Steve Baker
Festival Director Steve Baker has made his living from and with the harmonica since the age of 22 and is considered one of today’s finest players. He grew up in London and relocated to Germany in the late 1970s. As well as performing, recording and teaching, he has published several seminal books on the instrument and is also a long term consultant to the Hohner company.
Steve founded the Harmonica Masters Workshops in 2003 and has been musical director ever since, selecting the instructors, putting the concert programm together, engaging the accompanying musicians and hosting the concerts and sessions as well as teaching a class himself. After 20 years of this schedule, in 2023 he realised he was spreading himself too thin and decided to step down from teaching to concentrate on running the event, passing the baton to a younger generation of instructors.
One of the things which distinguishes Steve Baker as a harmonica player is his extensive experience as a studio musician in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, which has given him an easy familiarity with musical styles ranging from country and Americana to commercial pop, jingles and film music, as well as the (for harmonica players) more usual genres of blues and rock. His funky, rhythmically accented phrasing, combined with a rich command of timbre and tone, communicates an emotional intensity and depth of feeling which is rarely heard on the diatonic harmonica and his unique sound has influenced harmonica players around the world. Drawing on the blues harmonica tradition, he combines it with elements from country, folk, funk, soul and jazz to create an exciting and individual fusion, which transcends stylistic boundaries while sounding totally natural.
After a lifetime working as a highly regarded sideman accompanying singers as diverse as Tony Sheridan, Chris Jones and Abi Wallenstein, in 2017 Steve decided to begin recording and performing his own music, becoming a singer and bandleader for the first time. He has released three solo albums of original material on Timezone Records, casting a critical light on our troubled times with highly personal songs which defy easy categorization. After several years of working with an electric band, he refashioned the LiveWires during the covid pandemic to create a semi acoustic line-up which more closely reflects his folk roots, without losing the dynamics and punch which have always characterised his work. The combination of harmonica, guitar, upright bass, percussion and three-part vocal harmonies creates a full, rich sound, characterised by great dynamics.