Allan Holdsworth, born on August 6, 1946, died on April 17, 2017, just 12 days after the release of a retrospective box set of his career with a name he hated. In his last print interview before his death, he reflects on a long and artistic career at Prog.
Allan Holdsworth is a prominent figure in the world of progressive music. With his characteristic legato style, he influenced a generation of musicians who would follow in his wake. And like many innovators, he has noticed that many of his fans achieved greater advertising success. than him. But those kinds of considerations were never at the center of Holdsworth’s musical approach.
The early career of the Bradford, England-born guitarist saw him work on the Canterbury stage, and he even participated in some (unfortunately undocumented) work with percussionist Jamie Muir, later a key member of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic-era King. Crimson.
Holdsworth kept busy and honed his skill playing guitar for Pierre Moerlen’s Gong, Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Soft Machine, Jean-Luc Ponty, and others who explored spaces in the unexplored past where jazz and rock intersected. Once he began his solo career, he left England and settled in California. There, he spent less time lending his skills to outdoor projects, finding time to play on albums by Stanley Clarke, Chad Wackerman, and participating in nearly a dozen collaborative album projects. He has also written 3 books on guitar technique.
Holdsworth, notoriously difficult, didn’t include 1976’s unauthorized LP Velvet Darkness in his catalog and didn’t like to talk about it with us. But between 1982 and 2002, Holdsworth recorded and released 12 solo albums (although 1983’s Road Games is technically an EP) for at most the same number of labels. Although he continued to tour, 2001’s Flat Tire: Music For A Non-Existent Movie was his most recent collection of curtains meant to be an album. Los Angeles-based independent label Manifesto Records has collected all of Holdsworth’s solo paintings in a box set and presumptuously called it The Man Who Changed the Guitar Forever!
Unsurprisingly, Holdsworth hated this title.
Your first influences were the ambitious finishes of classical music: Stravinsky, Bartok and others. When you were young, did pop music infiltrate your musical sensibilities?
My father was a pianist, in fact, a very intelligent pianist. I had a lot of records available: most of them were jazz records. But you don’t wake up one day looking like Django Reinhardt, so I have to find out how to play. Some pop music may just play it. And once I did, my interest in this music faded. So pop music was just a starting point, although I still pay attention to all kinds of music.
Throughout the 1970s, you played with an impressive roster of artists, each of them unique. Did you feel empowered to make your own musical concepts explicit in the context of others’ paintings?
When I played with Tony Williams, he never told me what direction he was looking for for the music; He would let me do it. Tony would simply say, “Okay, here’s the music; do your own thing. “So it was simple for me to find a way to inject my own personality into some music, even if it was written through someone else. And I found that almost everyone treated me the same.
Was it your time with Jean-Luc Ponty that woke you up on the violin?
Oh no, no, it was just curiosity. I played with many instruments; I played the clarinet for a while. In the past he had borrowed saxophones from bandmates, just to get a sense of how they worked and the demanding situations of each; and so it was with the violin. I bought a violin and then I bought a viola. But the viola got lost in the combine when I moved; I don’t know what happened to him.
It’s losing a viola!
But I did it.
In the years that you worked with Ponty, because he was necessarily the main instrumentalist, did you have to slow down any of what you were doing to make room for him?
It was wonderful to paint for Jean-Luc: he also left me a little alone. He didn’t give me any instructions. I liked music and enjoyed betting with it.
But that wasn’t the case when you were with the UK. . .
Not so much. There was less improvisation than I would have liked. It was more structured, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It was just that Bill [Bruford] and I were on one side of the fence, and Eddie [Jobson] and John [Wetton] were on the other. It wasn’t a question of personality, at least not for me. I liked all those guys. I have just discovered that the United Kingdom is too restrictive; I wasn’t making enough progress. It didn’t help me in my own game.
You didn’t make your solo debut I. O. U. until you’re in your thirties. What drove you despite everything to do it?
The United Kingdom disbanded at that time and I was still playing in Bill’s band. He had just met drummer Gary Husband; We played together for a while and then I said (the transference went off in my brain), “You know what?I’m going to check this out! I wanted to take the leap and play on my own. “music. He had written a moderate amount of music.
It was incredibly rare to hear what he had done. . . You can simply turn on a jazz station and pay attention to music that isn’t jazz.
One of the unifying qualities of this new 12-album box set is the timeless nature of the music. For the most part, there is nothing, say, promissory notes. This suggests that it was made at most 20 years before Flat Tire. When you’re creating an album, do you look to avoid sonic textures or production techniques that could ultimately make the record sound dated?
No, it is not a conscious effort. Part of that comes from the musicians I’ve played with and their translation (or interpretation) of my music. Some of those guys just had that quality; they didn’t necessarily have a sound [associated with] an express moment.
But at the same time, sometimes speaking, the more recent the album, the more I like it. For me, the box is just a step back in time. There were pirated copies and some albums hadn’t been released in years, so we released my entire catalog.
In the past, he’s made a list of a dozen albums titled “Things I’ve Recorded But I Wish I Hadn’t. “Why did you characterize them in this way?
It depends on specific cases, but some of them involve other guitarists. It was just a matter of mixing: the other guitars would be 3 times the volume of mine!Things like that.
Early in your solo career, you were heavily involved with SynthAxe. What sparked your initial interest in this instrument?
In fact, this goes back to my childhood. Because I was looking to play the horn or the violin or anything that allows you to shape a note, unlike the guitar which is necessarily a percussion instrument. And I tried to make the guitar sound like it wasn’t a percussion instrument.
When SynthAxe came along, it opened the door to not only other textures and sounds that you couldn’t have on the guitar, but by using breath control, I was able to do all the things I wanted to do if I could. It had been a horn. A player in a way. I learned a lot playing with this instrument. I still use it a lot in the studio; For the material I’m running now, I’ve probably been on each and every track.
You have explored other technological inventions and you yourself are making sure advances. Have you played anything new, like the Moog guitar?
Anyway, that was a few years ago. But for me it’s like a step back; If I’m going to transfer from SynthAxe, it’s going to have to be absolutely incredible for me to have to make the jump.
For years you have also played and recorded with a baritone guitar. From your point of view, what is its appeal?
When he played the violin, he enjoyed the sound of the viola. It has nothing to do with it, just a small decrease in range. This other sound seduced me. This is the same as the difference between an oboe and an English horn, or an alto clarinet versus a regular clarinet; It’s in another register.
I recorded the same song twice, just so other people could hear how much it replaced the music being played by other people.
After an era of genuine innovation in jazz and progressive music, especially fusion, those genres experienced a publicity decline in the 1980s. “Smooth jazz” was popular. And with a few notable exceptions, progressive music has drifted away from the mainstream. Why do you think this happened?
In fact, I don’t know why it happened. Not really. I guess it was record labels and radio stations. . . especially radio stations. I’ve never been able to get a radio station to play my music; It was incredibly rare to locate or hear anything he had done on the radio. Whereas one can simply turn on a jazz station and pay attention to music that is rarely very jazzy. For me, it’s muzak.
When you were making solo albums, did you have a lot of publicity pressure?
Sometimes, however, it’s basically because of the labels. For example, Warner Brothers [who released Road Games] was a nightmare, and I was satisfied when it ended. But Bill Hein, the guy who ran the company when I was working with Enigma; He’s a very, very intelligent guy and also very open-minded. He never said, “We need you to do this” or “You can’t do that. “He left me alone.
I think the other people who were in charge of the label were a key factor, because I wasn’t under any pressure for anything. Bill would never criticize me for having a backward track record, which was the case. I’ve never made an album on time. But I didn’t worry if they didn’t care, because for me, it’s done when it’s done. If I don’t like it it doesn’t appear.
To what extent is the music on your studio albums a product of composition and arrangement, and to what extent is it a product of improvisation that leaves room for creation?
When I write a piece of music, I start only with the composition itself. And I’m not worried about how complicated it might be to play solos, or anything like that. I just let the composition go where I think it goes. And then I leave sections open to the soloist or whoever, to give them a little space to play. I have never written a particular composition intended for improvisation. Or if it was, I can’t forget which one it was. !I like music to be dense in terms of harmonies and then transformed. Anyway, it works for me.
For some artists, the album is just the newest factor in what they do, rather than a coherent body of work. Generally speaking, when you make an album, is there some kind of unifying concept at play?
The way it’s worked out for me is that I have a tendency to write songs around the personality of the band I’m with lately. For example, when I play with Dave Carpenter and Gary Novak, that band is significantly softer than, say, Hard Hat Area, which is more aggressive.
But that was the goal of the players. On one of the new albums I’m recording right now, I recorded the same song twice, just so other people could hear how much it replaced the music being played by other people. I did a track with Gary Husband and Jimmy. Johnson, and then I did the exact same piece of music with Ernest Tibbs and Joel Taylor. And aside from the melody, you wouldn’t even know it’s the same melody! It’s remarkable how much this is changing.
They are free to interpret it in their own way, and it has worked for me. Each member of the organization can laugh a little more and enjoy a little more of what they do in the project. That’s what I learned from Tony Williams: leave others alone, unless it’s something expressed in a certain segment that you really need to hear.
I don’t go on excursions (or very limited excursions) because I’m too old. . . I like acting, but I don’t like the travel aspect.
What is the Tales From The Vault crowdfunding assignment?
In fact, Tales From The Vault became a real disaster. There were older songs that I had already done with Ernest and Joel but that I never finished; I was going to cancel them for the pledge campaign, but essentially the money ran out. Compared to other people, I don’t produce albums very quickly. So I ended up not employing some of those tracks; It was not financially imaginable for me to do so.
Tell us about the new album you have in the works.
For the last album with Virgil Donati, Jimmy Haslip and Jimmy Johnson, I did it on the computer. And I had trouble with that, because I’m not very computer savvy. I use the PC very limited. I use it like an obsolete tape recorder: play, forward, fast forward and rewind. That’s all I know!
The album is for Steve Vai’s Favored Nations label. He was very full of life and they encouraged me to write songs for the band. This will be over before the end of this year, because I have made the decision not to take a hike, or very limited hikes, because I am too old. I don’t enjoy it anymore. I like to play, but I don’t like the team; I don’t like airplanes and I don’t like going through security.
One of the reasons why so much time passed between recordings is that I moved 3 or 4 times that time. And each time the studio had to be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. So I really had nowhere to paint. Combine that with being on the road and never seemed to have time to do it. That’s why I decided to take some time to work on those recordings. The problem is to try to survive: when I paint on a record, I don’t make money.
Aside from computers, how would you say your technique for creating albums has changed over the years?
Basically, it’s replaced by default, simply because of the way other people do things. In the old days, other people rented a great studio for a few days and we could play everything more or less together. If we had to upload something, it wasn’t a problem. Then we’d spend a few days or a week mixing it all up, and then Bob would be your uncle. But now other people just send files over the internet, and more than anything, you’re not in the same room, or at least not at the same time. Technology has forced a change; That is why so many studies went bankrupt.
Do you think it has been lost with the disappearance of the old way of doing things?
Yes, something is always lost. But you also win things. It is possible to make very high-quality virtual recordings if you use very high sample rates, such as 96 kHz or toper.
Still, anyone who has worked in a studio with a smart two-inch analog recorder knows that you can’t do that with a small virtual recorder. It’s obvious, but no one cares. Everyone plays it on their iPhones!
You have to wonder about the name of the box. This doesn’t sound like what you would call it.
I must have been horrified when I saw the box. I had never seen the actual canopy before it was already in production. I went crazy: “You can’t say that on the front: ‘The guy who replaced the guitar forever!’I thought, “Explain to your readers that I’m not aware. “of this. “
I was just looking to survive, but I survived by doing whatever I enjoyed instead of turning it into a day job.
The boys know me; They know my personality. You know, it’s not something that I would say, “Here I am, king of men. “I heard it would be called The Allan Holdsworth Album Collection. It was time to shake the tree.
Some of the curtains have suffered from the time that has passed since the masters were made, and I know that the record company spent a lot of money on remastering. In the end I simply said, “Well, it’s my fault; I asked them to show me exactly what they were doing. It was just unexpected.
They did a wonderful job on everything else. It’s a limited edition: the box will disappear and there will only be individual albums.
You’ve been a musician most of your life and a recording artist for up to 50 years. Was there a moment in your career when you thought, “I made it”?
No, I had never thought about it like that. Like many musicians, he was simply looking to do something he enjoyed rather than making it a day job. I enjoyed it and was able to continue learning.
And it stops. I will know a lot about music no matter how long I live. It’s like this: when we take one step, there is another, bigger one.
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