The HARPER IMAGE by Thomas A. Harrison, Arts Editor, Mobile Press-Register
Aug 05 2008

No, he's not that Ben Harper.

But he is a guitarist of some repute, even if he doesn't play one on TV. He is also a husband, father, radio maven, teacher, techno-whiz, photographer and bon vivant.

Harper, 44, is perhaps best known these days as guitarist for the successful Celtic ensemble Mithril, but he also performs rock and jazz, often with his gifted brother Steve. Ben occasionally plays bass for cabaret singer and actress Paula Broadwater, who likes the chemistry.

"I love playing with Ben," she says, "but his dance card gets filled pretty quickly. He's always my first choice when I can get the guy. He's a fine player and an even finer person. He's just a neat guy to be around. He does wear a lot of hats, but he wears them all with a lot of grace and genuine kindness."

Harper's ability to handle an extraordinary range of duties, make him a valuable player at the Larkins Music Center in downtown Mobile. In addition to his duties as stage manager for the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, Harper is box office assistant and Preludes instructor for the MSO. He is also the orchestra's Web site designer and designated photographer.

"We often joke with Ben that beyond regular duties, he should ‘expect other duties as assigned,'" says Stephen D. Hedrick, executive director of Mobile Symphony, "which means that when we need something done, we call on him. And look what that's led to. Recently Ben's photos appeared in a national publication, Symphony magazine, and now they'll be featured as an art exhibit."

That exhibit, titled "The Mobile Symphony - Creative Force," opens Friday and will remain on view through Aug. 29 at the Mobile Arts Council. Most of the images were taken during the 2007-08 season, Harper says. The exceptions are images of young string players from the Preludes program.

Sarah Wright, education director for the MSO, says Harper's efforts add a needed dimension to the organization's efforts to reach a wider audience.

"People are so visual today," she says. "For years we have been trying to tell the Mobile Symphony story by describing sounds, sights (and) feelings, and were frustrated that our attempts didn't capture the essence of what we do.

"Ben knows the story. He is a teacher, performer and a classical music aficionado (and) his pictures make our story a much better read. Telling you that there are 100 children playing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle' on their little violins doesn't have nearly the impact of his Technicolor photo."

Harper's solo exhibition will include 18 images of varying sizes, and includes a large diptych of Joshua Bell photos.

Harper confesses he was "in over my head" in selecting images for the show, so he called in his "Jedi Master," Catt Sirten, a well known photographer and longtime host of "Radio Avalon."

"Catt and I go way back," Harper says. "He's also an amazing photographer. I said, ‘Help me, Obi-wan. You're my only hope.'"

Together they winnowed 100 images down to 40 and eventually to a manageable 18, essentially a retrospective of the entire MSO season, according to Harper. "Three shots Joshua Bell, one of Olga Kern, one of Pablo Sainz-Villegas, one of (co-concertmaster) Enen Yu in rehearsal as the soloist for ‘Beethoven & Blue Jeans.'"

The photogenic violinist was all by herself on the Saenger stage. Harper was in the balcony with the shutter down on his Nikon D80. "She looked up and gave me the big Enen smile," he says.

Harper says the images in this exhibition tell little stories about their subjects and reveal communication between and among the musicians and Speck.

"It's so hard to get that," he says. "These shows go so fast. I've basically got two hours. If you're trying to get the guest artist, you've got 45 minutes and that's it. No do-overs. . . . A lot of times my style is to hold the shutter down and see what you get. Take as many as you can and throw out the crap."

Occasionally Harper's results show a touch of serendipity, as when a musician is in focus but the shutter speed "smears" the hands or another aspect of the image.

"That can be good or bad," Harper says. "With Joshua Bell, there is not one picture of him totally in focus because he moves so much - his arm is smeared or his hair is flying over or something. You call it ‘capturing the action,' but I think it's just an artsy way of saying it's out of focus."

The inspiration for Harper's solo exhibition came from violinist Tom Morley, also a co-founder of Mithril and Silverwood.

"I admired the photos (Ben) had been putting up at the MSO Web site over the past year and realized he had a great eye and a unique perspective," Morley says, "in that he could move around the Saenger during a concert the way no one else would be allowed to, resulting in some amazing concert shots.

"And only those of us who thought to go to the Web site would ever see them. That's when I mentioned it to Charlie Smoke and hooked the two of them up with the idea of Ben having a show. So you can see that I'm one of Ben's biggest supporters!"

Like many people, Morley marvels at Harper's ease and facility at multi-tasking."

"I don't know how Ben does so many things so well for so many people," he says. "I am a classic Type-A male who is lucky to be able to do one thing at a time for one person at a time! So I don't see how he does it. But when he tells someone he can do something, he most certainly finds a way to do it. He'll learn how to do it from scratch if he needs to, but he will do it and do it well.

"That's the kind of guy you want on your team, so all the people who work with Ben in any capacity should consider themselves lucky. I know I do!"

One of the joys of being the MSO photographer is the venue.

"The Saenger is awesome," Harper says. "I love shooting in the Saenger because there are all sorts of nooks and crannies . . . my favorite spot is backstage in the wings. There are stairs that go up to the dressing room and I'm usually right there, You're shooting straight into Scott. Then, if you're really adventurous, you go up one floor and open up that fire door. It's my favorite spot to shoot from. You're shooting straight down into the orchestra."

It helps that Ben Harper is no stranger to the concert hall.

"I played in the Port City Symphony, the Gulf Coast Symphony and I've been to more orchestra concerts than just about anybody I know," he says. "You file away mental (images) as to what would make a cool picture.

"What you see from the audience is the back of the conductor's head and the first row, the violins and cellos, and you don't see anything else. That picture to me is the least interesting of any angle you can get, so I'm constantly looking for stuff you don't see. The more I can shoot Scott's facial expressions and the musicians' faces, the better."

Harper says he never shoots photos from the audience.

"My whole deal is, I cannot be seen or heard," he says. "People spend a lot of money to come to the orchestra, and the second anyone notices me, I'm out of a job."

A sound philosophy, although Harper has more job security than most. The irony is, the photo gig almost didn't get off the runway. Harper had Nikonophobia. The camera unnerved him.

"I was intimidated by it for several months," he says. "We bought it in November (2006) and I didn't shoot a show until after Itzhak Perlman (March 2007)," he says. "I did shoot the Yuri Rozum concert (in April). That was my first one."

On one level, a symphonic concert is a gathering of "a lot of interesting people doing really interesting stuff," Harper says. "Thank God for the zoom lens, because it's the only way you can get in there. I hide a lot - it's like being the ‘sniper' of photography. The Saenger has those wonderful windows and doors of the lobby, and . . . I shoot a lot through the glass of the lobby doors with the zoom lens."

Most of the shots of classical guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas, resplendent in a shimmering gold suit, a la Elvis, were shot through the lobby doors, according to Harper.

He says photography sort of found him. In high school he "dabbled" a bit with a movie camera, creating stop-action films a la Monty Python. He didn't get serious about still photography until he met Amanda Donald 11 years ago. The couple celebrated their 10th anniversary in May.

"When Amanda and I got married, we had this big house and we put in a darkroom," Harper says. "That was at the start of the digital age. Then we had kids and we had get all the chemicals out of the house, so that went by the wayside."

Ben and Amanda Harper have two children, Billy, 7, and Ruth, 5. Both attend Council Traditional School. Billy will begin cello next year through the MSO strings program in third grade after two years of Preludes. Ruth starts Preludes next year, which will give Harper four consecutive years of teaching one of his children.

Amanda, a massage therapist and business owner, says her husband's penchant for photography caught her quite by surprise.

"Because I'm the photographer in the family," she says, laughing. "When we met, I was the one with the cool camera and the darkroom and all of that. Somewhere along the way I went a different path and had two kids. Now he's the photographer."

She loves the Mobile Symphony images, and when Ben comes home after a rehearsal or a concert, they download the photos and view them on Amanda's laptop.

"We pull them all up and go over them together and say, ‘That, that! Not that one so much. I like that!'" she says. "It's a lot of fun."

This "whole photography gig" has required a few adjustments, says Ben.

"I had to buy an external hard drive," Harper explains. "I clogged up the whole symphony system, (My new hard drive) has got a bazillion gigs and it's not even a quarter full. I'm not blowing away anything unless it's obviously awful - because ... when you're shooting, you don't know what you're shooting for. It's like you don't know who needs what."

Digital photography has definitely leveled the playing field, Harper says, and made it possible to do what he does.

"I can't imagine doing any of this on film," he says. "Joshua Bell is my worst/best example. With the rehearsal, the gig and the after-party, I shot over 4,000 pictures that night. Granted, half of them were out-of-focus garbage, but I probably have more pictures of Joshua Bell than anyone in a three-state area. It's Joshua Bell, so you've gotta take as many as you can."

The addition of photography to his ever-lengthening resumé is just another of Harper's varied interests. He says he is making up for lost time.

"I've always been interested in a lot of things," he says. "I spent so many years just getting by, doing what was necessary to get by in school, so I'm sort of paying back the karma on that." He laughs. "This is the kind of job where there are just a lot of things I'm really interested in that nobody currently is doing, so I sort of just say, ‘Yeah, I'll do it! Web site? Sure. Teach? Sure, I'll do it.'"

Scott Speck, music director for the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, says Harper is "incredibly valuable to our organization, and a great guy to boot."

"Whatever he does, he does cheerfully," Speck says via e-mail from St. Petersburg, Russia. "He is constantly telling me how much he loves his job. Ben's photography has impressed me from the start, and it's only getting better. He is able to catch those rare characteristic moments that make a photograph great. His musical knowledge, believe it or not, is essential to this task - he only clicks the shutter during the forte passages, and he knows exactly where those are and when they end."

Harper gets his talent honestly. His father, Andrew Harper, was chairman of the University of South Alabama music department for 17 years (1982-99) founder of the Port City Symphony (1986) and conductor of the Gulf Coast Symphony.

"We were never told we couldn't do things," says Ben. "If we had an interest, we pursued it. All my siblings are artists or musicians, especially little brother. I'm sort of the non-artistic one in the family. I could never draw a straight line, so I guess this is my way of going at the artistic angle."

Harper says the family led a nomadic life. He was born in Cleveland, Tenn., moved to Indiana, then to Oklahoma and Alabama. Ben worked with the music store Peaches 13 years and eventually became store director. The job took him to Fort Myers, Fla., Orlando, Fla., Greensboro, N.C., and back to Mobile, where he has lived since 1987.

Harper's brother Andy, 50, moved to Los Angeles, where he is a sound editor for Fox. Steve Harper, 39, used to live in Waveland, Miss., but lost his home in Hurricane Katrina and now lives and works in Bay St. Louis, Miss. He teaches elementary school art and music. Ben describes him as "a phenomenal guitarist and a gifted painter." Their sister, Mary Helen, 46, is a cellist in Spain.

"If it can tie into music, I'm interested in it," Harper says. "If I can't find a way to relate it to music, I can appreciate it but it doesn't really thrill me. With the exception of a summer working in a beauty-supplies warehouse - which was the low point of my adult life - I never had a job that was not closely tied to music."

In 1987, Harper's dad lined up an interview with WHIL-FM, where he was hired on the spot. He was the "fill-in-late-night-call-me-whenever guy," he says. "The key to the job at that point was knowledge about orchestra, having some command of foreign language pronunciation and being able to talk without sounding like a complete moron."

Not a problem. Harper was raised in a musical household, and he probably had a better command of Italian, German and French pronunciation than many linguists.

"My favorite childhood memory is Saturday afternoon watching football on TV with my dad with the sound off and the Metropolitan Opera on," he says.

Andra Bohnet, Ph.D., is professor of flute at the University of South Alabama and also a founding member of the Celtic ensemble Mithril and the classical group, Silverwood Quartet.

"Ben has to be one of the few people on the planet that everybody likes!" she says. "He loves to make everybody happy. If you ask him to do something, he will do it - often to his own detriment."

Harper loves music of all kinds and has "the most amazing collection of records," Bohnet says, "and (he) pretty much knows everything on them. The styles range from hardcore classical to the most current rock/pop stuff. Of course, he used to work in a record store, which was perfect for him, surrounded by what he loves.

"Ben totally gets into what he does musically," says Bohnet. "He's a rock star in his head all of the time. Before Mithril, when he played with Fez and lesser-known bands I never saw . . . he would strut the stage in his tight leather pants and has all of the rock star moves down, he even has ¤'em numbered. His pre-‘Sparky' nickname was ‘Chaos,' the rock persona."

Tim Stanton, a member of the band Ugli Stick, was the original drummer for Fez, which featured Ben and Steve Harper.

"We were all coming out of various points in our lives and Fez was cathartic for all of us," Stanton says. "We decided we wanted to do something nobody else was doing and have total fun with it. Ben's up for anything and he threw himself into that and, like, he became totally different persona.

"Ben is a very mild-mannered, meek person. He is calm, cool and collected and one of the most laid-back people I've ever met. But onstage he's absolutely a beast - he is so much fun to watch. It's almost like an exorcism to watch him on stage . . . jumping off amps, running around the stage. All that fun was very contagious."

Fez was "very full on, in your face," Stanton says, "and easily one of the most fun musical experiences in my life."

Stanton says Harper taught him that business is business and "not to take everything so personally. For a passionate, crabby guy like me, it's nice to have someone say, ‘Just shut up, man, and play.'"

At the other end of the musical spectrum is Mithril, the immensely popular Celtic band that performs along the Gulf Coast and points north and west. Harper is so beloved by his colleagues that they dedicated a tune to him on their 2007 CD, "Mithril: The Return Home." Titled "Sparky at the Wheel," the song was written after a white-knuckle drive home from Michigan in a blinding thunderstorm.

Harper says his wife gave him the nickname during a flurry of text-messages. He says it was "an offhand comment" for which he has received "terrible grief," he told the Press-Register in 2007.

"It's a term of endearment," he says, "and the band has taken it and run with it - and immortalized it in song."

Bohnet has known Harper the longest of the Mithrilians because he was one of her first flute students.

"He was a Music Ed. major at USA and his dad had just hired me to be the flute teacher out there," she recalls. "I figured if I could get his son to play well - not an easy task - I'd score points with the boss. Ben had an OK tone but almost zero technique, which of course takes practice, and a really crummy instrument. But we were relatively close in age and hit it off, and when you work with somebody on an individual basis, good things can happen."

Bohnet says Harper never thought he could be a good flutist, "but I rode him pretty hard - he still vividly remembers me saying, ‘That was deplorable' after he played something or other. He got better (and his) dad forked out for a new flute and he gained some self-confidence, (and) he played second flute to me at several of the early Port City Symphony concerts."

"He had terrible performance anxiety, though, and when the senior recital came around we were both pretty worried he would freak out. But, he had worked hard on the repertoire . . . and I knew he was capable of doing well if the stars aligned properly."

Bohnet says she brought Harper a single-serving bottle of wine before the recital "and crossed my fingers."

"Believe me, it's much more nerve-wracking when I have a student playing then when I am playing myself," she says, "and this was a high-stakes event, Boss's son and all, and I genuinely liked Ben! Anyway, he played well and at the end of the recital tears were streaming down my face, both out of sheer happiness that he did it and relief, I think!"

Amanda Harper says Ben has always been driven to perform many tasks simultaneously.

"We're both very fortunate that we have careers we love," she says. "Our careers are demanding but we love them. I think we get the patience from each other and we realize how fortunate we are."

Another irony: Amanda is a massage therapist, but her husband does not like to be massaged.

"It works out really well," she laughs. "Like Ben, I give 150 percent and I don't want to work when I come home."

Ben Harper has been way busier over the past few years, but "the more he enjoys what he is doing, the more he wants to do," his wife says.

And how is he able to do this?

"He's a rock," Amanda says. "He is the calm at the center of the storm - but more than that, Ben is the most ethical person I ever met in my life. At the end of the day, no matter what the situation, I know he's going to do what's right."

Amanda says she would like to see her husband write some music.

"He always has something going in his head, ideas of his own," she says. "But hands down, the most important thing is that he always do something he loves."

A version of this story appeared in the July 27 editions of the Press-Register's Living Arts section.