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Hi everybody and Happy New Year!
I would like to ask a question and i hope that someone of you could help me...
I'm preparing my dissertation for my degree in jazz guitar, and for the topic, i chose Mick Goodrick and John Abercrombie.
The only problem is that i don't know well how to link these two musicians, because at first i thought about the technique that they used which is the fingerpicking, but i would like to add something else.
I know that they both graduates from Berklee and they shared the same teachears, and lately they worked both for ECM, but i would like to know if they share something about their contribution to the modern jazz guitar!
Thank you for your possible reply
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01-04-2022 05:10 PM
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Yes, absolutely. Back in the days when they came about formulating the unique approach to modern guitar that is a given today, nobody played like that. It was the baroque of jazz guitar and lots of people were looking at Jim Hall as their spiritual father and asking "what's next?". There was John McLaughlin's approach, there was Larry Coryell's, there were many who were looking for the next step but in my opinion, nobody took as decisive steps in combining the attitute, level of improvisational interaction, modern harmony and chord scale based linearity as John and Mick. They were inseparable in many ways and they hung with the likes of Jack DeJohnette, Bob Moses and Miraslav Vitous. It was a very important stage in their formative years as people and musicians, and it became a mutual synergy that created and solidified a new movement and sound. It should be noted that in that mix, Steve Swallow is equally creditable in this "new school of playing" and Mick says he hears more of Swallow in Pat Metheny's playing than his own influence (but he may be the only one in that respect).
John was the melodic, lyrical and hard driving rock linear player of the two and Mick was the more cerebral harmonic explorer and together they came up with a way of playing that brought them on a road of exploration for the rest of their lives.
That's the way I see it anyway.
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There are a few records they did together, Arrival by Harvie Swartz and Noisy Old Men
John Abercrombie / Mick Goodrick / Steve Swallow / Gary Chaffee – Noisy Old Men (2002, CD) - Discogs
There's also a bootleg of them playing duo, Waltham MA, 1986. Not sure the best way to find that these days...
Best wishes for your dissertation,
PK
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Got it somewhere. I digitized it a while ago and gave a copy to Mick. I think Mick still has his copy too. I'll see if he's got his handy, I'll see him tomorrow. If he does, I can put it on the google drive. I'll see. It's really nice. Duo. Playing standards and their own tunes.
Originally Posted by paulkogut
By the way, there's a really old and rare LP of Jack DeJohnette's where they're both playing on it, Pre-ECM. It's pretty raw and wild. Inspired by the psychtropics du jour lol!
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I confess that "Help Me Write My Paper" is one of my least favorite internet memes. Sorry. Originally Posted by Fra88
Also, in the US a "dissertation" is a book-length work researched and written, usually over one or more full years, for a doctoral degree. If you mean "baccalaureate thesis" or "master's thesis" please say -- it may shape the responses you get.
+ + +
Frass, I grew up listening to John Abercrombie. Interacting with him once or twice was a highlight of my youth. He's a continuing inspiration. I can easily understand why his music would inspire you to write in depth.
Abercrombie spent decades -- indeed, built his solo career on ECM and elsewhere -- playing with a pick before setting it aside.
If your central point is "Abercrombie and Goodrick are alike because they play fingerstyle, and let's add a few more things beside that," your dissertation is in trouble before you get to page two.
All good luck to you.
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I knew both them quite well as they were developing what I call the "Boston" sound of portamentos and slippy-slidey phrasing that was more "liquid" than most jazz guitarists, although Jim was certainly an inspiration as well. "Crumbles" played bass for me a few times on commercial gigs, and was a solid and intelligent bassist as well. I took a lesson from Mick that consisted of looking at my seven-string guitar on a stand for a while, followed by some table tennis, accompanied by a discussion that was based around his book "The Advancing Guitarist". He was a Zen-like mystery, but he and I shared a deep respect for Bill Leavitt, and I met Mick for coffee before my early-morning lessons with Bill; he was always curious about my previous week's lesson. He gifted me his cassette package of Real Book tunes: each tape contained the accompaniment to several tunes on one side, and his playing over those on the other. It was quite wonderful, and a lot of my students got to hear and work with those tracks. Suffice it to say that both were visionaries, humble, smart, really nice and very influential in expanding the possibilities of jazz on the guitar.
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I remember walking into his office during open hours, we'd talk about art. And that day I said "I listened to these other worldy chords, things I can't find ANYWHERE on my guitar. Can you tell me about triads over bass notes?" -I admit I thought he'd hand me the key to harmony tricks that would change my guitar life. Originally Posted by ronjazz
In true 'be careful of what you ask the genie' fashion, he proceeded to demonstrate the permutations of any triad over any of the chromatic notes, the possible harmonic context where that chord could be used by playing them in a passage each, and then treating every note in each chord as the root (which gives you 4x the useful application) and then the INVERSIONS of triads over bassnotes (see the Almanacs), and not once did he say "are you getting this?". He either assumed I'd get something or I wouldn't; that wasn't the guarantee in the answer he gave me.
I politely thanked him and walked out the door. But what I DID get was a huge reason to take the realm of possibilities seriously. I then went on a self initiated study of these structures that takes me to this day.
My takeaway: If there's an easy answer to a big question, you're missing something.
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In 1988 , I took a seminar with Mick at that Connecticut Summer Workshop. He was tuning up and started playing these small but harmonically dense voicings, and when he realized we were all listening in with awe and wonder said "These are inverted three-part fourth voicings. I've been working on them really hard for the last 20 years or so, I think I'm finally getting a handle on them...." It made sense to me, but most of the class seemed to take it as a joke. I looked around to see if anyone else wasn't laughing, and there was a young Tim Miller.... I'm a little slower with things than Mick was, but I've put in a good 30 years with them and am seeing some progress....
PK
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And their "finger style" technique is totally different. Goodrick plays fingerstyle, using his thumb and all of his fingers; Abercrombie abandoned the pick late in his career and used his thumb after that, not the other fingers. Their approach to playing is very different. While Abercrombie had a sophisticated and advanced understanding of harmony, he preferred to play linearly rather than chordally. Even when comping for other musicians he tended to play lines behind them rather than traditional chord comping. Goodrick, on the other hand, generally tends to play chords/note clusters more than he plays lines.
Goodrick taught a lot and recorded some; he did not seem to regard that is especially important. One of our forum members posted a story in which Goodrick had the master of an entire unreleased album sitting on a hard drive that he deleted because he needed the hard drive space. there is an interview in which he talks about playing a duet with Pat Matheny, maybe "How Insensitive" which went really well (it's on YouTube). Well enough that partway through the song he started thinking that maybe he didn't need to perform in public anymore after that.
Abercrombie recorded a lot and taught some, but that doesn't seem to have been a big interest of his. On the other hand he played probably thousands of gigs with many of the finest jazz musicians in the world and had a moderately large and devoted fan base. He covered an extremely broad range of music from acoustic to blazing rock tones to guitar synthesizer to clean-toned contemplative music at the end of his career.
Other than that they knew each other and played together on a number of occasions, both were connected to Berklee College in Boston and both were jazz guitarists, I'm not sure you've got a lot to work with here in terms of a topic for a dissertation. If nothing else, speaking as somebody who's been through graduate school (not music), you certainly better tighten up the proposal for your dissertation a whole heck of a lot rather than the vague notion you have floated to us. I can't picture any dissertation committee accepting this in its nebulous state. Heck, either of them would be a fine basis for a dissertation in themselves. Abercrombie is by far the better documented, but Goodrick has documented his explorations on paper in his books.
I refer you to the documentary about John Abercrombie called "Open Land." It gives you a sense of his character.
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The OP is seeking information for the dissertation and already has made contact with people who knew the subjects, in this very thread. I think the OP is doing fine.
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There's a lo-fi video of them playing together:
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Just saw Mick. He gave me this nice documentation that they did, in fact, know one another.
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Thank you so much guys for all your suggestions!
Actually i don't want to focus only on the technical similarieties of their style...
I know that sounds like a too generical question, but i would like to know if there are similarieties in their contribution to the new era of modern jazz guitar that started in the mid '70!
In the end, they were almost the same age, they were both graduated in Berklee, and they shared some approach on the instrument like the technique of "Play on one string"!
Anyway all your suggestions given me many useful ideas to carry on my reasearch! Thank you!
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They were 2 of 6 guitarists in the Berklee guitar department. They were both young, talented and absolutely nothing preventing them from writing their own rule book. They were very close, almost inseparable and worked, played, gigged and talked about music together all the time. Originally Posted by Fra88
John gave Mick the gig with Jack DeJohnette when he left to work with his own group. Mick passed the guitar chair to John when he left The New England Conservatory to return to Berklee.
Does this sound like they had more than a passing association as Berklee graduates (actually John left Berklee just a handful of credits short of his degree, and it was Mick who encouraged him to do so, citing the credentials as a working musician as being more useful than the degree)?
Sounds like you have a bunch of work ahead of you. Get your facts together. It's a fascinating story of the origins of an entire approach to modern jazz guitar that traces its roots to these two guys.
Just how DO you plan on gathering source material, might I ask?
What institution are you doing this through?
What's your strategy and focus?
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How much jazz guitar history do you know? The modern jazz guitar as we know it, had key seminal figures that were formative: Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, John Scofield. They studied with and credit Mick as their spiritual and theoretical father. Originally Posted by Fra88
The next generation spawned players who would bring other elements into the mix as the diversity of musics thrived on the airwaves. Figures like Wayne Krantz, Mike Stern, Wolfgang Muthspiel have changed the practice and sound of jazz guitar. They studied with Mick and credit him as their spiritual and theoretical and practical father.
There is a next generation of modern players who are reforming the realm of possibilities in modern guitar. Players like Lage Lund, Nir Felder, Andrew Marzotto, Julian Lage, Tim Miller, all have a strong role in shaping the future of jazz guitar. They all studied with Mick and credit him as a primary influence, spiritual and practical father.
And of course now in the Almanac era and beyond, there are players like Ben Monder and Max Light who are brought up in the deep sea of the voice leading Almanacs and they credit Mick as the tree from which what they know has sprung.
Someone could make an academic argument that great revolutionary advances in the playing field of modern jazz guitar coincided with the academic publications current with Goodrick's evolution of the improvisational language throughout his life and career as a teacher: From chord scale, expanded harmony, voice leading, 3 and 4 part non-teriary harmony, rhythmic permutation and phrase formulation...all these things came from Mick and became the baseline for the new generations that sought him out and studied with him. He was, in essence, the initial force behind many players that shaped modern guitar today.
Back in the beginning of it all, there were two kids who struck an uncanny spark and codified a new way of playing unlike anything in existence at the time.
At the beginning, there was nothing of this sound. So yeah, they had a little to do with the sound of things in the 70's.
By the way, Joel Harrison is gathering some of the heaviest of Mick's (and John's) acolites for a concert in Brooklyn in March. You really can do a lot of source work by being at this convergence. But that's not my job to tell you how to do this.Last edited by Jimmy blue note; 01-06-2022 at 04:12 PM.
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Anyway thank you Man! i have to discuss my thesis in March! I hope i'm in time! Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
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Originally Posted by Fra88
Originally Posted by Fra88
What a great subject you choose to write about. Im sure that you will find a lot of common things in your research. Great observations and good points in the replies here as well!
It looks like many here know these guys and and thanks for sharing,
I was thinking about common links and of course my reply is subjective,
One thing is how they both use space (breathing) in their music. I do think that it has to do with the awareness of impulses in music.
How to create direction and tension in the improvisation by not playing all the time. Building bridges with your band members by listening as a collective.
Sometimes it can hurts when you wait that little extra long between the impulses but for the band and for the listener the music it's going places.
John Abercrombie and Mick Goodrick have a wide flexibility of interpretation, and maybe a little bit self-distance, sometimes they let the music go where it need
to go and that can be relief as a listener.
The use of space in the music highly defines their musical signature.
I met John once in Sweden after a wonderful concert and he was such a nice guy. I remember how he was talking about the sound in the concert room and how it felt for him.
I never went to the states and I never saw Mick Goodrick but I think the way he improvise and how it feels its just so good. I have no words to describe that.
It's interesting about Mick, the approach as a teacher with all this books, then on the same with this endless spectrum of freely interpretation in his improvisation.
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I took private lessons with Mick Goodrick in the early ‘70s. He had recently thrown all his guitar picks away and switched to only finger style. One of the first assignments he gave me was to transcribe a Chet Atkins solo “Indian Love Call.” I was surprised that such a modern player dug Chet but I learned a lot from that exercise.
Mick went through his “system” of playing horizontally and vertically, which is well-described in the first parts of his book The Advancing Guitarist. He was very well organized and encouraged me to practice everything — all triads, all inversions, all 4-part chords also inverted, etc etc. He also had a spiritual side — encouraging his students to explore what seemed like meditative exercises. For a while he stopped giving individual lessons and taught in groups back then.
Around this time he was playing duos with Pat Metheny in local Boston area venues. P. Metheny published a transcription of one of Mick’s solos around that time — I think it was in Downbeat magazine.
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Well from the Abercrombie vid on YouTube he's a fan of playing up and down one string which is, of course, how TAG starts.
The Abercrombie video seems quite old. I wonder if Mick and John agreed to explore this way of playing together?
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I never studied with Abercrombie, but knew plenty of people and did (and many more people who did with Mick). It wasn't uncommon for people to study with both of them. From what I understand, a lot of Abercrombie's teaching was going over his own compositions and different playing approaches to them -- which would be a great lesson for an advanced student who already has the basics together.
Abercrombie did put out a few instructional videos. The first one was for Homespun, during the guitar instructional video boom. Most of those videos were dreck, but Abercrombie's was actually very well put together, and had a lot of helpful information. His exercises and approaches will be familiar to anyone who's worked with a lot of Goodrick material.
The other batch is more recent (maybe a year or two before he died) from MyMusicMasterclass, which I have not watched so caveat emptor. The first video looks like it covers a lot of the same material as the Homespun tape. The second one looks like it's more of what his private lessons were like, looking at his compositions.
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Hey there. I asked Mick about that just now. He said when John and he arrived in Boston, they didn't know a whole lot about playing jazz, but they were brought up on the guitar of the times: Barney Kessel, Joe Pass, Wes of course, George Barnes (that was a surprise), Charlie Christian, Tal and the ususal suspects. They also knew something that was happening because the two of them and the small group of musicians who had converged upon Boston had ideas about a new direction in Jazz. There were so many different types of music that the older generation WASN'T listening to, and these strains of rock, some country influences, folk, acoustic and the new Miles stuff (funky and rock influenced-hendrix) and the young contemporaries in Boston wanted something that reflected that excitement in their music. Originally Posted by Liarspoker
Keith Jarret was enrolled, Peter Donald and Bob Moses were around and they were all learning the traditions of jazz. Old School. But working with Jack Peterson and being changed by Jim Hall's new looser smarter improvisation, they knew what they DIDN'T want to do. ...At this point in explaining, Mick picked up his guitar and started to play a Joe Pass type walking bass line with chord which he called chord chunka...that's what they DIDN'T want to do.
About this time they met and studied under Steve Swallow and all the pieces fell together.
Mick and John played a LOT of duo together at that time. Each time one of them would start leaning towards walking bass and chords, the other would say NO! That led to a comping style that was more sparse, less metronomic, more varied on the harmonic basis and a soloing style that melded with moving bass lines that went up and down the neck rather than across, which is somewhat necessary to accommodate a more fixed chording approach they were trying to escape.
Mick told me "Find the video John did a long time ago. He talks about that a lot and it comes as close to explaining that approach" as any he'd heard.
So there's a little peek into the origins of the string linear approach.
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