Harmonicist in London

Queen's Hall in London is the scene of many a proud orchestral concert, a place where proven virtuosos play, give dignity to music. Last week British brows were raised when a performer without a pedigree announced a Queen's Hall concert. He was Borrah Minevitch, famed as a U. S. comic who plays the harmonica, costumed usually in nobby grey trousers, a loud checked coat, a derby cocked impertinently to one side. This time he was serious, intent on demonstrating the harmonica as a legitimate musical instrument. The Duke & Duchess of Athol bought tickets to hear him. So did Mr. & Mrs. George Arliss, Lord & Lady Cavan, Actress Gertrude Lawrence. Fog penetrated the hall. Many sat bundled in overcoats while Minevitch and nine fellow harmonicists attempted an ambitious Philharmonica Suite, a Minevitch opus divided into three formal movements. Many a Londoner went ready to scoff. The harmonica was only a toy, a gadget that belonged to newsboys and sailors. They left impressed. The harmonica might still be mongrel, but in skillful hands it was capable of countless effects, actually suggested a well-balanced orchestra. Borrah Minevitch was once a harmonica-playing newsboy, a Russian immigrant's son who peddled papers in Boston's Scolay Square, had Calvin Coolidge for a steady customer.* An elder brother made his mark as a chemist in Manhattan. Young Borrah tried to follow suit, studied at City College of New York, failed in English, went to work in a Sixth Avenue shoestore. There, when business was dull, he would draw out his harmonica, strike up a tune. Thus he lost his job. Because he still wanted his college degree, he undertook a thesis, wrote about the harmonica with complete instructions on how to tuck the tongue behind the teeth, when to blow out and when to breathe in, how to cup the sound with the hands to make it vibrate and swell. He invented a system of notation that the feeblest amateur could understand. Every groove on a harmonica is numbered. Thus, for example, we were only playing leap frog was scored to read:

We were on-ly

Blow Draw Blow Blow

6 5 5 6

Play-ing leap frog

Blow Draw Blow Blow

7 8 8 7

Soon Minevitch was a moneymaker, first as a harmonica salesman, then as a vaudevillian. Urchins idolized him, clamored to play with him. In 1926 he organized a troupe of 60 boys, scrubbed them up, taught them manners. But the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was not impressed with his efforts. Now there are some 14 "Harmonica Rascals," their ages ranging from 18 to 24. The rest of the Minevitch followers, numbering more than 125,000, belong to Minevitch's Harmonica Institute, play instruments stamped with Minevitch's name. By the sale of these harmonicas alone, Minevitch makes a tidy income. But he has yet to become a serious rival of M. Hohner Inc., the old German concern which puts out 60 different "models as against Minevitch's 20.

An excellent showman, Borrah Minevitch mimes every piece his orchestra plays, hunches his shoulders, wiggles his ears. He made headlines in Manhattan when he gave a Carnegie Hall concert using not only harmonicas but handsaws, elastic bands, Jews' harps, tuned coconuts, sweet potatoes. Later an alarm went out that he had been kidnapped by Corsican sailors off the coast of France. Soon afterward he returned to Manhattan with a beard (see cut, p. 40), gained more publicity when a theatre manager refused to let him appear with it, on the ground that it was unsuited to his act.

*Like Abraham Lincoln, the late President Coolidge used to play the harmonica. Other mouth-organ amateurs: Britain's Edward VIII, John McCormack, Jascha Heifetz, Irving Berlin.

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