Artist Profile: Jason Ricci & The Bad Kind

Multiple award winning jazz, funk and blues harmonica player, singer, songwriter Jason Ricci has played with, toured and recorded with some of the world’s most esteemed blues, jazz, rock and New Orleans musical legends. Jason is included in nearly every top ten and top twenty lists of harmonica players in magazines and all over the internet. His fascinating career and life has led him up to the highest musical mountain tops such as performing at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, recording a Grammy winning record with Johnny Winter, winning three Blues Music Awards and numerous nominations from The Blues Foundation only to fall all the way down to the lowest valley’s of addiction, homelessness, jails and back up again. Today his sincere recordings, shows, songs and incendiary harmonica playing continue to tell the story of life and garner new fans to add to an emotionally devoted following of dedicated music lovers.

Jason Ricci, born in Portland Maine in 1974 began playing the harmonica, guitar and singing at an early age. His mother was a blues fan and by the time Jason was in his early teens she was bringing him to clubs to witness blues greats like James Cotton, Charlie Musslewhite, Buckwheat Zydeco and many more. Under the guidance of harmonica aces like Madison Slim (Jimmy Rodgers), Mark Hummel, drummer Per Hanson (Ronnie Earl) and many more a young Jason was poised for a life immersed in jazz, blues and roots music. At the age of 16 Ricci would find the blues offstage as well with a troubled and unstable home due to serious mental illness and addiction that ultimately led to homelessnes, shelters and instability in the streets of Portland Maine. Jason was able to get his GED and as part of a divorce agreement between his parents he was able to enroll in college at BSU in Boise Idaho, with a wildlife management major, before his highschool class had yet graduated. While briefly attending school in Boise Idaho, Ricci traded in his formal education for that of a working musician and befriended club owner and pianist Ken Harris who put Ricci to work immediately learning and ultimately performing music at his bar. At Harris’s club: “The Blues Bouquet ” in Boise, the pianist and club owner would pay an underage Ricci a symbolic ten dollars so that the eighteen year old was an actual paid employee of the club and was thus legally allowed to work in the club. Ricci’s nightly duties included ironically checking customers ID’s and of course performing songs with the band from the repertoire of Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Paul Butterfield and others, note for note and when Jason strayed his elder Harris would make swift mention. At the Bouquet Ricci played with Smokey Wilson, Johnny Dyer, Mark Hummel, Sam Lay, Mel Solomon and many more. In Boise Ricci would then join his first working band as a sideman in “Streetwise” with vocalist Cyndie Lee and tour the Pacific northwest. In Idaho, Jason, still a teenager, also befriended teen harmonica player/vocalist John Nemeth and played briefly with the North West powerhouse Jimmy Lloyd Rea and the Switchmasters up in Oregon.

To learn more about Jason Ricci, visit his website at mooncat.org.