If you’re an up-and-coming artist, sites like YouTube can be one of your greatest friends.
In the past, getting a following for your art often meant going out in the community or going on the road to perform for long stretches of time. Through all that work, you could promote yourself along the way and hopefully build up a fan base through word-of-mouth.
Fortunately, artists these days can also post their work and performances online and let the fans come to them. Although there’s plenty of competition, every now and then one talented performer breaks through the rest.
And that’s definitely the case with today’s video.
The performer we’re talking about is Juzzie Smith, a musician who calls himself a “one-man-band.”
The video was filmed at the Grolsch Bluesfestival in Schöppingen, Germany in 2018. As Smith explains in the video, all of the other artists that day started their sets by introducing themselves and their band mates.
Since Smith is a one-man-band, he decides to take everyone through his “members” one at a time. He starts by introducing his right hand, and the audience cheers. After that, he introduces his left hand!
The whole time, the audience laughs and cheers along.
Once the crowd is on his side, Smith starts playing his electric box banjo and laying down a nice groove.
After he has a good rhythm part going, he says that it’s going to his left foot as well—and he starts hammering out a drum part.
With all of that happening at the same time, he starts working his other foot into it as well for some extra percussion. With that, he’s established how his blues song has three separate parts spread between his limbs that he plays all at once!
Even so, he still has his one more instrument in the mix—his harmonica!
By now, the whole crowd is clapping along with Smith and can’t wait to see what he pulls off next.
As he puts it all together, what emerges is an echoey, bluesy original composition complete with strings, rhythm and more. Even though he’s just one man up there on the stage, his performance feels like so much more.
After he’s established one part of the song, he switches into something much more upbeat and has the crowd clapping and cheering all over again!
Although everything is great, his harmonica chops are pretty solid too!
Though he’s already done a handful of different musical skills, he keeps building the song until he’s doing six things at once!
As if the rest of it weren’t enough, he adds a shaker into it and even juggles while he does it. Next up, he adds his feet into it and keeps everything else going as well.
Although the rhythm of everything he does is relatively straightforward, it’s definitely impressive that he does it all himself—and the energy he brings to it is so contagious!
Since the clip was posted, it has been viewed more than two million times and it’s easy to see why.
Although there are plenty of original musicians out there, what he does sets him apart from so many other entertainers!
It takes a lot of skill to play multiple instruments at once—but it takes even more skill to engage the audience the way he does. Needless to say, we’re bound to see a lot more of Smith in the future.
Congratulations to Juzzie Smith on truly being a “one man band”! Be sure to watch the whole performance in the link below:
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