Norton Buffalo and the Knockouts
Norton Buffalo is regarded as one of the most versatile and talented harmonica players in the music business. In Rock, R & B, and Blues circles, as well as in New Age, Country and Jazz circles, he is widely acclaimed as the finest multigenre harmonica player of our time.
His new release, King of the Highway, on Blind Pig Records, is surprisingly, his first solo release since his late-70’s albums on Capitol. Buffalo has hardly been idle during that time. For the last twenty-five years Buffalo has been a highly celebrated member of the Steve Miller Band, recorded and toured with some of the top names in music, worked in movies and television, and performed with his own band, the Knockouts.
In addition to his work on record and on stage with Steve Miller, who spotlights Norton’s playing at shows and introduces him as ”...my partner in harmony…” Buffalo has also been highly sought after as a recording artist, having played on over 100 albums by artists as diverse as Bonnie Raitt (he did that searing harmonica solo on “Runaway”), Kenny Loggins, The Doobie Brothers (including the Grammy Award-winning “Minute By Minute”, The Marshall Tucker Band, Johnny Cash, David Grisman, Juice Newton, Laurie Lewis and Elvin Bishop.
Besides performing live before the millions of Steve Miller fans he has played for over the last quarter century, Norton’s musical talents are also in demand by notable musicians such as Kenny Loggins and Olivia Newton-John, who have also enlisted the harmonica ace for their U.S. touring bands.
Buffalo was born in Oakland, California into a musical family – his father was a harmonica player and his mother a vocalist in nightclubs in San Francisco in the 1940’s. Buffalo’s great-uncle won an Academy Award for his contribution to the music of “The Wizard of Oz”, and worked as a film composer for MGM for several decades, composing many well-known hits and scoring many of their classics of that golden cinematic era.
Norton grew up in the post-war housing of Richmond, California, a blue-collar, industrial town on the San Francisco Bay, giving him a culturally mixed and musically diverse background. When he was seven, Norton started learning harp from his father, and won his first talent contest in the sixth grade (1963). In high school he began playing in rock and roll and soul bands as well as in the school symphonic band, marching band, jazz band and pep band on both trombone and harmonica. In his later school years he began listening to jazz day and night. Though he continued playing primarily in rock and roll bands his musical mistress was jazz…Norton was writing complex horn charts and having a ball fitting his harp into all types of offbeat musical arrangements and jazz-rock compositions. While in college as a psych major, Norton was performing in bands as well as working a full time graveyard shift job at a bank. Buffalo moved to San Francisco, Berkeley, then in 1972 having left college and his bank job behind, Norton chose to devote his life to playing music and migrated north to Sonoma, in the heart of California’s wine country. Although he was still playing mostly rock and roll, he started expanding his horizons, by getting into bluegrass, western swing and country music, all the while working on his songwriting skills and honing his vocal and harmonica chops. In mid 1973 Norton combined his song writing and musical talents with multi-instrumentalist John McFee to record several songs at Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s studio in Novato, CA. All but one of these cuts later appeared on Norton’s two Capitol LPs. In early 1975, he moved to Los Angeles for a short time, making his living playing talent contests, performing solo, and even acting in a play, all the while trying to get a recording deal by shopping tapes around to the many connections he made in the music business. After about 8 months in Southern California, Norton moved back to the Valley of The Moon and soon after, started playing in an off-shoot of the Commander Cody band, The Moonlighters. Later that year he started playing with Commander Cody which led to an early 1976 tour to Europe and a live album from that tour entitled We’ve Got A Live One Here.
It was during this same time that Norton met Steve Miller during the recording of Fly Like An Eagle. Their musical friendship grew and after the release of that album, Norton joined Steve out on the road for his 1976 summer tour. In 1977 Norton released the first of two superb solo albums for Capitol Records. Lovin’ in the Valley of the Moon not only highlighted his skills on the harp, but also his talents as a songwriter, producer, and a powerful new talent. With this release under his belt, in 1977, Norton continued to tour with the Steve Miller Band, and this year, as well as being a member of Steve’s band, his own group, The Stampede, opened up all of Miller’s shows at Coliseums across the US. In early 1978 Norton went to Hollywood to work playing music and acting in Bette Midler’s successful screen debut “The Rose”. The fall of that year brought the release of Buffalo’s second outstanding Capitol LP, Desert Horizon, which featured some experimental electric harmonica as well as the celebrated Tower of Power horns.
In the early 80’s Norton hooked up again with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and keyboardist Merl Saunders, along with Bobby Vega, Vicki Randle and several other Bay Area musical luminaries and started a band called High Noon, an experimental and extremely diverse group that did performances throughout California for about a year and a half, including several performances with The Jerry Garcia band and often featuring the stellar vocals of Joan Baez as a guest performer. High Noon did some great recordings but the group unfortunately fell apart due to the complications of so many conflicting schedules.
In 1987 Norton teamed up with legendary Bay Area slide guitar player Roy Rogers to form a powerful performing duet. The special magic between these two virtuosos was captured on two albums for Blind Pig Records. In 1991 they released the all-acoustic R&B. One of the tracks from that CD, “Song for Jessica”, was honored with a Grammy Nomination as Best Country Instrumental Performance, and the video of another track, “Ain’t No Bread In the Breadbox”, got airplay on TNN. Downbeat said of the album, “All it takes is a sampling of the slide guitar/harmonica dialog on any one of these songs to comprehend how potent and exciting the chemistry is between Rogers and Buffalo.”
The following year the pair released Travellin’ Tracks, which included some live tracks as well as some studio tracks on which they were joined by a rhythm section. People magazine called the recording “an album with more bounce than a book of bad checks…a spirited mix of souped-up slide guitar and blustery blues harmonica.”
The movie industry has also recognized Norton’s special magnetism, resulting in several noteworthy film accomplishments. Norton has many movies to his credit, including his acting and musical role in The Rose, as well as a small part in Michael Cimino’s epic western Heaven’s Gate. Norton composed and produced all of the music for two feature films, Eddie Macon’s Run, starring Kirk Douglas and John Schneider, and Stacy’s Knights, one of Kevin Costner’s first films. Other films he contributed his harmonica mastery to include Dogpound Shuffle (with David Soul), Oliver Stone’s The Doors (with Val Kilmer) and 68 (Featuring Neil Young).
Norton is no stranger to television either, with numerous TV performances down through the years with such notables as Bonnie Raitt, Steve Miller, America, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Lacy J. Dalton, Kris Kristofferson, Roy Rogers and Willie Dixon, even a guest appearance (years ago) on Starsky & Hutch.
As part of the Steve Miller Band, he’s appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Arsenio Hall Show, as well as The David Letterman Show. He and his band have been featured on Austin City Limits, and Buffalo was recently featured on a San Francisco based TV show, Bay Area Backroads.
Other television work included writing and producing the music scores for two episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries” and playing harmonica on several episodes for both “The Twilight Zone” and “Unsolved Mysteries”. In addition, his harmonica graces several “Garfield” and “Peanuts” cartoons. Norton also sang the first theme song for the “Garfield and Friends” cartoon series. In 1994 and 1995 Buffalo released two highly acclaimed instructional videos for the harmonica, on Homespun Tapes.
At home in the Valley of the Moon, when he’s not touring with Steve Miller or the Knockouts, Buffalo stays involved with environmental causes, local community programs, as well as bringing harmonica instruction and inspiration into many California state prisons.
Buffalo’s new Blind Pig CD, King Of The Highway, was recorded with his long-time band, The Knockouts, a dynamic and diverse R&B-blues-rock unit that frames the incredible depths of Buffalo’s harmonica, vocal, keyboard, songwriting, and performance talents. This release also features such stellar musical cohorts as Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop, and Merl Saunders.
Though he’s adept at many styles of music, King Of The Highway, has Buffalo standing firmly and comfortably on the blues side of town, with his deep, soulful and penetrating vocals, that, though unique, also reflect the many jazz, country, rock and blues singers from whom he honed his vocal style, while he takes the harp from a whisper to a scream, with his truly phenomenal brand of blues harmonica. There are many who say that Buffalo is indeed one of the greatest harmonica players in the history of the instrument. This CD gives us an intense classroom demonstration of so many blues harmonica stylings, that harpsters around the world will indeed be using this CD to up their chops for years to come. On this new recording, Norton Buffalo becomes the king of the blues highway, and his many fans will be thrilled to be along for the ride.
