WHOEVER
SAID that nothing good ever came out of getting stuck in traffic should listen to Thomas Colvin. "I started teaching myself harmonica at stoplights. You could carry the thing around so easily. When I got to a stoplight, I'd get the thing out and I would practice."The year was 1971, and the stoplight autodidact's Eureka moment came with autobahn force: "I was driving my car down the highway when I heard Paul Butterfield on the radio. I said, 'That's it,' and that very day, I bought a harmonica."
If you think a lot of Colvin's significant moments happened on the road, that's because he'd spent a lot of time on it. Prior to his retirement -- he sang his swansong from the Asian Development Bank [he did audio-visual work for this international organization since 1986] a month ago -- Colvin moved around a lot.
He says: "I wandered pretty much all over the US. I also went to places in Europe, Africa, Central America. I spent 11 years in Asia."
Not only that, Colvin changed jobs many times: he taught English and Ancient History at Summit School in North Carolina and Choate School in Connecticut, handled professional training for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, did soundtracks and audio-video work for Soundcept, an AV production house in Washington, DC, and was Director of Communication for Occidental College in California.
Now, in his retirement here in the Philippines, he's busy playing the harmonica with Lampano Alley -- Binky Lampano's blues band -- and is traveling across the country documenting "Philippine commemorative sculpture." ("There are thousands of Rizals but there are a lot of statues people don't know about. Part of my question is why certain people got commemorated and others were not.")
In his easygoing, North Carolina drawl, he explains: "I need change. I don't like doing the same things over and over again. Change is invigorating."
A seemingly paradoxical statement from a man who's stuck to his instrument for all of 26 years, his lips in touch with his harmonica with an intimacy that rivals that of the lovers' in Rodin's statue.
"There's a harmony between me and the blues," Colvin says. "I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the blues has to deal with emotions. I find that I can express my feelings through the blues."
He explains: "You can take notes and bend them. In classical music, the notes would be clear and distinct, but with the blues, it's more expressive. You can make the notes wail and cry."
After his fascination with Pau Butrterfield -- "he was able to take this teeny-tiny toy and make it sound like a sax" -- Colvin got more curious. He studied the instrument in greater detail and met more and more of its practitioners in conventions, competitions, and workshops.
"People say that the harmonica is the easiest instrument to learn and the most difficult to master. You give this to a kid and they can start playing right away. On the other hand, there are techniques that are really difficult.
"There's this guy -- Howard Levy -- who realized that there are only 10 holes and 19 different notes in a harmonica. From the lowest note to the highest note is a three-octave range, so there should be 37 notes.
"You can get some of these notes by bending, but Levy said that there are still some notes missing. He experimented some more and discovered that if you blow the harmonica in a certain way, you can get 37 notes instead of just 19.
"He calls the technique 'overblow' and he considers bendable notes as 'sweet spots.' He also found out that these missing notes are the most interesting notes: you can do all these inflections with them -- bend them up, bend them down, make them squeal."
If the harmonica now becomes an instrument laden with all-too-human attributes, that's because Colvin considers his music "extremely physical." An electrical sensuality runs throughout Colvin's blues playing: "My harmonica isn't something that's sitting out there. It's something that gets attached to the body. It enlarges the body's capabilities."
That's maturity coming from someone whose musical career started when he was still a teenager. "I played drums for the first rock-and-roll band in Winston-Salem, my hometown in North Carolina."
Ever the storyteller, Colvin shares this yarn about the time they were featured on local TV. "Word got out that we were performing at the studio. However, there was room for only 100 people. At the time of the gig, around 2,000 people showed up. They were mostly screaming high school kids -- we had a riot."
Right now, he considers himself as "seasoning" to Lampano and co's "meat and potatoes." He says: "My own feeling is that a harmonica is like garlic -- a little bit goes a long way. You need to pick the places where you want the seasoning to come through. You just don't overwhelm -- you're selective."
Now that's a long way from his early days wailing while stuck at a stoplight. With the computer boom, Colvin confesses that he now practices when there's traffic on the information superhighway: "I practice when I wait for pages to download."
photo: Patrick Uy
Right now, he considers himself as "seasoning" to Lampano and co's "meat and potatoes." He
says: "My own feeling is that a harmonica is like garlic -- a little bit goes a long way. You need to pick the places where you want the seasoning to come through. You just don't overwhelm -- you're selective."
photo: Gerry Kaimo, PhilMusic