Philip Achille is a young English jazz and classical chromatic player who always blows me away with his chops, taste and groove. Check out this live version of The Chicken:
Philip's seamless switching between octaves and single notes is particularly cool, and his tasty use of outside notes on the chord changes adds a nice jazz edge to the funk groove.
Philip is similar to Spain's brilliant Antonio Serrano: chrom players who started with classical playing and then switched to jazz, using their high-level chops to create new sounds in a field so long defined by Toots Thielemans. It's refreshing, and exciting!
Great technique and licks conception! I know his "classical" face, but I see that he plays jazz tune as well. Cool music! ==============================
That is some of the finest jazz chromatic playing I've heard. He really has his own sound, and just listening to this makes me want to put down my diatonic and go pick up my chromatic. There are only a few chromatic harmonica players that really make me want to focus on becoming a great chromatic player (Stevie Wonder, Clint Hoover, Tollak Ollestad, Paul Delay, and a few others), and this video alone has now made Phillip one of those players.
And Brendan, you are definately right about his seamless switch between octaves and single notes, it's really great and sounds fantastic. I've always been a little surprised that a lot of jazz chromatic players don't make more use of octaves in their playing. What makes it even more impressive technically is that he appears to be lip pursing his single notes. He's having to jump from these widely spaced tongue blocked octaves, that require having a large chunk of the harmonica pushed deep into your mouth, to lip pursed single notes, which requires him to pull the harmonica out of the deep octave embouchure and accurately hit the right note. And he does this completely seamlessly. The frequency and speed with which he switches back and forth is really impressive, and it sounds perfectly smooth. It would be much easier to accomplish this by tongue blocking the single notes, so you wouldn't have to make these large embouchure changes, but Phillip is able to make these switches perfectly. You can actually see him doing this in the video, and it's cool to see how easily and naturally he makes these big changes in embouchure.
