Allan Holdsworth
“The world’s greatest unknown guitarist”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/arts/music/allan-holdsworth-virtuoso-guitarist-dies-at-70.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
That subtitle has been used multiple times over the past 50 years. The first time I heard it was in reference to Roy Buchanan. In my youthful exuberance I embraced that moniker applied to Roy and shared it with others.
Over time I’ve come to realize that some of the most exotic guitarists typically flirted with jazz chording and tempos. Folks like Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin were seen and appreciated for their extraordinary talents. Other magicians of the fretted instrument were brought to my attention including Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen the Swedish guitarist. These wizards of the guitar played astonishing tracks that left my jaw agape. The beauty and complexities of their playing surely placed them upon an exalted plain.
Nearly six years after his death (APRIL 15, 2017) I discovered the music of Allan Holdsworth. After doing some preliminary research it is obvious that many top of the line guitarists saw that he and his work were in a class alone.
From the LA Times obituary found here:
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-allan-holdsworth-20170417-story.html
“Allan Holdsworth, an innovative and influential electric guitarist who helped shape everything from progressive rock to jazz over the past half century, died Sunday at his home in north San Diego County. He was 70.
Holdsworth, who the late composer and musician Frank Zappa once said deserved credit for “single-handedly reinventing the electric guitar,” played in a number of groups, from Soft Machine to the progressive rock band U.K.
His death brought immediate tributes from other musicians, including guitar star Joe Satriani, who tweeted: “R.I.P. Allan Holdsworth. You remain an enormous inspiration to me. Your beautiful music will live on forever.”
“Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid tweeted: “How many guitarists, upon hearing #AllanHoldsworth the FIRST time, put their guitars in cases, NEVER to be opened again? Literally, Jaw Dropping.”
And former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy tweeted: “RIP Allan Holdsworth... One of the all-time greats and innovators...no Holdsworth = no Eddie Van Halen #UK #OneOfAKind”
Whether playing a conventional electric guitar or a guitar synthesizer, Holdsworth soared. He created wonderfully distinct music that drew from jazz, rock and contemporary classical music. At his best, he came close to transcending all three.
Holdsworth’s astounding fluency was matched by the intense emotion he brought to his playing. He cleanly articulated every note, no matter how accelerated the tempo or deviously constructed the song structure. And, when playing ballads, he created gently swelling chords that made ingenious use of space and silence.
His advanced approach to harmony and his blindingly fast and intricate legato style left even some of the world’s greatest guitarists shaking their heads in awe.
“Allan plays things so advanced I can’t even understand some of it, and I’ve let him know that,” John McLaughlin told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2003.”
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“An April 10 performance in San Marcos was the last of several Southern California shows he did, performances timed to celebrate the release of his two new Manifesto Records releases: “Eidolon: The Allan Holdsworth Collection,” a two-CD collection, and “The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever,” a 12-CD box set.
Zappa was not alone in his admiration of Holdsworth. “He is the best in my book,” Eddie Van Halen once said of Holdsworth. Guitarist Carlos Santana agreed, saying: “He has something totally beautiful. I give him more credit than anyone for just pure expression in soloing.”
“Holdsworth greatly impressed jazz guitar giant George Benson at a 1975 New York club date. “He sure has made an impression on me; he does things I have not heard the guitar do,” said Benson, who subsequently got Holdsworth his first solo record deal. “He’s not trying new things, he’s mastering them.”
“Holdsworth recorded his second solo album, “I.O.U.,” in 1980. He made at least 13 more albums over the next two decades, including 1985’s “Metal Fatigue.” Its title song has been credited by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello as the single most influential piece of music that shaped his own guitar style. “It was the first time I heard someone go outside of the expected melodic parameters, and that sounded fantastic to me,” Morello told Music Radar.
Holdsworth also had a major impact as a guitar designer. His signature Holdsworth H2 semi-hollow electric guitar model has been a bestseller since Carvin Guitars of Escondido first began marketing it in 1996.”
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The New York Times obituary can be found here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/arts/music/allan-holdsworth-virtuoso-guitarist-dies-at-70.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
“Mr. Holdsworth forged a relentlessly exploratory approach to harmony, which he brought to bear on both the guitar and the SynthAxe, a guitarlike synthesizer that allowed him added control over his tone and flow. He had his own vocabulary of unorthodox chords, often involving far reaches across the fretboard. As a soloist, he executed lightning-fast melodies with remarkable fluidity.
Reviewing a performance by Mr. Holdsworth in 1983, The New York Times’s Jon Pareles wrote: “He pours out notes in a liquid rush without slurring a single one. His sense of harmony reveals itself in daring melodic extrapolations and in chords that are complex and impressionistic yet as transparent as folk music.”
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“Intransigently committed to his own artistic vision, Mr. Holdsworth sometimes clashed with record labels. And though he was constantly self-critical and battled stage fright even into his later years, he drew breathless praise from many guitarists — including Frank Zappa and Eddie Van Halen, both of whom considered him to be at the top of the class.
Mr. Holdsworth never thought much of his reputation as a musician’s musician. “I don’t like playing to guitar players, actually. I’d rather just play to ordinary people,” he said in a Canadian television interview in the 1980s. “But obviously it’s difficult with this kind of music because no one ever really gets a chance to hear it, because radio won’t play it. Because it’s not jazz, they don’t really know what to call it, so they don’t know where to put it.”
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“Throughout his life, he continued to prefer the sound of wind instruments. (He also taught himself the violin.) To avoid a choppy, percussive sound, he never strummed the guitar, even when playing chords. Instead he plucked each string with a separate finger. When playing lines, he avoided picking with his right hand, often letting his fretting hand do the work.”
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The Guardian obit can be found here:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/19/allan-holdsworth-obituary
“Allan Holdsworth, who has died aged 70, was a contrary kind of guitar hero – one given to implying that he would rather have played the saxophone, who disliked the sound of much of his own work and who chose anonymity for much of his long career over star status. But if Holdsworth, a stern-faced, tentacle-fingered and all-but-motionless onstage performer, was a private and self-critical individual, some of the world’s leading guitarists in rock, pop and jazz held different opinions about him, and often expressed them in terms closer to declarations of devotion than simply technical admiration.
Frank Zappa regarded Holdsworth as a gamechanger for the electric guitar, a player who perfected blazingly fast techniques without sacrificing character, naturalness or emotion. The smooth-jazz hitmaker George Benson, ostensibly the edgy Holdsworth’s musical opposite, said: “He’s not trying new things, he’s mastering them.” The hard-rock virtuoso Eddie Van Halen revered him, and the former Deep Purple guitarist Joe Satriani told Guitar Player magazine that “his brilliant approach to harmony is completely original, beautiful and spellbinding”. The guitarist John McLaughlin has wryly admitted he would have been happy to borrow just about anything his fellow Yorkshireman invented, if only he could have figured out how it was done.”
“Holdsworth played in some of the most original hybrid bands drawing on jazz, prog rock and early electronica in the 1970s. He preceded those achievements by devoting three years of his early 20s to the exhaustive personal reappraisal of scales, intervals and chords (he once said his notes from the process wound up “five phonebooks high”) that made his improvising sound so mysteriously different, and his unusually large hands and long fingers allowed him to bridge intervals more acrobatically than most guitarists could.”
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“2001, Holdsworth unveiled a torrent of labyrinthine guitar jams over hard funk undertows to a mesmerised crowd at Ronnie Scott’s club, London, while sometimes veering into bugged-guitar electronic tone-poetry and elegiac violin-like passages of an orchestral complexity and richness. But he issued no more recordings after 2003, preferring the immediacy of live performance.”
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NPR wrote here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/04/17/524332013/allan-holdsworth-revered-fusion-guitarist-dies-at-70
“Allan Holdsworth, a spellbinding guitarist who influenced generations of jazz and rock musicians with his innovative sound, has died unexpectedly at age 70.
His daughter Louise Holdsworth announced his death on Sunday, prompting an outpouring of grief as well as high praise for an artist who not only changed the guitar, but also created a musical language entirely his own.
Holdsworth emerged as a promising and original player in the late 1960s and early '70s. But he hit his stride in the mid-'70s, with sideman appearances in major groups on the jazz-fusion and prog-rock circuits. He succeeded John McLaughlin in a new incarnation of the Tony Williams Lifetime, and also worked with Soft Machine, Pierre Moerlen's Gong, and fusion violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
His late '70s collaborations with drummer Bill Bruford (of Yes and King Crimson fame) proved especially strong: Bruford's albums Feels Good to Me, One of a Kind and The Bruford Tapes find Holdsworth in wizardly form both as a soloist and a cog in a bracingly tight ensemble. Holdsworth also joined Bruford (and the late John Wetton) in the supergroup U.K., issuing one of the landmark guitar solos of his career on the track "In the Dead of Night."
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“Holdsworth's unusual scale runs brought a whole new perspective to the fretboard; they were colored by rock distortion but had an almost flute-like beauty. Jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, in a 2005 interview with this writer for JazzTimes magazine, said this of Holdsworth:
To me, he's the only guitarist dealing with the kind of language Coltrane was dealing with — those long Slonimsky patterns that evolve differently through different registers in a very precise way, but pure like a prism. That's a big part of what I hear, that clarity of harmonic unfolding and melodic intricacy.
Holdsworth's chordal language, in its sheer imagination and otherworldliness, set his music even further apart. Unlike the solos, the chords were voiced with a clean, glass-like reverberating tone. They involved extreme finger stretches required in no other kind of music. They brought out strange intervallic combinations: on "Looking Glass," from Atavachron, two notes on the lowest strings and two on the highest strings, with nothing in between. Reaching for the Uncommon Chord was the title of a 1987 book of Holdsworth transcriptions, and for good reason.”
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The San Diego Union-Tribune
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/sd-et-music-holdsworth-obit-20170416-story.html
“My music is written with one goal in mind: to improvise. It’s like explaining a great story in words, but without words, much faster than you could with words. It’s like a direct line of instantaneous communication where you don’t have to wait for the end.”
Holdsworth recorded his second solo album, “I.O.U.,” in 1980. He made at least thirteen more albums over the next two decades, including 1985’s “Metal Fatigue.” Its title has been credited by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello as the single most influential piece of music that shaped his own guitar style.
“It was the first time I heard someone go outside of the expected melodic parameters, and that sounded fantastic to me,” Morello told Music Radar.
Some admirers at least partially credited Holdsworth’s extraordinary guitar prowess to his unusually large hands, which enabled his fingers to make extra-long stretches on the neck of his instrument. But it was his conceptual approach that truly made him unique.
“I realized that most guitar chords are only four notes, though it’s possible to play six,” Holdsworth told the Union-Tribune in 2002. “So it made me look at the whole thing in a different way, and I started looking at chords as coming from scales, and not the other way around. Then, when I was in my early 20s, I figured out a system to catalog every combination of notes. I used basic math to make a catalog of all these scales. And then I would name them differently, using symbols.
After each symbol is a huge diagram of the whole guitar fingerboard. It’s just based on recognizing the differences between intervals. It took me two to three years to compile, and I have this huge catalog that is five phone books high. But I don’t use any form of math in the music at all; this (catalog) is the work part to learn things. The way I play is the opposite of that. Other musicians look at it, and then look at me like I’m kind of crazy, which I probably am. But they are curious about it.”
He also had a major impact as a guitar designer. His signature Holdsworth H2 semi-hollow electric guitar model has been a bestseller since Carvin Guitars of Escondido first began marketing it in 1996.”
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https://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2017/04/19/no-place-to-call-home-an-appreciation-of-allan-holdsworth/
“I first encountered Holdsworth as an ambitious young guitar player. Even then, in what in retrospect was his heyday, he was the kind of musician described as “the best guitarist you never heard of.” I immediately loved not only his playing but his music. Even when listening very casually, one could tell that it was incredibly harmonically sophisticated, melodically engaging and amazingly well played. One thing that struck me almost immediately was the sheer beauty and lyricism of his music- qualities not often found in virtuoso electric guitar players. He struck me then as much more of a guitar Debussy than a guitar Shostakovich.”
“From early days of listening to his music for pleasure I gradually moved on to listening more and more analytically and critically, then, bit by bit, trying to understand what he was doing. Holdsworth may have been music’s greatest iceberg. What you see on first glance is beautiful, massive, impressive and even intimidating, but what lies beneath the surface is simply beyond belief.”
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“Later on, during my years at Indiana University, I went through a period of deep disillusionment with classical music. At that time, I often wished I could be a jazz musician. I was completely immersed then in the 60’s jazz of Miles Davis 2nd quintet, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. Working with David Baker in the IU jazz department, I felt like I started to understand the music well and to form solid ideas about improvisation. However, as David Baker knew probably better than anyone, the cello is no instrument for jazz. And for all its pedigree as a jazz instrument, neither is the guitar. When one listens to the solos of people like Trane, Miles, Woody Shaw, Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, you realise they were all able to develop single-note improvisation with a kind of agility, ease and expressivity that not even the best guitarists could approach. Even the cream of the crop of 70’s and 80’s fusion guitarists working with Miles or Freddie Hubbard often ended up sounding like amateurs next to their horn-playing colleagues. In their defence, it wasn’t entirely their fault. Saxophones and trumpets are near-ideal instruments for jazz improvisation. The guitar is not. None of the guitar greats of the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s could approach the kind of expressive ingenuity and creative freedom of a John Coltrane.”
“None of them, that is, except Allan Holdsworth. Holdsworth seemed not to be bound by the same laws of physics that limited every other guitarist from Django Reinhardt to George Benson. For him, picking didn’t seem to exist. Changing strings didn’t seem to exist. Shifting positions didn’t seem to exist. The notes simply flowed out of the guitar as they might from a scat singer possessing Messiaen’s harmonic knowledge with a four octave range on speed. Harmonically, he was simply in a different league to any other jazz guitarist of his generation. He might well have been the first guitarist to really completely escape the blues-box cliché. His improvisatory language was distinctive- one always knew it was him, but largely because it was so easy to recognise the lack of repetition, the lack of pre-planned licks, the lack of fall-back BS. Holdsworth seemed to be happiest playing in the higher extensions of a chord- weaving patterns around the 9th, the sharp 11th and the 13th. The upshot of this approach was that when he did settle melodically on the root or the fifth of the chord, it sounded somehow new, even a bit exotic.”
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Other Sources:
An Allan Holdsworth Wiki:
http://fingerprintsweb.net/ahwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
