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Hmmmm interesting thread....
I will defend anything self medication wise he or anybody else has to use just to continue on.
My progressive nerve damage has gotten so bad that I have to use booze in what I am sure what would be considered excess just to play at all anymore.
I met Allan once... Had a few of his self brewed beers with him even. Really amazing brew in my opinion.
It is just a reality that a lot of musicians end up in bad financial shape. I mean I can't even pay my property taxes and just lost my bank account because I could not even afford the monthly service charges. I only have internet thanks to a kind neighbor that lives down the mountain and a crazy wireless network involving three wireless routers strung up the mountain side.
RIP Mr. Holdsworth
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04-27-2017 12:59 PM
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Discussions of the general health effects of alcohol, drugs, treatment of health problems, etc., probably should have their own thread instead of being discussed in the Allan Holdsworth RIP thread. Those are important discussions that impact our own health, the wellbeing of our family and friends, and impact our music. But they're not about Allan, whose own alcoholism took a terrible toll on his music and bandmates (per drummer Gary Husband's post on his Facebook page).
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OK...Deleted..If you think I should edit the above and Post the Warning elsewhere I will do so.I am not buying my first Holdsworth Boxed Set until I know at least 50% goes to the Family..He should have been more Rewarded when here- but his Family still can be...
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Well, the Chit Chat sub-forum would be a good place to have the discussion about health, drugs, etc.
I would have no way of knowing what percentage of the sales of the box sets went to Allan; I would assume that those dollars would go to his estate. I don't even know what's normal for that kind of thing; wth most record contracts, the artist sees little to no money until the cost of studio time, mixing, mastering, artwork, CD production, etc., is paid off. The record industry is very good at making sure all the financial risk is borne by the artist to the greatest degree possible.
I suppose you could contact the label.
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I want the Family to issue something Posthumously that goes to them.
A Trustee Appointed...a Producer to Release some of Holdsworth Best Unreleased Recordings proceeds to the Family on Sales as I alluded to earlier.
That's the One I'd purchase or just 50,000 of us can send a $ 10 Donation to Family Paypal Email.
I issued a Warning re Drugs- no need for discussion.
I'll back up what I said in other Places .Last edited by Robertkoa; 04-28-2017 at 03:42 PM.
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I listened to the first UK album today--one of my faves at the time. That band should've been big the way Asia was--maybe if Holdsworth had stayed in...then he would have been set for life...
That said, JMO, my tastes have changed and I'm not into that type of fusion these days. Now I appreciate Allen more for the stuff he does where there's some melody and swing, like on JL Ponty's albums, not pure speed and technique. He CAN be a very soulful player.
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If you haven't yet, I highly recommend Sixteen Men of Tain. While I always admired and enjoyed Holdsworth, I tend not to go back to the super fusiony stuff. But I think his music kept on getting better and better and his latest material is some of my favorite. I think his most recent albums have great examples of very beautiful melodic playing by Allan. I also like what he sounds like with these bands, which I think are jazzier and subtler than a lot of the more fusion stuff. Here's a beautiful example IMO:
Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
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One of the great guitarist's guitarists. A fellow countryman and that gives me pride. Although we lived in the same city (LA), I only got to see him at Ronnie Scotts in London. He started the evening by saying how nervous he was to be playing at Ronnie's. I guess what he meant was that if you were invited to play there, it meant you were the business. Self-deprecating to a fault. The Guardian ran an obituary for this long lost son of Old Blighty, so he will always be remembered. See ya' in guitar heaven Alan.
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I just heard the bad news
RIP Allan!
Who is going to play us the whole-half licks so spicely as You did?!...
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Like the Tain album.
Some interesting comments by Allan and the interviewer here:
BM: You mentioned that you had this period of writers block...
AH: Yeah, what happened was I kind of...When my wife and I split up it kind of threw me into a..I ended up in a different place. You know, we'd been together for 26 years. So I ended up in a house of my own. I lost my studio, which was in my other house, and it just got kind of crazy trying to keep everything together. And I never really got back to a point where I was feeling creative. Sometimes I wouldn't even want to play the guitar. I'd just look at it and go, 'Jeez...not today.' And I think it was just because of all the other stuff that was in my head..you know, it got in the way. I feel better now. About a year ago I met a girl...she's really, really great. She's really helping me to where I actually feel good about music again. I was getting into a 'I don't want to do this anymore' kind of situation. I kind of got fed up and it was really bugging me, because I love music. It's just that I didn't want to participate in it myself. I just felt like I was bored. I couldn't seem to come up with anything that I hadn't heard or played before myself. And I started to get into enjoying listening to other people play, and I was like, 'Oh man, I don't want to do this anymore.' But I feel a bit better now.
BM: It happens. Other great artists have walked away from their careers. Tal Farlow did that. He quit playing guitar and became a sign painter. Johnny Smith did that. He walked away from the New York scene at the height of his career, moved to Colorado and became a flight operator, then started a flight school and never played his guitar again in public. So people have walked away from it, but some inevitably come back with a renewed attitude toward playing.
AH: I felt that's what I felt like I wanted to do; like if I had some money in the bank I'd say, 'OK, I'm just not gonna do anything for a while.' And then just wait for it to come back, if it comes back, rather than trying to push it or just do it so that you can survive. I didn't like that idea. It doesn't feel good to do that, to me. When I started music I never thought of it as a job. And when it becomes a job, it might as well be another job; you might as well work at McDonald's. Because it doesn't have the same thing as just doing something because you really love it or you really want to do that. I was losing that feeling but I'm feeling a lot better now. Couple of years ago I wasn't too good with it, though.
Abstract Logix - Interview - A Conversation with Allan Holdsworth
I can sympathize with his comments on performance anxiety as well.
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It still breaks my heart to hear of such emotional anguish from someone who was truly connected to something higher. Reminds me to be ever more grateful for my own path and to remember that everyone is dealing with something, even if it doesn't show. God bless you, Allan. I suspect it all makes sense now, and was worth the effort.
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my thoughts on Allan: Allan Holdsworth (1946-2017)
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Cool vid from Brett Garsed about Allen.
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Thank you for the video MD...Brett's a great guy.
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Listening to this tune again, it struck me how much it's like something from an ECM album, complete with a Kenny Wheeler-ish trumpet solo:
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I like Garsed's ' Primative Pop way' of Voicings.
He's considered Great by many anyway...
'Primative' compared to Holdsworth I guess he means - I like how he plays and sounds though- heard him mentioned before but not heard him before now.Last edited by Robertkoa; 05-08-2017 at 11:14 AM.
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His harmonic knowledge isn't as advanced as Holdsworth, but a great guitarist in his own right.
It isn't jazz, but beautiful playing nevertheless.
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I've been listening a lot to Holdsworth recently, esp. Sixteen Men of Tain, and transcribing him.
I think one thing that strikes me is that Allan was really a LINES player. And that his lines are often hard to relate to a given scale or concept. While he may have practiced scales, his playing shies away from using them in an obvious way. It's like his encrypted those elements in his playing.
There's a revealing bit in his instructional video where he says he shies away from using the diminished scale too much as he feels it sounds a bit cliche and obvious, but he will put a taste of it in there (I paraphrase) - this reminds me of something Artie Shaw said about the whole tone scale, and I wonder if Holdsworth didn't make a concerted effort to remove that 'scale-ness' from his music. Wouldn't surprise me.
In this, he is startlingly different from most of the modern technical fusion players who have followed in his wake. There's a lot of up/down legato players and guys who shred modes. Superficially the technique is the same, but the content of the playing is much less idiosyncratic.
I don't mean to diss Guthrie or Tom Quayle who are great, but the more I listen to Allan, the less like him they sound on a linear level. (I actually hear a lot of Brecker in Quayle, incidentally. He's quite straight up post-bop language-wise.)
I'll check out the Garsed video, I haven't hear him play in years. I remember being wowed by his chops when I was a young'un.
Myself - I've practice the legato thing a bit and can edge a bit closer to Allan's sound, but as soon as I take a listen to some actual Allan, it becomes apparent how much music is in there at the cellular level.
However, Allan does of course have a huge influence on modern jazz guitar - but most of the modern players who follow his approach to music to some degree (Kurt, for example) don't possess his technique, and TBH their music is a lot easier to work out from the point of view of 'what's going on?'
Also Allan's tone - great sustain, but no more overdrive than necessary. No fizzy distortion, no sharp rock vibrato and no rock guitar stylistic ticks (well the odd pinch harmonic and blues rock lick played in good fun.) Allan was a jazzer through and through. It doesn't sound like he had any interest in rock much.
I'm listening to the Jimmy Raney albums he said he really liked (Three Attitudes) - I can here some of the influence actually. I'd love to trace that connection in more detail.
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Lovely vid, Garsed sounds great as I remember, and his comments seem to chime with what I've noticed about Allan's playing myself. And I love what he says about the expressive qualities of Allan's playing. Originally Posted by Melodic Dreamer
A big thing about Brett's playing which I notice in Allan is how accurate his timing when playing the legato stuff. It's not speed, and again perhaps not pulling off so much - more hammering... In any case it has a rhythmic backbone to it, which something Allan has - hard to achieve with legato.
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