Lee Oskar – She Said Mahalo
Dreams We Share
10 songs – 44 minutes
Lee Oskar may be best known to the casual music fan as the founder of Lee Oskar Harmonicas, one of the world’s leading harmonica companies. He is also however an internationally acclaimed harmonica player in his own right, as well as a composer, producer and visual artist. While he has been releasing music since the 1960s (originally with Eric Burdon’s WAR), She Said Mahalo is Oskar’s second album on his own Dreams We Share label.
The album features 10 self-composed instrumental tracks (written over several years) with Oskar’s harmonica taking the lead in both the tracks’ melodies and the majority of the solos. He is backed by a crack band comprising Darian Asplund (saxophone), Andrew Cloutier (drums), Denali Williams (percussion), Dean Schmidt (bass), Brian Monroney and Alex Mortland (guitars), Andrew Joslyn (strings) and Mack Grout (keyboards and piano). A number of guest artists also appear, including Takahiro Miyazaki (saxophone and flute), Paul Hanson (bassoon), Randy Oxford (trombone), Harold Brown (drums and percussion), Thin Diop (percussion), Joe Doria (organ), Phil Peterson (strings), “Sancho” Youichrou Suzuki (shakuhachi) and Mayo Higa (shamisen). Suzuki and Higa in particular bring a very exotic edge to the breakdown of “Morning Rush”.
The quality of the music is uniformly excellent throughout, with Oskar’s warm, almost vocal tone on the harp combining beautifully with the other instruments, particularly with Mortland’s guitar on the title track or Monroney’s equally stellar solo on “Most Favoured Nation”. The music is also superbly recorded by Brandon Busch with mastering by Robert Rice.
With its well-written and performed songs, detailed orchestration (witness how “Memories” seamlessly builds from a single strummed acoustic guitar to a full band work effort), fascinating liner notes by Keri Oskar, and gorgeously packaged CD featuring some of Oskar’s own paintings on the gatefold sleeves, She Said Mahalo is pretty much an essential purchase for fans of top drawer harmonica playing. Those who are harp players themselves will also no doubt be fascinated by the liner notes that list not only the key but also the type of harmonica used on each track. There is also a sense of sunny optimism or hope in every song, as if the musicians were playing with huge smiles on their faces when the performances were recorded.
She Said Mahalo is an outstanding release, but it also isn’t really a blues album at all. There is no doubt that Oskar can play the blues and the blues infuses much of his playing on this album, but the songs themselves fall squarely within a “world music” category, with slices of funk (“Funky Rhetoric”), reggae (“Caribbean Love Song”) and even some theatrical jazz rock (the closing track, “One World Fist”).
Definitely worth investigating, all the same. It’s impossible to listen to this album without feeling the warmth of the sun creep into your life.
