Manx of the world

Internationally acclaimed musician Harry Manx has created a rare musical place where blues, country, folk and Indian classical music co-exist. He speaks to The Echo about his passion for music, life on the road and genre busting!

When you were a young lad, working as a sound engineer in blues clubs, who were the musicians who first inspired you?

I became inspired on 18 January 1970. I was 15 years old and on my way downtown with a friend who wrote articles for a rock magazine. It was Saturday afternoon when we arrived at a matinee show at a club featuring Buddy Guy and Junior Wells.

I was too young to get in, but the owner so wanted to have an article written by my companion about the club that he agreed to have me sit in the back. I was impressed beyond belief with the theatrics of the show. The clothes, the swagger, the deep groove, the trance that settled over the crowd, the crying guitar, the moaning harmonica. I loved it all. It spoke very clearly to me.

I was inspired.

You started with guitar as your main instrument. Now that you perform with such an array, including banjo and the Indian mohan veena, how do you choose which instrument to play on which songs?

A song gets inside me at some point and then I find it can be played on any instrument. The same song sounds different on each instrument too, so it usually comes down to a choice of which casts the greater spell on the crowd.

The Mohan Veena with its 20 strings usually casts the biggest spell of all.

You do a lot of touring. What do you enjoy most about live performing? Are Australian audiences different from those elsewhere?

I can fall into tune with things very easily when I tour over here. I like your Aussie breakfast with the beans, flat whites and all that. But yes, I think there’s a really good balance of demand and supply happening between myself and the people who attend my shows.

I see that I’ve managed to inspire a few of them and they in turn tell me their stories, which inspire me to stay creative.

The audience is never that different from place to place from where I sit (with the lights in my eyes). Things are a little different here than in Canada on the surface but not really when it comes to the people. Everyone who’s drawn to my shows seems to be a friend that I’ve just met; we have a lot in common and much to share.

Your unique genre of ‘mysticissippi blues’ has a very sweet, relaxing sound that makes people happy. Shouldn’t blues makes us sad? What do you think, beyond the classic blues chord progressions, makes blues the blues?

I once heard it said that the blues is not about feeling bad, it’s about making other people feel bad. There’s probably not much truth to that but it’s funny and I love it. When I think about the blues I think about it as an art form that has really deep roots. I suppose when some people other hear about the blues the usual clichés come to mind. They imagine a guy down on his luck, lost his way, lost his love, dog bit him, stuff like that; maybe somebody who is wallowing in their troubles. But the other side of the blues is that it’s really just another way of saying that you’re suffering.

Most people have had the blues at one time or another. It’s a household phenomenon. The blues is mostly a song about life-sized struggles; it’s spiritual music; it’s all about a person seeking release from their pain and suffering. I don’t know that the blues ever tried appeal to the masses, to make somebody rich or to be a fashion.

Blues has mostly been the direct voice of the human spirit. Because of that it’s timeless in the world of music. Muddy Waters’s sound is as contemporary today as when he made his recordings back in the 60s. The blues is always a song about the struggle of the individual; it needed to be sung and people want to hear it. They still do, they always will. They see themselves in that music and it moves them on every level. Singing about their pain becomes a cure for what ails them. A way to let their suffering go.

Blues guys have known for a long time that the blues has always been both the cure and the illness. The lyrics to a lot of the blues tunes describe hard times while the music is mostly always delivered with a deep musical groove that turns the words on their head. That particular way of putting your troubles into song speaks to a lot of people.

You might hear a blues singer getting deep into it about suffering and hard times, and all the time your toe can’t stop itself from tapping. I think that’s the alchemy of the blues: taking a negative experience and transforming it into a song, a dance, a poem. Helping you to move on, that’s what I try to do with it.

Looking way into the future, do you envisage that your style of playing, your mixing of Indian ragas with the blues, will be carried on by others?

I have to wonder about that. It will need someone who loves both Indian classical and the blues so much that it happens simply by chance that they come together in one person’s hands. It happened to me by following my passion. Along the way I think I may have influenced a few people’s thinking about musical boundaries. Whenever I encountered one, I’d cross it. I learned the structure of Indian classical ragas and then I adjusted them to fit my needs. The same applies to the structure o2f blues. I rarely play in the typical 12-bar fashion; I often use one chord and a lot of groove to move a song forward. Basically my approach has been to learn as much as I can about music, then forget all that and just play with all my heart and soul. Seems to work pretty well.

Harry Manx plays the Star Court Theatre in Lismore on Friday 30 September (www.starcourttheatre.com.au) and the Mullumbimby Civic Hall on 1 October (www.ticketebo.com.au/harrymanxmullum).