Adam Gussow is one of the top blues harmonica players in the world today, and he has been posting lessons and great music videos like crazy on Youtube. The harmonica community is currently ecstatic about this, with good reason -- Adam is a marvelous teacher and shares much of his accumulated knowledge in these videos. Some of them features some really gutsy amplified harp playing, while others focus on acoustic playing. There are lessons on setting up harmonicas for overblowing, tuning harmonicas out of the box, vibrato, rhythm, and a wealth of little tidbits of info that don't fall into any category. In short, he's giving away the store. The videos are each around 8-10 minutes long and take place in Adam's living room, office, his car, and at a crossroads in Mississippi. The latest (#24) is a front porch slow acoustic blues lesson that shows blues harmonica as it is meant to be. This is from Adam, and posted on a blues mailing list:

A couple of weeks ago I decided on a whim to share some of my accumulated knowledge of the harp. So I figured out how to transfer footage from my digital videocam to my MacBook and compress it for export, and then I filmed and uploaded a couple of free-form harp lessons to YouTube entitled "Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed."

One thing led to another. Now, two weeks later, I seem to have created my own channel at YouTube, with 20+ lessons in the can, 250 subscribers, and more than 35,000 combined hits. Just yesterday I decided to supplement the lessons by uploading a bunch of Satan and Adam videos, since there wasn't a single bit of footage of my duo on the web. I dug deep into the archives and found some stuff from the days when we were playing the Harlem street, plus our appearance at the 1993 Philadelphia Folk Festival. Later today I'm going to upload some stuff from a 1992 gig in Syracuse that will hopefully convince people that I'm NOT lying when I call Sterling the greatest one-man blues band in the history of the blues. It's late-night, end-of-set stuff where he's throwing down the way he used to on 125th Street in Harlem--stuff we never really got onto our CDs. But I've got the videotape to prove it.

I also found a video of outtakes featuring my harp teacher, the late (and legendary) Nat Riddles in a Richmond-area cable show called "Blues TV."

Here's my YouTube URL, for anybody interested in checking out all this stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=KudzuRunner

If you have any interest at all in learning harmonica or brushing up on techniques, or just hearing some good music, check out the videos and subscribe to the series.

Update 6/23/2007: More on Adam Gussow...