Allan's influences: Difference between revisions
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"He just kind of completely turned my life upside down," Holdsworth says of Coltrane's influence on him at the age of 18. "I remember when I first heard those Miles Davis records that had Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on them. It was fascinating to me. Coltrane's playing in particular was a major revelation. I loved Cannonball also, but when I listened to him I could hear where it came from, I could hear the path that he had taken. But when I heard Coltrane, I couldn't hear connections with anything else. It was almost like he had found a way to get to the truth somehow, to bypass all of the things that as an improviser you have to deal with. He seemed to be actually improvising and playing over the same material but in a very different way. That was the thing that really changed my life, just realizing that that was possible. I realized then that what I needed to do was to try and find a way to improvise over chord sequences without playing any bebop or without having it sound like it came from so mewhere else. And it's been an ongoing, everlasting quest. | "He just kind of completely turned my life upside down," Holdsworth says of Coltrane's influence on him at the age of 18. "I remember when I first heard those Miles Davis records that had Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on them. It was fascinating to me. Coltrane's playing in particular was a major revelation. I loved Cannonball also, but when I listened to him I could hear where it came from, I could hear the path that he had taken. But when I heard Coltrane, I couldn't hear connections with anything else. It was almost like he had found a way to get to the truth somehow, to bypass all of the things that as an improviser you have to deal with. He seemed to be actually improvising and playing over the same material but in a very different way. That was the thing that really changed my life, just realizing that that was possible. I realized then that what I needed to do was to try and find a way to improvise over chord sequences without playing any bebop or without having it sound like it came from so mewhere else. And it's been an ongoing, everlasting quest. | ||
==Allan Holdsworth (NPS Radio transcript)== | |||
PH: But somewhere along the line it set the seal of which you wanted to sort of pursue experimentation with like using rock rhythms and jazz basically, didn’t ya? | |||
AH: Yeah, well because of my father, who was a jazz musician, and I grew up in a house full of classical music and jazz records… I obviously had a great love for it, you know, I started out with a classical music… I remember even before I could read I remember listening to like Debussy or something or a couple of my father’s favorite composers and actually crying, and I couldn’t figure it out – ‘this is really strange – what is this strange thing that’s happening to me’, and I didn’t understand it, and then a few years afterwards I realized how powerful music is… And then the next big major thing was John Coltrane because my father had those records that had Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane in the same band. The thing about that was, I loved Cannonball Adderley, but I could hear where it came from, you know, I could hear the connection between him and what was before - but when I heard John Coltrane, I couldn’t – he was like, somehow he’d been able to take this elec – this cable of life or cable of music and plug it directly into the source, and it wasn’t going through any pathway that had already been recreated - it like was a new circuit, like a new thing and it just… I was just really moved by it and I used to go out every Saturday morning and buy all the John Coltrane records I could find. And I’d already learned earlier that it was a very bad idea to try and copy someone, because all you did was get good at sounding like someone else, and also make you feel like you were kind of leeching off of somebody, so I didn’t want to do that. What I wanted to do was listen to the spirit of it, and the heart and the soul of the music – and the head, you know, because he was a brilliant musician – if you listen to some of those things like, I think, my favorite album, Coltrane’s Sound, and there’s a tune on there called Satellite, and I listened to that just a couple of days ago and it’s unbelievable, man it’s absolutely astounding – it’s amazing! And it never happened before – isn’t that great? | |||
(Coltrane excerpt) | |||
PH: The approach and the feeling – you wanted to pursue that sound, right? By hearing something which is so vital and fresh, that you wanted to kind of pursue that kind of approach? | |||
AH: Well, what I learned from him was that it’s a really bad idea to try and do something that somebody else is already doing. What I wanted to do was, I wanted to find out what the essence of it was. In other words, if a certain kind of music has been elevated to a certain level because of the quality of it, then he made me realize that you can get to that level and beyond it without necessarily travelling the path that somebody else made to get to that level, and he made me realize that quality level, that line, can be pushed up and pushed up and pushed up and pushed up …without going through pathways that had already been gone through, and it was like a revelation and I tried constantly – well I’ve been trying ever since, just to uh… Also knowing that you can never know anything about music is a beautiful thing - like when you fall in love, and you’ve got that thing that you don’t understand before you find out who the person is – music’s like that to me, you can’t ever find out what it is, but you just want to know more and more and more – and you try to get more and more and you try and also put out more and more because you’re trying to get to it – it’s a really great thing, man, it’s like life, it’s like everything gets better except looking in the mirror, haha! | |||
'''[[The Allan Holdsworth Interview! (Jazz Houston 2006)]]''' | '''[[The Allan Holdsworth Interview! (Jazz Houston 2006)]]''' | ||
