Big Harp George’ Bisharat goes from law school to the blues club
Andrew Gilbert October 10, 2018 Updated: October 12, 2018, 9:22 am
George Bisharat (a.k.a. Big Harp George) performs on stage with Kid Andersen and Friends for the album release of “Uptown Cool” at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland.
Photo: Sarahbeth Maney, Special to The Chronicle
Any journey that takes a man from the top ranks of the legal profession to headlining at blues joints is likely to be marked by unexpected twists. Even considering those divergent pursuits, Big Harp George walked a long and remarkable path from one world to the other.
Raised in Southern California and Sacramento in a prosperous Palestinian American family, George Bisharat played in rock bands as a teenager. Studying at UC Davis in the early 1970s, he decided to do his junior year abroad in Lebanon, following a family tradition of enrolling in the American University of Beirut. That’s where he truly discovered the blues.
In his first weeks on campus he decided to take a music class, “and I started hearing rumors about a blues band composed of a crazy mix of Arabs: Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians and Americans — all students at the university,” recalls Bisharat. (He is now celebrating the release of his third Big Harp George album, “Uptown Cool,” with a series of shows around the Bay Area, including Friday, Oct. 12, at Biscuits & Blues in San Francisco; Wednesday, Oct. 17, at Redwood City’s Club Fox; and Oct. 26 at Fremont’s Smoking Pig BBQ.)
A game but green harmonica player and vocalist, Bisharat joined the combo, which he dubbed the Bliss Street Blues Band, and got an education in the music’s foundational figures.
“Those guys knew much more about blues than I did,” he says. “They introduced me to the greats: Junior Wells, James Cotton, Little Walter. That was the year I grew the most as a harmonica player and started gaining an understanding of the genre.”
Bisharat, 63, is an accomplished musician as well as a commentator on Middle East politics and a law professor emeritus.
Photo: Sarahbeth Maney, Special to The Chronicle
If Bisharat’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s a widely quoted commentator on Middle Eastern politics whose columns and editorials have run in newspapers around the world, including The Chronicle.
A spokesman for the Palestinian cause, he’s a professor emeritus at UC Hastings College of the Law, where he continues to teach courses on criminal procedure.
While music remained a passion, he put performing on the back burner for decades while pursuing a legal career. Bisharat started to think about moving music to the foreground with encouragement from Beirut-born guitarist Otis Grand, a buddy from the Bliss Street days who came to town in the late 1990s to perform at the San Francisco Blues Festival.
“Otis took me aside and said, ‘Your playing is professional quality, get yourself a band, get out there and play!’” Bisharat says. “I told him, ‘I’m a law professor, living a comfortable life. I’m not living a blues life. What do I have to offer to the blues?’ He said, ‘You never know until you try.’”
Inspired by the dazzling chromatic harmonica playing of Paul deLay, he added the harmonically advanced harp to his arsenal. He was still teaching full time when he introduced his natty bandstand persona Big Harp George and released his 2014 debut album “Chromaticism,” a project designed to showcase the harp’s potential to expand the blues idiom and his personal take on the music.
“Up until 2012 I would have characterized my own playing as derivative,” says Bisharat, whose original songs often offer incisive commentary on the state of the society. “Why bother recording what other people have done before and done better? But when I started getting facile on chromatic, I heard my own musical voice emerge.”
Like so many other blues artists, he has found a home at San Jose’s Greaseland Studios, where he has recorded his three albums with many of the region’s top blues artists. Guitarist Kid Andersen, who owns and runs Greaseland, joins Big Harp George on the album release gigs.
“It’s been really cool to seem him growing musically. Each album is better than the last,” Andersen says. “It’s the beautiful thing about blues, you don’t have to be young to be a rising star.”
Big Harp George “Uptown Cool”: 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12. $24. Biscuits & Blues, 401 Mason St., S.F. 415-292-2583. www.biscuitsandblues.com; 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17. $7. Club Fox, 2209 Broadway, Redwood City. 877-435-9849, www.clubfoxrwc.com; 9 p.m. Oct. 26. Free, with purchase of food and drinks. Smoking Pig BBQ, 3340 Mowry Ave., Fremont. 510-713-1854. smokingpigbbq.net
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