East
Meets Blues
Harry Manx has been touring relentlessly, promoting his hugely popular CD Dog My Cat and will not have much of a break with this month's release of his follow-up, Wise And Otherwise (see review in John's Blues Picks)
In the 13th century, the Sufi poet and mystic Jallaludin Rumi wrote, "Please existence, play some song or something through me."
That quote begins the liner notes of Harry Manx's new CD, Wise And Otherwise, and is followed by Manx's response, "Me too."
Existence has been listening to Manx, a one-man band. After travelling the world as a modern-day troubadour for 25 years, he seems to have reached a creative peak, with Wise And Otherwise coming fast on the heels of last year's Dog My Cat, a well-received collection of original songs and covers.
Manx combines resonant acoustic blues with ethereal Indian ragas, the Mississippi Delta meets India. A riveting performer whose voice has been compared to Van Morrison's, he plays lap slide guitar, banjo, harmonica and the Mohan veena, a guitar-sitar hybrid.
On its release, Dog My Cat and Manx were lavishly praised by the critics. "Genius is lopsided. It's all music or all mathematics or all chess. With Harry Manx, it's all music," wrote Sandi Johnson in B.C.'s Daily Barnacle. After Roger Levesque of the Edmonton Journal saw Manx perform, he wrote: "When he opened the second set with a demonstration of his studies in Indian music and the Mohan veena…the air literally rang with golden slides and potent vibrations."
This year, Dog My Cat, on NorthernBlues Music, received the Canadian Independent Music Award for Blues Album Of The Year. In Australia, where Manx toured late last year, it's one of the most successful "folk" recordings of all time.
Manx, who was born on the Isle of Man, grew up in Toronto a musically precocious child. At eight, he taught himself to play Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" on the tennis racket. "I loved Jimi," he says. "Still do." Manx plays "Foxy Lady" on lap guitar and veena on Wise And Otherwise.
Manx, 47, started playing guitar at 15. He used to watch the jazz players at George's - from the sidewalk - and occasionally stuck his head inside Le Coq D'or, where he first heard Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. In 1974, as a sound technician at the El Mocambo, he saw such blues legends as Willie Dixon and Hound Dog Taylor. "I had the groove starting to sit with me," he says. "I began to play at home what I was hearing at the club."
In 1975, Manx began his 25-year journey, his first destination London, England. Appearing as a one-man band, he busked on the streets and in the Underground, then he played cafes in Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy and worked the European festival circuit until the mid-'80s. "I played Dylan, Marley, old folk stuff, some blues and originals," he says. "I was definitely into the one-man band sound. I wore a drum on my back for a few years. People loved to watch that act."
Manx did take a break from his European sojourn, spending time in India in 1979, drawn there by his love of meditation. "Just watching the grass grow and learning how to play the sitar" is how he describes the year he spent with his meditation teacher in Almora, a small town in the Himalayas.
In 1986, he returned to India for a longer stay, settling just south of Bombay (now Mumbai), and began touring Japan three times a year. For five years in the '90s, in Jaipur, he studied Mohan veena with the instrument's creator Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. A disciple of the sitarist Ravi Shankar, Bhatt won a 1994 Grammy along with Ry Cooder for the recording A Meeting By The River.
Manx once thought that Western audiences would be indifferent to Indian music, but "just for fun," he says, he began to mix it with blues. "It started to get more interesting for me and the listeners." He recorded two CDs in the '90s but he says "they're not that interesting, just stepping stones to greater musical places."
Manx's music, whether it's the blues or a raga, or a combination of both, has a spiritual quality, reflecting his adventures in meditation and the time he's spent immersed in Indian music. He's inspired by a few legendary Indian classical musicians, including Bhatt, Brij Bhushan Kabra, who plays an instrument that's similar to the Mohan veena, santoor player Shiv Kumar Sharma and flautist Hari Prasad Chaurasia - on whose latest release, Hari Nova, Manx plays.
With his return to Canada in 2000, Manx's 25-year world tour came to an end. He bypassed Toronto though, instead settling on B.C.'s Salt Spring Island. "I've come to appreciate many things which I used to take for granted after seeing the state of affairs of so many places on this planet," he says. "Those who can live here in peace are definitely blessed."
Some mornings at sunrise, when he's at home on Salt Spring, Manx (followed by the cat) takes his veena into a forest outside his house and plays, seated under an old cedar tree. "There in the context of nature every note played seems to sound a little bit deeper, a little richer," he wrote in the liner notes of Wise And Otherwise.
"The challenge is always to play a raga that comes as close as I can get to expressing all the joy, suffering, tears and laughter that most of us feel living in this troubled world. Music seems to make the hard times a little easier to bear (and the good times a little better too)."
- Ruth Schweitzer