Performing career

Sebastian began his harmonica soloist career in the late 1930s playing nightclubs and cabarets, where his repertoire initially included swing music. Because very little classical music had been written for the harmonica, Sebastian painstakingly transcribed and adapted suitable works that had been composed for other wind instruments or for violin. Between his club dates, he rehearsed for three hours a day and worked on his transcriptions. As each new adaptation was complete, he added it to his repertoire, until within a few years, his sets consisted solely of classical music. He refused to compromise by playing "swing" versions of the classics, and even turned down a Hollywood contract because he would not have control over the musical selections he would play. His choice of material enhanced his reputation as a nightclub performer, and by the early 1940s he regularly appeared at elite clubs such as Café Society and the rooms at the Pierre, Waldorf and St. Regis hotels in New York City, and the Palmer House in Chicago.^{[3][11][15][16]}

Despite Sebastian's nightclub success, he aspired to perform in a concert setting (which his contemporary Larry Adler had already accomplished), and to have the harmonica accepted as a serious instrument by classical music critics and the concert-going public.^[3][17] In order to achieve his goals, Sebastian had to overcome the prevalent view of a harmonica as a "lowly" instrument with little musical value.^[13][18] With the assistance of his manager, André Mertens of the prestigious Columbia Artists Management, in 1941 he debuted as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Following this breakthrough, Sebastian transitioned from nightclubs to the concert stage.^[3][5] From the 1940s through the 1960s, he toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Canada, giving concerts and recitals. He performed in a wide range of settings, including appearances with major orchestras,^[11][13][19] community concerts staged at local churches and high schools,^[17][20][21] and other stage productions such as a revue produced by Vincent Youmans. He also frequently appeared on radio, including performances with the NBC Symphony Orchestra^[11][13] and a fourteen-week series of solo programs over the Blue Network,^[14] and later on television.^[22][23]

In December 1954, he gave a full-length classical music recital at The Town Hall in New York City, then considered essential for an American soloist. The program was billed as his "debut" in a positive New York Times review by critic Ross Parmenter, even though by then he had already performed as a soloist with a number of major orchestras, and in 1946 had given a previous recital at the Town Hall with Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein.^[17] Parmenter noted that Sebastian, rather than trying to hide the fact that the harmonica was a "small-toned" instrument, made its sound "smaller than need be by the way he envelops it in his hands" and that he worked for "subtlety and poetry within a small dynamic range."

In 1954, Sebastian was one of five American musicians invited to visit West Germany as guests of the Federal Republic of Germany; this marked the first time a foreign government had acted as host to American artists.^[24] He toured internationally throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including appearances in Europe as well as the Far East and Africa.^[5] He appeared not only in major cities such as Seoul and Tokyo, but also in less traveled areas such as Okayama, Japan, where he was enthusiastically welcomed by children studying harmonica as part of a program to re-establish music education in local schools.

Sebastian, who was self-taught, studied and incorporated techniques used by wind instrument players in many ethnic traditions, in particular learning from Mexican pipe players how to hold air in his cheeks, and practicing yoga to improve his breathing technique.^[3]

Repertoire

Many of Sebastian's selections came from the seventeenth and eighteenth century baroque music era,^[18] although he adapted some works by more modern composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Bartók and Gershwin. He also drew from the works of impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel, thinking them "ideal" for transposition to the harmonica. He avoided the works of romantic music composers such as Schumann, Brahms and Chopin because he felt that "[the harmonica] does not have the lush, sentimental tone that is so necessary in 'romantic music'. The harmonica can be plaintive, pastoral, ascetic, gay, whimsical— but never 'romantic' in the true sense of the word. I have therefore kept to the wealth of music I believe better suited to the instrument." Despite this statement, he did include a Brahms composition, "Hungarian Dance No. 6," on two of his records, A Harmonica Recital (Schirmer, 1940) and Profile of John Sebastian (Decca, 1960).

In at least one instance, Sebastian's transcriptions caused controversy when the French publishers Durand & Co., who owned the copyright for the Debussy composition, "The Girl With the Flaxen Hair," that was originally transcribed for violin, refused to permit Sebastian to release a harmonica adaptation on his 1947 RCA Victor album Harmonica Classics. Durand claimed that it "would never authorize a performance for the harmonica," even though it had previously authorized harmonicist Larry Adler to record Debussy's "Clair de Lune".

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Sebastian continued to expand his available repertoire. He lobbied and sometimes commissioned contemporary composers to write harmonica pieces. Walter F. Anderson, Anthony Burgess,^[25] Luciano Chailly, Henry Cowell, Norman Dello Joio, Alan Hovhaness, George Kleinsinger, Frank Lewin, Donald Martino, Edward Robinson, Alexander Tcherepnin, and Heitor Villa-Lobos all composed works for him. Works created for Sebastian include Kleinsinger's "Street Corner Concerto" (1942), Tcherepnin's "Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, Op. 86" (1953), and Hovhaness' "Concerto No. 6, op. 114" (1953–1954).^[3][5][26] When Villa-Lobos composed his "Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra" for Sebastian in 1955, Sebastian suggested changes that were approved by Villa-Lobos and incorporated into Sebastian's performance of the work.^[27][28] Sebastian himself also wrote several pieces for harmonica, including "Serenade for Exhale Notes", "Inca Dance", "Hornpipe Gigue",^[3] "Arabian Love Song", "Moroccan Serenade", and "Afro-Cuban Dance". Occasionally he also performed works that had been written for other harmonicists, such as Larry Adler.

Recordings

Starting in the 1940s, Sebastian released a series of records on different labels including Schirmer, RCA Victor, Cadence, Columbia, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and Heliodor. These ranged from orchestra-backed recordings of the concertos written for him by Kleinsinger,^[29] Tcherepnin and Villa-Lobos,^[19] to light classical selections and even popular songs such as "Foolish Waltz" (promoted by Cadence as Sebastian's "First Popular Smash Record"),^[30] "Stranger in Paradise" and "Autumn Leaves". Sebastian collaborated with his then-wife Jane on a children's record called The Happy Harmonica (RCA Victor, 1948), which told the story of a little boy who saves pennies to buy his own harmonica.^[31] He wrote and performed the music, while she wrote the lyrics.^[20][32] In the early 1940s, he also released an instructional record on Schirmer entitled Play the Harmonica that provided a short basic two-part lesson on diatonic harmonica for the beginner.^[4]

As of 2015, Sebastian's records were all out of print, but according to Sebastian's son John B. Sebastian, the Music Masters label was contemplating some CD reissues.^[33]

Some additional unreleased Sebastian recordings also exist in library archives^[34] or as noncommercial acetates produced by Deryck Waring Records.

Other activities

Sebastian served as a consultant to the Hohner company, a major producer of harmonicas. His work was primarily directed towards improving the lower register of his harmonica of choice, the Hohner Chromonica 64.^[3][5]

Sebastian occasionally produced instructional materials aimed at teaching beginning harmonica. His instructional record Play the Harmonica focused on diatonic harmonica,^[4] and he also wrote a beginner's method book entitled An Introduction to the Chromatic Harmonica (aka Chromatic Harmonica Instruction Course) that was published by M. Hohner, Inc. in 1972.^[35] The book assumes no prior knowledge of music and teaches the notes, scales and techniques involved in playing the chromatic harmonica, using popular folk tunes as demonstration pieces.^[7]

Despite his own career focus on classical music, he enjoyed a wide range of folk music and ethnic music from around the world. His son John B. recalled him returning from tours of the United States with obscure folk and blues songs he had discovered in his travels.^[36]

Later career and death

In 1966, following a lengthy concert tour of Africa, Sebastian suffered a heart attack in Rome and after recuperating, remained there, staying until 1976 when he moved to France.^[6] Following his illness, he performed less frequently, mainly in Europe, and never performed some of the pieces that had been written for him just prior to his heart attack.^[3][5] (One such work, the "Harmonica Concerto" composed for Sebastian by Henry Cowell in 1962, was finally premiered in 1986 by Robert Bonfiglio with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.^[37][38]). Despite Sebastian's setback, his occasional performances were still well-regarded; after a 1976 Kennedy Center solo performance, a Washington Star reviewer wrote, "He is THE master of the harmonica."^[3]

Sebastian died on August 18, 1980, at his home near Périgord, France.^[1][2][6]