Born on the Isle of Man, Harry Manx moved to Canada with his parents when he was a child, started working around the Toronto music scene at the age of fifteen and worked his way up to a gig as the sound man at the El Mocambo club before heading back to Europe in the late seventies and ended up in Japan, where he spent a decade.
Then, in 1990 he heard a recording of the Indian slide guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, the inventor of the twenty-stringed Mohan Veena. He’d already spent years playing slide guitar, but the possibilities associated with the cross between a guitar and a sitar intrigued him to the point where he contacted Bhatt and joined him in Rajasthan, spending five years unlearning most of what he knew, exploring the connection between Indian ragas and blues scales and mastering what has become his trademark instrument. He also plays slide guitar, harmonica, six-string banjo and stomp box.
Since 2000 he’s been based back in Canada, but he gets around, venturing as far as the wilds of the Proserpine Cultural Centre (reviewed here).
Discography
2001 Dog My Cat
2002 Wise and Otherwise
2003 Jubilee (with Kevin Breit)
Road Ragas
2004 West Eats Meet
2005 Mantras for Madmen
2007 In Good We Trust (with Kevin Breit)
2008 Live at the Glenn Gould Studio
2009 Bread and Buddha
2011 Strictly Whatever (with Kevin Breit)
2013 Om Suite Ohm