How Carlos del Junco Transformed the Humble Harmonica Into a Jazz and Blues Powerhouse

There’s a moment when you first hear Carlos del Junco play that stops you cold. What comes out of a small ten-hole diatonic harmonica — an instrument most people associate with folk songs and train-yard buskers — sounds like something else entirely: fluid, chromatic, simultaneously raw and sophisticated, as if the blues and jazz have finally agreed to live together. It is the sound of a man who has spent a lifetime bending an instrument to his will.

Early Life: From Havana to Port Hope

Carlos del Junco was born on May 17, 1958, in Havana, Cuba — the youngest of six children in a family where classical music training was simply part of growing up. His parents, who had previously spent time in Canada, fled Cuba following Fidel Castro’s rise to power and settled in the Toronto area when Carlos was just one year old. It was a journey that would shape him in ways no one could have anticipated.

His surname, del Junco, translates loosely from Spanish as “of the reeds” — a detail that, in retrospect, feels almost too fitting for a man who would make the reed-driven harmonica his life’s instrument.

Del Junco picked up the harmonica at fourteen, and immediately took to it with a conviction that went beyond casual interest. His very first public performance came at a student talent night, where he played a pair of Leadbelly numbers alongside his high school math teacher on guitar. It was an unpretentious beginning for someone who would eventually be spoken of in the same breath as the greatest harmonica players in the world.

In the years that followed, he immersed himself in the blues tradition, studying the work of Paul Butterfield, Little Walter, and James Cotton, while also gravitating toward more progressive voices like Lee Oskar and the underappreciated David Burgin.

An Artist Made of More Than One Thing

Before Carlos del Junco became a full-time musician, he spent his early twenties deep in the visual arts. He enrolled at the Ontario College of Art, where he graduated with honours after a four-year program majoring in sculpture. The discipline of that training has never entirely left him. “Music is just a different way of creating textures and shapes,” he has said — a perspective that helps explain the architectural quality of his playing, the way he constructs solos with an awareness of space and form that eludes less thoughtful musicians.

The Overblow Revolution: Carlos del Junco’s Signature Technique

The technical centrepiece of del Junco’s playing is a technique known as overblowing — a method of coaxing notes from a diatonic harmonica that the instrument, by conventional thinking, is not supposed to produce. By manipulating breath and embouchure in highly precise ways, an overblow player can access the full chromatic scale on what is otherwise a limited, key-specific instrument. It is fiendishly difficult, and only a handful of players in the world do it convincingly.

Learning from Howard Levy

Del Junco learned the overblow technique from its primary modern architect: Howard Levy, the jazz virtuoso and founding member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Starting in the late 1980s, Carlos del Junco studied with Levy for four consecutive years during Blues and Swing week at the Augusta Heritage Centre in West Virginia. He later received a Canada Council grant that allowed him to study privately with Levy in Chicago for two months in 1995.

A Blues Voice with a Jazz Sensibility

If Levy was the originator, del Junco became one of its most committed and expressive practitioners — extending the technique into the blues idiom in a way that gave the music emotional weight and rawness to match its technical ambition. He has described his own harmonica voice as a marriage between early David Burgin and Howard Levy: a blues attitude with a jazzy sensibility.

Gold Medals, Junos, and the Maple Blues Awards

The accolades that followed Carlos del Junco’s years of study are considerable by any measure. At the Hohner World Harmonica Championship in Trossingen, Germany, in 1993, he took home two gold medals — one in diatonic blues and one in diatonic jazz — a rare double that underscored his fluency across both traditions. He has since returned to Trossingen as both a workshop instructor and a competition judge.

Canada’s music industry took notice as well. Jazz Report magazine named him Blues Musician of the Year in 1996. His 1998 album Big Boy earned him a Juno Award nomination for Best Blues Album — the Juno being Canada’s equivalent of the Grammy. He received a second Juno nomination in 2010 for Steady Movin’. NOW Magazine, Toronto’s cultural barometer, gave him its Best Blues Award in 2005.

Most significantly, the Toronto Blues Society’s Maple Blues Awards named del Junco Harmonica Player of the Year eight times — a record that reflects not a single career peak but sustained excellence over more than two decades of competition.

Carlos del Junco: Awards at a Glance

Discography: The Blues Mongrels and a Restless Catalogue

Carlos del Junco’s recording career began in 1993 with Blues, a collaboration with the late guitarist and vocalist Bill Kinnear, recorded in an intimate acoustic format that earned five out of six reviewers from the Toronto Blues Society placing it among their top ten releases of the year. Further albums followed: Big Road Blues (1995) with guitarist Thom Roberts, Just Your Fool (1996), Big Boy (1999), Up and at ‘Em (2001), and Blues Mongrel (2005).

His band, the Blues Mongrels, became the vehicle for his most expansive musical thinking — a unit capable of moving between Chicago blues, New Orleans second-line grooves, Latin rhythms, swing, ska, and roots rock without losing the thread that holds it all together.

His most recent studio release, Blues Etc. (2016), was recorded in a stripped-back duo format alongside guitarist Jimmy Bowskill. True to del Junco’s pragmatic approach to the modern music landscape, the record was captured, mixed, and mastered on a laptop computer in his living room in Port Hope, Ontario.

Carlos del Junco Discography

A Musician’s Musician: Teaching and Legacy

Beyond the studio and the stage, Carlos del Junco has devoted considerable energy to teaching. He has led workshops at Hohner’s headquarters in Trossingen and runs an instructional website, harmonicapractice.com, aimed at students at every level. He has performed alongside Howard Levy and Belgian jazz legend Toots Thielemans at the 2000 Harmonica Summit in Minneapolis — a gathering that placed him squarely in the company of the instrument’s elite.

He has played major jazz and blues festivals across Canada and the United States, opened for Ray Charles, and toured Europe extensively. Critics at the Globe and Mail have called him “a model of focus and urgency — a true virtuoso.” The Edmonton Journal placed him “in a class with such greats as Toots Thielemans, Paul Butterfield, and Howard Levy.”

Conclusion: Of the Reeds

Nearly five decades after picking up his first harmonica, Carlos del Junco continues to play, teach, and push at the edges of what a small reed instrument can do. His story is one of immigration and adaptation, of art school and blues joints, of an unlikely instrument elevated by uncommon dedication. The name del Junco means “of the reeds.” He has spent a lifetime making sure those reeds say something worth hearing.

For more information, visit carlosdeljunco.com or his instructional site harmonicapractice.com.

Joe Ruicci