When a reed finally gave I got the Jazz after a couple of weeks adjusting I won’t go back in spite of preferring the plain black colour. I spent 15 years on a CX12 and loved it to bits, even though it’s famously fat to try and wrap your mouth around the plastic slides easy and gives it a rich yet softer tone but with more volume than a classic honer chromatic. Exactly the same inside parts as the standard CX12 and a hideous colour on the outside, but they’ve narrowed/wedges the mouth piece and that gives you so much more control and comfort. Jazz has a tendency to drift between keys all throughout a song, and use all sorts of off key notes and strange scales. If you want recommendations for good chromatic harmonicas, follow up to my comment.ĭefinitely go Chromatic. A chromatic harmonica is going to be more expensive than one diatonic by a long shot, but over time with the amount of different diatonic keys you will buy will add up to be more.
The chromatic also has a sound that is much easier to be blended into a jazz combo or ensemble.
Chromatic harps are much more suited to jazz as you aren’t limited by keys or complex changes. That is the first option, but the second option is to get a chromatic C harmonica that allows you to play in all keys flexibly. It’s ideal that you have more than one key, so I suggest you start with one that plays in the key of a song you most want to learn then over time add more keys to your collection for new songs. But you could honestly just play any song on one harmonica, it is just whether you want to play in the original key of the song.
You will still need different harmonica keys for different songs as a beginner, especially because the changes in jazz are generally more complex or specialized than blues or folk. As far as diatonic, there really is not a best key for jazz.