seniors, $12.