Sam Holdsworth

Player Of The Month (Beat Instrumental 1978)

How curious, then, that he didn’t even pick up anything with six strings on it until he was seventeen. "Originally I wanted to play saxaphone [sic], when I was a kid. My dad was a piano player. He was really good, but he gave it up. I don’t know why, I’ve never understood that. Anyway, he never got round to buying me a sax, and I didn’t have any money of my own at that time, so I couldn’t afford an instrument. So he bought an old Spanish guitar off an uncle of mine for a fiver, and he left it lying around, and I just picked it up."

Any Key In The U.K. (Unknown publication 1978)

When and why did you start to play guitar?

I started when I was about 16 or 17 after I left school because I ‘d always been interested in music. My father was a pianist so I was exposed to a lot of music at home. He was like an inspiration to me really in that he often presented me with things I wouldn’t normally get to hear. He helped me a lot in that way but I never actually sat and down and learned to read music.

Allan Holdsworth (Beat Instrumental 1979)

"I liked quite a lot of classical music but was really more interested in people who could improvise. That was something that fascinated me. Luckily my father was a Jazz pianist and had quite a lot of records which gave me something to go on. When my Uncle gave me a Spanish guitar I dug those records out and listened to them."

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1980)

A native of Bradford, Yorkshire, Allan Holdsworth was born on August 6, 1948 [Note: The correct year is 1946]. Although his father was a skilled pianist, a love for the 88 keys never bloomed in young Allan. His early interest in music never went beyond listening to jazz records, and it wasn’t until he was 16 that he even tried playing a guitar. At that time his father bought him an acoustic for about ten shillings. The instrument sat around for awhile until Allan’s interest in playing was sparked by hearing the local guitarists play in the neighborhood pub. Soon thereafter he joined a band that covered pop songs, in which he played two guitar solos per song: "One was supposed to be an impersonation of the one on the record," he explains, "and the other was something of my own."

Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)

Although Allan doesn’t see himself as a jazz guitarist, in his youth he listened to a lot of jazz records belonging to his father, which featured Charlie Christian and Joe Pass. ‘I’d heard a lot of jazz guitar before I’d even seen a guitar. I listened to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix too, but what I always tried to catch from people, was the essence of what they were saying, rather than the way they were doing it. The last thing I wanted was to sit down and calculate what they did, just so I could do it like them. What I wanted to do was find a way to get something that was as good as that musically, and that’s my aim. To continuously try and play better, without deliberately playing like someone else.’ Allan Holdsworth’s morals were firmly planted when I quizzed him about the offer of a job with Miles Davis, should the offer ever arise?

‘I don’t know, it depends on what I’d be asked to do (laughs).’

The Innocent Abroad (Musician 1984)

Born thirty-five years ago, Allan Holdsworth was raised in the grim Northern mill town of Bradford, Yorkshire. Although he didn’t pick up guitar until age seventeen, he quickly made up for lost time due to a distinguished tutor: Allan’s musical tastes and later his knowledge of theory came entirely from his father, Sam Holdsworth (no relation whatsoever to the editor of this journal). The elder Holdsworth had been a professional piano player who made the ultimate sacrifice: "He was really a monster musician. He retired and went to work in a factory because he couldn’t stand playing all the tunes that people wanted him to play. He made a conscious decision to only play music on his own at home, for his own pleasure. So he really put all his energy on me."

The result of Sam Holdsworth’s tutelage was twofold: young Allan developed an ear for good jazz, a taste that now firmly underpins all his playing and composing; secondly, and more importantly, Holdsworth’s music has a striking individuality and originality, a whole separate channel on the rock guitar river.

Allan Holdsworth’s New Horizons (Downbeat 1985)

When he switched over to guitar he was still interested in getting a saxophone kind of sound, which led to all kinds of early experimenting with amplifiers and sustain. "I guess consciously since I’ve started on the instrument I’ve been trying to get the guitar to sound more like I was blowing it than plucking it, as such. I remember having this little 15-watt amplifier that my parents had bought me, and there’d be a certain volume I’d play at with this thing where it would feedback and sound really great, a more hornlike quality than anything I had heard before. Then I’d plug my guitar into somebody else’s amplifier and it would sound completely different. That interested me very much, so I’d try and figure out how the whole electronics thing worked. My father had a friend who built amplifiers and I’d get some lessons with him, so I gradually became aware of what was happening with the sound once you’d pluck a note. From there I’d try to hone in on it - make an amplifier that did exactly what I wanted it to do!’

Holdsworth credits much of his astounding technique to the fact that his first teacher, his father, the late Sam Holdsworth, was a piano player and not a guitar player. "He used to help me with chords and scales, and since he wasn’t a guitar player he couldn’t tell me how it was to be done on the guitar. But he could tell me about the music. So while I did learn the music from him, I had to apply my own logic to everything.

Allan Holdsworth (Guitarist 1985)

Why did you leave the UK. to go to America?

Basically, it was because I thought I had tried as hard as I could to play what I wanted to play in England, and couldn’t really get anywhere. It had actually got to a point where I decided that I wasn’t going to be a musician any more. I was just going to get a job, like my father had, in a factory or a music store or something and just play for my own amusement. I’d never stop playing, because I would always have the interest to play, but I don’t want to play pop music and I don’t want to be a session player; selfishly, I just want to play what I want.

I really didn’t expect anything to happen though which is why, before I left England, I was quite prepared to drop out of music completely. Luckily, the bass player in the band at that time, Paul Carmichael, went over to the States and met a girl there who said she could get us some gigs, because people knew who we were. We went over there and were absolutely astounded at the response. Basically, I’ve never looked back.

It was like a last chance for me, because I definitely knew what would happen to me if I stayed here, which was absolutely zero, so why not try. I did, and this is our third album since we left, so I’m really quite pleased. I love England, I always will, but for me it’s just not the place to be for music. It’s great for certain people and certain kinds of pop music, but for me it was just impossible.

"...Where_No_Guitarist_Has_Gone_Before..."_(Cymbiosis_1986)

Cymbiosis: I understand if your family could have afforded it you would have had a saxophone instead of a guitar when you were younger?

Holdsworth: Yeah, that’s what I really wanted—to play saxophone.

Cymbiosis: Why was that?

Holdsworth: Well, I just loved the saxophone. It was the sound. I think people are first attracted to music and then to specific sounds within it. I also liked violin later. But at the time I liked saxophone more, because it was on most of the records that my dad had. He was a jazz player and had a lot of jazz records.

Cymbiosis: So you had things like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw?

Holdsworth: Yeah, dad played in the Air Force band during the war, and they played a lot of swing.

Cymbiosis: You apparently had a fascination with your parents’ record player when you were very young and you’ve certainly carried on in your father’s tradition about wanting to surround yourself with equipment. [That’s about all that could be seen in the living room].

Holdsworth: Well, it’s a curiosity. I’m curious about it all. I’ve always been interested in electronics, and I wanted to know why the guitar sounded like it did when using a certain amplifier. I had to analyze and find out why each amp sounded different, so I spent a lot of years modifying and messing with tube amplifiers.

HUMBLE_GUITAR_MASTER_ALLAN_HOLDSWORTH_ALWAYS_STRUGGLES_TO_PAY_THE_RENT

My father bought an old guitar from my uncle and just left it lyin’ around. I never thought I’d be a musician, but I had always loved music, just listening and stuff. So I started messing around with the guitar and it just kinda grew on me.

Castles Made Of Sand (Guitarist 1987)

How is your music theory; do you read for instance?

No I don’t. But I don’t think that would affect your theoretical knowledge. For example, my father helped me a lot with regard to that, because I understand chords and scales and that changes from day to day and hopefully grows from time to time. So I think it’s possible for people to know a lot about harmony, for example, without having to read. But I’ve never been able to read, although when I first started playing I was dabbling around on wind instruments - but I used to perforate my ears all the time - and I found it incredibly easy to read on a wind instrument. When I saw Eb, there was only one place I could play Eb in that octave. But I could never get it together on the guitar; I could never decide where I wanted to play a given note. I’d see a phrase on a piece of paper and just get completely confused as to where I wanted to play it - which may or may not have been practice and may or may not have been that I didn’t pursue it enough. But you’re still thinking about the notes, but you’re thinki ng about them from the inside instead of the outside. Like superimposing things. I like to superimpose two or three different chords over the top of one chord. A very simple example is playing a G major triad, starting on the low E string, and then an octave above that play an F sharp triad and the octave above that play an F triad. So when you play them the actual harmony is going down but the notes are going up. I like those kinds of things.

The Open End (Boston Sound Report 1988)

BSR: Who are some of your early and current influences?

AH: Some of my early influences were Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, I suppose, Jimmy Rainey and Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, and all those guys. They were the records that my father had. He was a jazz piano player, and he always had these records lying around. This was before I started playing. So I heard them all when I was growing up.

The Unreachable Star (Guitar World 1989)

GW: I can anticipate your response, but in retrospect, which among your recorded solos have you been most happy with?

HOLDSWORTH: I’m not really happy with any of them. I mean, I just think that they were okay at the time, because that’s all you can ever hope for, unfortunately. Because I started playing late, it’s only in the last five years or so that I’ve started to feel I’ve made any progress as a musician, out-side of just waffling around on guitar. I feel like, I don’t know that I haven’t done anything yet. There are certain things I almost like. Like that solo on "Distance Versus Desire" [Sand]. In a way that was the closest I ever got to attaining the kind of sound I hear. People say, "You know I like the guitar sound you get, it’s really expressive," or whatever all these things are that one tries to attain, but to me, it isn’t anywhere near as expressive as what I think I’m going to be able to get out of the SynthAxe. I didn’t think the sound was so great on that particular track, but I would never have believed that you could get that degree of control over a synthesize r. But people perceive things really differently. And it’s almost like I’ve been living all this time just to get that instrument and I never even should have gotten a guitar. But then again, if I hadn’t gotten started on the guitar, I wouldn’t really be able to deal with the SynthAxe. You know I wish now more than ever that I’d been a horn player, because there’s all these new little wind instruments coming out for synthesizer control; God, it makes me want to try again with one of those.

GW: A genuine sense of yearning, similar to that of "Distance Versus Desire," is apparent in some of the newer tunes, "Endomorph" in particular.

HOLDSWORTH: That’s a solo piece about my father, but it could have been written about anyone. The song was written because I’m one of those people who never seems to say how much I care about people, especially the people I’m really close to. It’s kind of an English thing; certain things go unsaid, and you don’t have to always keep hugging people. I wish I had, because when my father did pass away, I felt that I hadn’t actually told him how much I cared about him. The title means "something that’s encapsulated in something else," like when you crack open a rock and there’s some kind of a stone inside. I just felt like letting him know, and the song’s about anybody else who might be feeling the same way, about just generally not being able to say what you’re feeling.

Guitarist’s Guitarist (Jazz Times 1989)

"To be honest," he said in a conversation in mid-April. "I call it jazz because the essence of the music is improvisation, and that makes it jazz to me. My dad used to tell me that to him jazz meant improvisation, and it was supposed to be current with what was happening at any particular point in time. Unfortunately some people insist upon tieing jazz to a specific time period. And that’s not completely right, I don’t think. I always feel that what Charlie Parker did when he came on the scene, or what any other new player does, should be different from what went before. That’s what’s jazz to me. That’s the essence of it,"-

Holdsworth mentions his musician-father frequently. An excellent pianist who spent the World War II years in the Royal Air Force, he was Holdsworth’s first teacher. "My father was really a great jazz piano player," he recalled, "and a great influence on my life; He made a living as a musician early on. But after the war, when he got a chance to go to London to play, he changed his mind - decided that he’d been away front home long enough and he wanted to be with my mum. So he just did local gigs.

"In the beginning, he was working as a musician, and then he just made a decision to stop. I guess he played too many dance gigs with drunks leaning over his shoulder. He finally said, I don’t want to play this kind of music anymore. To him it was better to get a day job and play the music he wanted to play for his own pleasure. I never understood that at first, but I do, now. I used, to think -that, well, surely any playing’s better than no playing. But then, after a" while, you begin to think, well ... maybe not."

Holdsworth’s first interest was the saxophone, and its a fascination that has stayed with him right up to the present day. "I loved the sound of it," he said, "and I still do. But we didn’t have the money to buy one. When I was about 15, my dad picked up an acoustic guitar from an uncle and just left it laying around. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. at all. But after it’d been around for a couple of years, I started noodling around on it. When my father saw there was some interest, he started to help me out with chords and stuff. He was such a fantastic natural teacher that he understood the guitar, even though he didn’t play the instrument. The funny thing is that he actually wound up teaching it to local students in Bradford.

"The important thing that my dad did was to open me up to all kinds of creative ideas. I was exposed to music from the very beginning, As far back as I can remember I used to play his old albums,- even 78 rpm records, and I heard Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian very early on. And, of course I’d get to hear my dad play on his gigs. When I was about five or six he made me a record player out of one of those mechanical, wind-up turntables. He was into hi-fi, with mono amplifiers, and building stuff."

"He passed away a few years ago. I’m afraid that I never really told him how I felt about him, but I guess that can happen. But I wouldn’t be where I am musically now without his influence -that’s for sure."

The other significant influence on Holdsworth’s playing has been - predictably, perhaps - saxophonist John Coltrane. "When I first started," he explained, "I tried to play pop music - or what was popular at the time, just because it was the only thing that I could manage to play. But I always used to listen to other kinds of music. Then a few years later I started listening to John Coltrane and it was wonderful (in fact, I introduced my father to his music, because he’d never heard it). Shortly after that, Coltrane died. And it was just after I’d fallen in love with his music. I was devastated; I remember locking myself in the toilet for a long time to think about it because I was so moved by what he did."

Allan Holdsworth (English Tour Program 1989)

Born in Bradford in 1946, Allan didn’t start playing the guitar until relatively late - he never wanted to play it anyway, he’d rather have learnt sax - but it was a guitar he was given and so it was the guitar he learnt to play. Guided by his father, apparently a gifted jazz pianist, Allan was a good pupil, always questioning and probing. He quickly realised that the way keyboard chords were arranged differed greatly from the musically limiting system which ‘shape’ guitarists seemed all too willing to adhere to. But, as Allan preferred the more musical sound of his father’s piano chords, he set about the arduous task of transferring them to the guitar: "I started experimenting... taking a triad and going through all the inversions I could get on the lower three strings. Then I’d do the same on the next three, then take a four note chord and do the same... and so on. Then I’d write them all out, find the ones I liked and discard the ones I didn’t." It was this approach that gave Allan his amazing chord vocabulary and led to those tendon-defying stretches - seven or eight frets sometimes - that still put his imitators to shame.

Allan Holdsworth’s Untold Secrets + Worthy Quotes (Guitar Player 1990)

"Endomorph"

Like a lot of kids, when I was growing up I was kind of stubborn, and although I obviously loved my parents, I didn’t always show it - kids can be like that. I think they knew I loved them and cared about them, but I was just not very good at telling them. After my dad passed away, I started feeling unusually sad, particularly so because I was always left wondering if he ever did know how much I loved him.

I tried writing some lyrics for this piece, but I couldn’t express them. I called Rowanne, played it for her and explained the feeling, and that I wanted the title to be "Endomorph," something that’s trapped inside something else, just the way I felt. She wrote it, and like she usually does, she just put a big frog in my throat. She did the same thing with "All Our Yesterdays," from Atavachron: I was just in tears, man. It was incredible. She’d written words that said more than I would have imagined I ever could have. The problem was that I’d written it for me, and it was just outside her range. She could sing it up an octave, but I wanted the melody to be inside the register of the chords. We tried transposing it, and it started not sounding dark or somber enough. I remember my dad used to say, "This tune sounds great in this key." Then he’d play it in a lot of different keys and say, "But listen - it doesn’t sound right in this one." Sometimes you can get away with a half-step in either direction, but even then it often doesn’t work. I tried it again myself, and I couldn’t do it, man. I might have been able to 10, 15 years ago, but I was just croaking and sounding terrible. A few people tried, and then Craig Copeland, whom I met through Chad - who introduced me to Rowanne, as well - came in, and he really sang it great.

Under the second verse there’s a weird, ominous undercurrent.

It was actually a resampled voice. It was taken way out of key, completely off, then we took other samples at different notes, mixed them together, and made another sample as the combination of all of them in that one note. Sonically, it wasn’t as nice as I would have liked, but it did the job inasmuch as it had the spooky vibe about it - there’s a lot of air in the sound. I’d also been working with the Steinberg Tx7 programmer, to get something to simulate the unique sound of a PPG synthesizer. I did two PPGish sounds and blended those with the voice sound That was the bulk of the piece.

Did the piece come off with the kind of emotional breadth you’d intended?

I don’t know. By the time I finish an album, I’m numb. I don’t even know whether any of it’s good. You think, "Oh, Jesus, what did I just play? Was that the biggest load or what?" There’s no way to know. You just say, "I think it was alright," and try again the next day. But sometimes you just have to get away from it. You have to remember what it was feeling like to you when you first did it. I usually come up with the idea really quick, so if the feeling is strong enough in the beginning, when I strike on something I think is okay, it will usually return later. Quite often I work to a point where I just can’t tell. I won’t listen to it for a while, and then I’ll hear it later and go, "Yeah. It was alright."

On The Level (IM&RW 1991)

IM - How much do you actually know about the harmony theory and scale theory. What’s your background on that?

"Well my dad was a piano player and as far as I can tell I know quite a lot about scales. I could be wrong! So it is something that I have spent a lot of time on. I always study a piece of music from a harmonic point of view before I even play on it and I write it all down for myself then I just improvise on it."

IM - So when you look at the guitar neck you see it as a unified whole rather than as loads of little box positions of shapes?

"I see it as a whole thing because that’s how I started out learning it. When my dad started showing me scales, he would never let me use an open string. I started learning scales with full fingering so that opened up the neck immediately and I wasn’t stuck with playing in the nut position. When he started showing me chords I’d always be more intrigued with closer voicings which were a little more unusual at that time on guitar. I didn’t know what was normal on guitar, what it’s supposed to be like. Whenever I practice a scale I never practice it in one position. Even when I first started, every scale I practiced would be from as high as I could get to as low as possible. Sometimes even now when people ask me to do things that use open strings, I have to really think hard before I can use an open string."

IM - So, are you totally self taught then apart from what your father taught you?

"Yeah, well then from what he had given me I started coming up with concepts of my own and I wanted to figure out how many combinations of notes there are. Just getting into permutations and creating scales by using mathematics. That was one of the simplest ways to do it because that way you can get every single one and you don’t miss anything. Say you want a scale that stretches over three octaves so that if you’re soloing over a couple of changes or whatever you could use this scale and it will go through three separate, independent key centres but in itself it is a complete unity. So you would start out and spread the notes out in such a way that if it started on say a C you could take any amount, say 10, 12, 15 notes over three octaves and just spread them out so that when you get to where you would think the next octave started on C it wouldn’t be C and then on the octave above that it wouldn’t be C, the octave above that it would be. By using numbers like that I could figure all that out so I did and I got reams of stuff and I will never be able to remember it all, but it was just like an exercise, so what I do is draw from that thing because it’s like an endless supply. There’s more information there by just sitting down and working it out first than I’ll ever be able to absorb. Plus the fact that I then saw all the connections with the chords and scales, so I’m just trying to work on that. I’m not very good at it, but I’m trying."

Mike Pachelli Show (video transcript 1991)

MP: What was your early musical influences?

AH: Well, all of the people really that my dad use to listen to which is jazz from the period, which would go back as far as Django, Charlie Christian with Benny Goodman, and right way up through Miles…

MP: I understand at a real early age you had a major affinity with a record player, like at 2 or 3 you were just uh…

AH: Well I was absolutely enthralled with music, music was everything, I mean I had no desire whatsoever to play an instrument – I wasn’t really interested in an instrument, I was just interested in music.

MP: Were you formally trained?

AH: No, in fact most of the things I learned, I learned in the beginning anyway, since then I’ve just worked on my own, but most of the things I learned in the beginning were from my father.

MP: I understand that when you were young you wanted to be a saxophone player.

AH: Yeah, well after I’d been listening to music for a long time, I got to be about 10 or 11. I was really interested in saxophone, the breathing thing seemed so alive, you could do more with it than a voice. But it was on that connection like a vocal thing.

MP: And why didn’t you pursue that?

AH: Well, at the time saxophones were very expensive things to buy so my dad got, we I had an uncle who played guitar and my dad got a guitar from him and just left it lying around, I just started in front of the mirror (laughs) I had no real interest in it at all, and he just left it there and I just noodled on it from time to time, try it on listening to music but still had no real desire to play anything and I guess over a period of time I realized I was playing a few chords on it and my dad sort of took over because he knew all the notes on the guitar being the musician that he was…so as soon as he saw I had any interest in it he started trying to help me out. But I was very stubborn, I didn’t really like the help, though I needed it, but I wanted to do it on my own.

MP: There’s some amazing tunes on there, I always thought that if Metal Fatigue if it got airplay it could have been a great FM crossover hit. There was Devil Take the Hindmost, all I can say about that is “whew!” and then the tune I was REALLY interested in is The Un-Merry-Go-Round. Where’d that come from?

AH: Well it’s kind of a… basically I wrote that for my dad, you know, because my dad died during that year that I was doing the album. He used to have all these… he was a really great artist, he used to draw this merry go round with all these famous English politicians on it, like you’d have Ronald Reagan and all these guys on it, and he’d have them with their slogans, and he used to call it the UN Merry go round, so I got the title from him.

MP: The solo in there, which by the way is Phil Keaggy’s all-time favorite electric guitar solo, the soprano – which is quite a compliment in itself – the soprano sax solo that you sort of do – how, where’s that coming from, I mean what’s the inspiration, it sounds nearly exactly like a soprano!

(laughs) For a period of time I guess I was – I go through these periods that change and I was really trying to get like that soprano kind of tone. I guess that was about as close I got. I couldn’t get any closer so I gave up, started on something else.

MP: Let’s talk about some of your instruments, basically. What was your first guitar then?

AH: First guitar was this old, it was kind of like an old classical guitar, but it did have steel strings on it, and then after that my dad got me an f-hole guitar which is a guitar I played a year or so - it was a Hofner, and then I put a pickup on it and I spent it my dad who was into building amplifiers just started getting interested in amplifiers then. He built that, then I saw this guy who had this Fender Stratocaster which I fell in love with so I tried this Fender Strat, my dad got it – well signed for it – so I could make the payments on it. And then about 2 months later I saw, I played an SG and that was it from then on, I was completely in love with this SG. I got this SG Standard, later I traded it for an SG Custom. I basically stayed with that guitar right the way through until…Tony Williams.

No Secret (Guitar Extra 1992)

Q: What were your first recollections of music , and how did you first become interested in music?

Allan: It was all the records that my dad had. Being a jazz piano player, he had a lot of records lying around, and that’s how I first heard Charlie Christian, on some of the old Benny Goodman albums. So I kind of grew up listening to that. He also had Joe Pass, Jimmy Raney, Tal Farlow - those guys. I always loved music, I loved listening to it, but I absolutely had no intention of becoming a musician, or anything. I just thought music was something to enjoy and listen to, and that’s all I did.

Q: Did your parents push you to take piano lessons?

Allan: My father tried to get me interested in the piano, but it was really obvious that I had no interest in it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the sound of it, it was just that I don’t have any interest in that kind of instrument. Then I really started to like the saxophone, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, who I heard on the Miles Davis albums. When I heard John Coltrane, I was really moved by it. Then I started going down to the record shop every Saturday-I’d go down in to town and buy an album, and I started buying all these John Coltrane albums. It was only four or five months after I discovered John Coltrane that I read in the paper that he died. It was a real shock because I guess when you’re young and you’ve just discovered somebody, I felt like I really knew him. I just felt like he had a whole lot more left.

Q: How did you learn your first chords?

Allan: From him, because he had a real understanding of the guitar - he knew where all the notes were, he knew where all the chords were. He couldn’t play guitar himself, but he knew where everything was on the guitar, so he’d say, "Do this, do that, put your fingers here, put your fingers there." I didn’t even want to learn it, because I’m a little bit stubborn, and I like to learn things on my own. I don’t like to find out what somebody does and then have to ask him about it. I’d rather listen to it and then go and try to figure a way of my own to do it. By that time I was just noodling on the guitar a little bit, and before I knew it, I was in a local band, still with no intention of being a full time musician.

Blinded By Science (Guitar Player 1993)

Oddly enough, Holdsworth became a musician almost by accident. "I had no desire to become a musician," he explains. "I was only interested in listening. When I started listening to saxophone players, I became interested in playing sax. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me one, so my father bought an acoustic guitar from my uncle. He left it lying around to see if I had any interest. Through time, I picked the thing up and tried to play it, and slowly I started to pick a few things up."

Joe Satriani Meets Allan Holdsworth (Musician special edition 1993)

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH: "Well, because my dad was a jazz musician he had records of most instrumentalists including guitarists, so after Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, I grew up listening to Joe Pass and Jimmy Raney; I loved Jimmy Raney. And all those guys were absolutely wonderful, but there was something about the guitar that I didn’t like even then. Guitar chords only consist of four DIFFERENT notes, generally---you can play more, but they’re usually duplicates or an octave---so it becomes more limited. When I’d hear chord things, I’d recognize the sound of the chords straight away; you almost knew what was coming. You’d appreciate the fact that it was MARVELOUS---it never took anything away from that---but I thought it would be nice to do something, where the chords sounded different. And unfortunately, unless you have two guitar players and they don’t duplicate notes, the chords will naturally sound a bit more ambiguous in some ways, although they’re not, you know? So I started to think of chords as being related to families. I don’t hear one voicing move to another; it’s like, that chord belongs to a family, a scale, and the next one belongs to a different family, and I try to hear the FAMILIES change as the sequence goes. You can play anything that sounds nice, as long as the notes are contained in those scales as they move from one to another. I hear that in piano players I like. They don’t sound trapped with this chord-symbol thing. Whenever I hear Keith Jarrett, it’s just these harmonic/melodic ideas, and they all sound RIGHT, but at the same time have this kind of FREEDOM in the way they move."