There are some performers who become like old friends. You don't quite see them often enough, and it's only when they show up unexpectedly that you remember how much they mean to you. Canadian singer and instrumentalist Harry Manx is one of the best individual performers I know of. Playing his unique style of Delta Blues and slide guitar, his recordings immediately create a calm spot in any storm that my day might have been experiencing.
It's not that his music is, and gods do I hate the word, mellow, nor is it that he shies away from uncomfortable topics, or eschew electric instruments in favour of acoustic to create a "soft" sound. Grace is a difficult word, as it can mean so many different things, but not usually at the same time. Harry Manx not only plays with grace and style, somehow his music exists within a state of grace that's hard to believe could be found outside a temple.
If you remember as far back as the first paragraph, I referred to his unique style of Delta blues playing. For those of you not familiar with Harry, you can be forgiven for thinking that's the usual sort of hyperbole. The fact is there aren't many North American musicians who spent twelve years being instructed in both the physical and spiritual aspects of playing their instrument. Harry plays an instrument of which only two or three have been built, a mohan veena.
Played like any lap-steel bottle neck the differences start with the inclusion of extra strings attached to the neck of the guitar called sympathetic, which when rung, strummed, or simply allowed to resonate through the guitars natural reverberations, bring the sound of the sitar into the mudflats of the Mississippi. They continue with the realization that Harry was trained on the mohan veena as a classical Indian musician, by the man who built by hand the one Harry now plays: Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.
Mohan Bhatt is known in the West as the guy who won a Grammy with Ry Cooder some years back for their release Meeting By The River. Of course, the rest of the world already knew him as an international recording star, composer, instrument maker, and teacher. If I understand it correctly, in the Indian classical tradition a student is not only learning how to play the instrument under instruction, he or she becomes a link in a chain of teachers and students dating back to the first teacher of their discipline.
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