Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Terry Rand pulls a harmonica toward his mouth, his enormous hands enveloping the shiny silver instrument.
The 71-year-old pauses for a moment, as if winding himself up, and then begins to blow. A short rendition of "Yankee Doodle" fills his office with staccato harmonica bursts.
The Naples financial planner started playing the harmonica for fun 60 years ago, trying to play along with his grandfather's Cajun band as a kid in Green Bay, Wis.
He continued to hone his skills during his basketball career — first as an All-America center at Marquette University and later as an AAU professional, filling locker rooms and the team bus with old church songs, or the occasional bayou ditty.
He's never played the instrument professionally, but he's always playing something.
Somewhere. Anywhere. And he says he's passed out more than 400 harmonicas to people around Southwest Florida.
In the past three years, he's started to see a new use for his old friend, the harmonica. He thinks it's an overlooked way for people to exercise their lungs.
Sitting in his office, surrounded by stacks of financial data, Rand blows and draws his way through another chorus of "Yankee Doodle," maybe 20 seconds of playing.
"That right there," he says, "was the equivalent of walking a 1/10th of a mile. It's a real workout for your lungs."
Terry Rand, 71, has been playing the harmonica for 60 years.
"I can play anything I can hum," he says about the variety of music he plays, from folk to country and western. Rand says playing the harmonica good exercise for the lungs. He gives away harmonicas to people hoping they will learn to play.
The lung is like a bellows, expanding and contracting with each breath. When you are young, the entire system works to inhale and exhale. But as time goes on, Rand says, people use less and less of their lung capacity for regular breathing.
"By the time you are my age, you are just using a small portion at the top of your lungs," he says.
Unless you play the harmonica.
The says that unlike other devices built to exercise the lungs, the harmonica requires the player to exhale and inhale deeply.
"There are plenty of machines that make you blow out, but nothing that works the other way," he says. "It makes a big difference."
Dr.
Kenneth Bookman, a pulmonary specialist at Anchor Health Centers, says there is no research to back up this hypothesis, but that it makes sense. "It's probably a very good thing, like any other exercise," he says.
Bookman says that people lose some portion of lung capacity that can't be regained as they get older.
But more important than total lung capacity, it's how the remaining capacity works.
"I have patients with lots of capacity come in complaining of shortness of breath, while patients with diminished capacity are playing tennis," Bookman says. "The tennis players are doing the right thing.
The harmonica can be like that."
The idea of the harmonica as an exercise machine came to Rand about three years ago after a client had a series of strokes. He had trouble moving and speaking.
He couldn't walk.
Rand has many different kinds of harmonicas, in different sizes and different qualities.
Rand gave him a harmonica and told him to play it.
Just a simple tune: "When the Saints Go Marching In."
The client's wife would later tell Rand that her husband never played the song correctly. But that didn't matter.
"Just the act of playing helped," Rand says. "Pretty soon he was recovering much more quickly than expected. He regained a lot of the functions he lost.
"
The improvement sold Rand on the idea that the harmonica can become more than a musical instrument.
"I think the perfect workout would be playing the harmonica while walking on a treadmill," he says.
Invented in 1821 by German clockmaker Christian Ludwig Buschmann, the harmonica is a simple-looking yet deceptively complex instrument.
The basic harmonica has 10 holes, each housing two reeds. One reed plays when blowing; the other when drawing, or inhaling.
Pretty simple stuff.
"If you can hum, then you can play a harmonica," Rand says.
But it's more complex than that. Because the holes are so closely aligned, it's nearly impossible to play one note by itself without using your tongue to block some of the neighboring holes.
This tongue blocking, Rand says, brings a second health benefit. The concentration can help keep seniors' minds active and help kids learn to focus, he says.
On of Rand's converts is Grant Thigpen, pastor of New Hope Ministries.
He wasn't sure about Rand's theories, but he was willing to offer his church as sort of a laboratory. Rand passed out a few dozen in a couple of sessions at the church, each time teaching everyone to play "When the Saints Go Marching In" — because of the song's simplicity.
"When he mentioned that he was pursuing an angle with health benefits, I started to think about it a little and it started making sense," Thigpen says.
"That was a few months ago. We'll see what happens."
Thigpen has viewed the harmonica as therapeutic ever since it brought him peach as a soldier in Vietnam.
The troubles of war melted behind him, he says. Things got a little clearer.
"I'd just sit and play," he says of his days on the front lines.
"There was nothing quite like it."
With the right amount of practice and a little skill, the harmonics can open up a different worlds of music, Rand says. And so, like a modern-day Pied Piper, he passes them out to people he meets, many of them older.
"We give them a G harmonica, because the C is too high pitched," Rand says. "Old people don't like high-pitched sounds. It's too shrill for them.
"
With a slightly lower-pitched scale, there is something soothing about the G-key harmonica.
Rand is thinking big.
His push for using the instrument as a way to improve health has led him to the Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica.
With their help, and with a push from a national harmonica manufacturer, Rand is hoping to take his initiative nationwide.
Tom Stryker, president of the society, says enthusiasm has grown since Rand was featured in a front-page Wall Street Journal article.
"That really got people calling," Rand says.
For Stryker, this is a way to get the instrument back into the pop music landscape. Outside of "American Idol" winner Taylor Hicks, the instrument has been favored by older musicians playing blues, jazz and country.
"In the '30s and '40s the harmonica was really popular," Stryker says.
"In 1947, a harmonica group sold 12 million copies of a single. But now, it's not getting a lot of play."
Even musical giants like Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and John Lennon couldn't bring the harmonica back into the mainstream.
"But this might be a way to take (the harmonica) forward," Stryker says.
And, if Rand is correct, we'll all breathe easier.
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