This harmonica man is reaching Alaska kids with music and relationships

BETHEL – Years ago, up in the far north of Canada, harmonica man Mike Stevens found some kids clutching plastic bags of gasoline and huffing the wicked fumes to get high.

The disturbing encounter in the Labrador village of Sheshatshiu recalibrated a life that already had deviated away from the ordinary.

He's a chemical plant worker turned professional harmonica player, and since that chance meeting 17 years ago he has developed a new specialty: music workshops in Canada and Alaska for indigenous children and teens. He works in some of the most remote, poorest places in North America making music easy. He teaches more than that, though — feelings and observations and opportunities. He keeps returning to the same spots every few months or years.

All last week, the musician from Brights Grove, Ontario, was hopping planes from one familiar Alaska community to another, Fairbanks and Tanana, Hooper Bay and Bethel. He went to Nenana, too, his first time there.

Some talented outsiders make appearances in Alaska, then check it off, done that. Programs come and go. That's not the way Stevens operates. It shatters trust, he said in an interview last week.

"You go back, you go back, you go back," Stevens, 58, said before a Bethel workshop. He knew some of the kids already from earlier visits. "You build a relationship through long, long, long term visits. It's the only honest way to do it."

Music in colors

At the Bethel Youth Facility, a just-renovated juvenile lockup, Stevens set up a microphone, amplifier and loop station to record passages that could be played over and over. He told the kids any of them would sound good. He's tall and limber as he moves to the beat, engaged yet easy going, with a signature hat and ulu earring.

When one of the kids tells him "nice hat," he uses it to start his story, explaining that it's maybe 30 years old and faded after trips to perform around the world, to the Arctic and Antarctica, the Middle East and China. Once, he wore it on a camel trek to a community.

He grew up in Ontario, quit school to travel, returned to school and got a specialized instrumentation job in a chemical plant that he hated.

But he had his harmonica, which he taught himself to play as a young boy and then practiced obsessively.

"I picked it up and I just made a sound that made me feel really, really good. That's still how I play. I don't read a note of music. I basically play by how it feels," Stevens told the Bethel teens. When he was back in Ontario, he told them, he tuned into Detroit radio stations playing Motown and blues.

"I have this thing where I hear music in colors," Stevens said.

Listen, he told the kids. The room was quiet. But in the quiet buzz of the heating system, he heard the fan play a B flat he mimicked on his harmonica. He plays shapes and ambient sound and feelings.

"Everything around you makes music like that. Whether it's a stream or a car going by or a washing machine or whatever. My ears always dial into those sounds."

Life-altering moment

He wove the once-shunned harmonica into bluegrass in Canada, played in bands, wrote his own songs and at a big festival in Ontario connected with The Lewis Family, known as the first family of bluegrass gospel. He toured with them across North America for no pay, a plant in the audience who came to the stage when they asked for a harmonica player, still not part of pure bluegrass. But he got standing ovations and when they passed the hat, he made good. He quit his chemical plant job.

Now he's played more than 300 times on the Grand Ole Opry stage. He records. He tours. And in 1999, on an armed forces musical tour, he was with a group that stopped in Labrador, in northeast Canada. Stevens heard about kids in a nearby community who were sniffing gas. A local resident took him to the kids and filmed it. As the kids huffed, he played harmonica and joked around. A few moved their bags aside to laugh. Someone with the CBC "As It Happens" radio show saw the footage and called him for an interview. He ranted on air about what he had seen.

"I didn't think I was in Canada anymore," he said in an interview with Alaska Dispatch News. "I was embarrassed and I was pissed off."

He called for musicians and artists to do something, to go to the community and show the kids they cared.

"I've never seen anything like it and I think it will totally change my life," he told the interviewer.

For the past 17 years, it has. He still records and sells CDs. He lays down harmonica tracks for other bands. He tours. His website calls him a "harmonica virtuoso," which he laughs off as an oxymoron for such a simple, down-home instrument.

But most of his time now is leading interactive workshops through the nonprofit ArtsCan Circle, born out of that encounter with the Labrador kids, and in Alaska through the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival and the Kuskokwim campus of University of Alaska Fairbanks. He's been the subject of two documentaries, "Harmonica Crossing" and "A Walk in My Dream." His wife and son are very understanding, he said.

The Alaska work started in 2013 and "it just mushroomed," said Terese Kaptur, director of Fairbanks Summer Arts, who travels with him much of the time. He's made five trips to Alaska so far. She pieces together money and donations to make it happen, from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, airlines, shipping companies, village corporations and individuals.

'You try it'

For a guy with mad harmonica gifts, Stevens likes to fade into quiet when he's teaching kids. At the Bethel facility, he busted out some bluesy sounds, bent the music a bit, showed just enough stuff to wow the teens. But he made it about them.

"It's not a show," Stevens said.

Every kid he teaches gets a harmonica, a keeper in a case.

"These are good harps," he told the Bethel kids. "Take them out. I'll show you what I do."

Cup it in your hands with the numbers on top, he said. Just talk into it at first.

The teens are shy, so he gave them words. Say "Hooper Bay," he said, since he was just there. It sounded funny but also cool. Everyone laughed.

Stevens broke down the basics of how to exhale and inhale through the mouthpiece.

"You try it," he told them. They were halting but kept at it.

"That's not bad," Stevens said, nodding to a boy.

He introduced harder sounds, dropping the pitch to bend the music. Then he got to where he wanted. A harmonica, he said, can express feelings. What should he try to play?

"Anger," a boy said. He went harsh. "Happy," said another. He lightened up. "Confused." And he was all over the place.

They beatboxed on the microphone and looping too, on a machine in which sounds are recorded and repeated, sometimes with special effects.

"Rock the beat," he told them.

Any sound would work. Make a fart sound. Say a number, a name. One boy rapped an Eminem song. In one village a little boy offered up a line about how good walrus tastes.

Stevens moved to the side. The Bethel kids kept going, not noticing. They were off and running.

One 17-year-old said later he liked how Stevens taught the music, how he said to feel the music. He didn't know you could play different notes on a harmonica before.

"I was kind of embarrassed to try it but at the same time it felt good," the teen said.

Every time, there is growth

Last summer Stevens was in Hooper Bay and he returned last week, a few months after a cluster of suicides of young people.

The moment that lingers for him is one in which he was barely there. He had brought in his looping equipment. He showed some local women how to use it — the satellite college campus coordinator, the behavioral health aide, a wellness worker.

The women, all Yup'ik, were giggling over the sounds they were making. Village kids started trickling in. He watched but was quiet. They started building songs without him.

The kids know him now, said Martha Simon, the campus coordinator.

"Every time, you can see there is growth," she said.

Stevens leaves behind looping equipment and microphones. Over the years, through the grants, he has given away thousands of harmonicas. Kids want more connections with adults. Maybe they should bring out the looper as a community activity, Simon said.

Stevens just wants the music to go on. He wants the kids to explore their feelings in sound, whether he's there or not.