Allan's influences: Difference between revisions

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.

Here was a guitarist who had attained the absolute pinnacle of what practically every plectorist I had ever interviewed was striving for-to liberate themselves from the percussive nature of the instrument and emulate the flowing legato lines of saxophone players. And Holdsworth had already accomplished this way back in the ‘70s. He's been refining that aesthetic ever since, coming closer than any other guitarist to capturing the spirit of John Coltrane on his instrument. Indeed, ‘Trane has been Holdsworth's guiding light from the very beginning.