Alan Pasqua: Difference between revisions
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R.V.B. - How often do you practice these days?
A.H. - Sometimes I’ll go months at a time where I don’t do anything. Typically I play every day now. Every once in a while I go into a thinking mode, where I’m thinking about it and not necessarily playing it. When you go back to the instrument, it feels a lot fresher that it did before... even though it takes a while to get the connection between your head and your hands together again. '''Alan''' '''Pasqua''' used to do the same thing. It’s good to think about it. | R.V.B. - How often do you practice these days?
A.H. - Sometimes I’ll go months at a time where I don’t do anything. Typically I play every day now. Every once in a while I go into a thinking mode, where I’m thinking about it and not necessarily playing it. When you go back to the instrument, it feels a lot fresher that it did before... even though it takes a while to get the connection between your head and your hands together again. '''Alan''' '''Pasqua''' used to do the same thing. It’s good to think about it. | ||
=Alan Pasqua on Allan= | |||
The New Tony Williams Lifetime/Alan Holdsworth | |||
AAJ: So, we touched on Lifetime a few times while discussing the new record, but I'd like to ask a few more questions. How old were you when you were playing with Lifetime? You were a very young man. | |||
AP: I was 23 in 1975, when it happened. | |||
AAJ: Again people don't put you there, but you are one the original Rhodes stylists. | |||
AP: Thank you man, but that's just something I get to live with. | |||
AAJ: It's a separate aesthetic, your sound was so thick and mean and aggressive. | |||
AP: We played loud—really loud! We had a good time in that band I'll tell you that much. | |||
AAJ: And what happened to the fourth member, bassist Tony Newton? | |||
AP: He's in LA, still working out here—I've run into him a few times. | |||
AAJ: An enigmatic figure for sure. You're involved in some other very interesting fusion history as well. Allan Holdsworth's Velvet Darkness (CTI, 1976) has many stories associated with it. Some, including the Allmusic Guide, say it's just a taped rehearsal. | |||
AP: Oh man that was hilarious. It wouldn't go so far as to call it a rehearsal but it was done very quickly. Allan didn't have a lot of control over what he was doing because of the record label. | |||
AAJ: And then the mythology around Allan himself. | |||
AP: Allan is really something. He's incredible and a great composer and really, really nice cat, too. When we play together we have so much fun and so many good memories to go with it. | |||
AAJ: Hopefully more to come. | |||
AP: God willing I hope so, man. I'm not dome twiddling knobs yet. | |||
AAJ: So, what was it about that Carnegie Hall gig with George Russell that made Tony and Allan want you to be in that band? | |||
AP: When they heard me that night I had some solos. I think there was probably something about the way I played, even at that early stage of the game, where I might have had a spark of my own voice, where I just wasn't a derivative of some other keyboard player, playing a bunch of somebody else's licks. They probably responded to that and my energy as a player. | |||
Then when we got together it was kind of interesting because Tony would not really ever tell me what to do or tell me what to play. He might tell me what not to play. He might say, "Don't play that. Try something else." Or, "Make it more rhythmic." He was a great composer too and he also knew a lot about composing and orchestration, so he had a really big part in the sound of that band and ultimately shaping how I voiced my chords with Allan's melody line. On all those tunes, like "Mr. Spock" and "Fred." | |||
AAJ: You immediately brought in one of the prototypical fusion tunes of all time. If I was to compile the fifteen greatest fusion tunes of all time, it would be on there—I'd make it the leadoff track. | |||
AP: "Proto Cosmos." Again, right out of George Russell. | |||
AAJ: Did you compose that before Lifetime or right when you got together? | |||
AP: Right at the beginning of Lifetime. I think the bass line was—let me think about this [hums bass line]—yeah, it's a twelve tone row. The bass line is kind of weird. You don't even notice it. You hear [hums the theme-the phoneticisms only make sense if you break out your copy] bum da da da da da dum, ba dada dum ta dum, then ba ba bum. The bass line is going against the melody, four against six. But, yeah, it's a twelve-tone row. That's all George. I got so much out of him I didn't even realize it. It's weird because when I was actually with him, I didn't even know what the hell he was talking about half the time—the stuff is pretty complicated. | |||
--- | |||
AP: Our thing at Carnegie Hall was billed as "George Russell with the New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra," with all the special guests I referred to earlier. | |||
AAJ: Evidently, it featured Alan Pasqua just enough to get Tony's attention, as well. I'd like to know your take on how Tony went that direction, electric or funk or fusion, after Miles and why he went back the way he did after Lifetime? He revisited more traditional forms later. | |||
AP: Yeah but he didn't want to then, at that time, with Lifetime. I was always bugging him to play something straight-ahead but he never would. I just wanted to groove with him that way. One night at a gig though, right in the middle of "Fred," he just broke into it, like totally straight-ahead burning swing, and I just looked at him. My eyes must have been wide, as big as saucers, so I started playing, and as soon as I started he just hit this giant rim-shot like, "BAP!" And just stopped and started laughing, and did this unbelievable drum fill and then right back into the funk. He was just messin' with me. | |||
--- | |||
But back to Tony. Tony told me he wanted to sound like Keith Moon, that he loved Keith Moon's playing. That was a big impetus for him—he was into the English drumming thing. So when I finally got the gig with him and got to New York, I was with him and he said, "Come on, we gotta go down to Manny's Music and pick you out a Fender Rhodes." I walked over there with him, because we were at SIR, rehearsing, and there's Mitch Mitchell. So Tony sees him and the two of them just like, disappear. They went off and talked and did their thing and I stayed there and tried electric pianos for a while. This was '75. So, yeah, that makes me 23. | |||
I went down to New York and we probably worked for a couple of weeks together and Tony was like, nonchalantly, "OK, cool. We're going to make a record." We did it at the old 30th Street Studio, CBS—unbelievable. It took two days to make, with no overdubs or editing of any kind. Pretty much everything was first take. Nobody knew, nobody had like a clue...I still have this vision, I remember this studio and how immense it was. I had these giant amplifiers—Acoustic brand guitar amplifiers—two of 'em—with four fifteens and two horns, six hundred watts—and it just looked like this little dinky thing in that room [laughs]. I also had a Rhodes and a clavinet. | |||
AAJ: How about this simple question? How'd Tony get Holdsworth? I never understood how Holdsworth got to Tony Williams from England. | |||
Alan Pasqua AP: Let me think. He was with Soft Machine right before that—it might have been from that. But I do know Tony was looking for him. There was a mutual cat that brought them together and I forget who it was. Allan stayed in Tony's flat up in Harlem and kind of worked out a lot of that stuff with him. By the time I came along, a lot of it was done, and then they brought in Tony Newton after me. | |||
AAJ: You almost could have covered that low end yourself. | |||
AP: Yeah, but I don't like to do that though and Tony was badass too—a good bassist. And he brought in some tunes as well. | |||
--- | |||
AAJ: So basically, one moment at Carnegie Hall with George Russell's NEC ensemble and the next two years with Lifetime. | |||
Back to Electric, Part Two | |||
AAJ: You've done all that, plus you've managed to carve out careers on the acoustic trio type path and the electric band path. | |||
AP: But realistically, the last time I played fusiony electric kind of music full-time was Velvet Darkness. | |||
--- | |||
AAJ: You continued to appear on Allan Holdsworth's recordings though. | |||
AP: Oh, yeah, he would call me and ask if I'd play on a tune, or some tunes on his records, and of course I would. But the thing I was highlighting was, I wasn't playing that music live or at other sessions. That brings up a funny story. I actually forgot to show one day. Allan called me for a session and I was busy in the studio doing some other stuff, and I had gotten in really late the night before, but I agreed. The next day, I was asleep and the phone rang like at 10 o'clock and I said, "Who the hell is this?" And it was him and I can just hear him now, he said, "Oh, man, I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to play on this shit either." [laughs] And I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I totally forgot." And he says, "Oh, no man, this shit is awful. Don't even bother coming down." And that was Atavachron (Relativity, 1987) or Metal Fatigue (Relativity, 1985), which were great records. | |||
AAJ: That seems to be his deal. Putting himself down. | |||
AP: Oh, totally. He's very self-deprecating. | |||
--- | |||
AAJ: I went to your website to figure out your rig and didn't find much. | |||
AP: That's because it's really nothing. I'm playing acoustic and the Nord and I had a Korg CX-3 that I was using on the road with Holdsworth, and I've played B-3 on some stuff. It's funny because when I went on the European tour with Allan they got me the wrong CX-3, an old model that sounds awful, so I told them I wasn't going to use Korg and not to even bother getting me another one. I decided I was going to do the whole thing on Nord. I had more fun making sounds from effects, like throwing Leslie on the Rhodes and taking the bottom end off of it and making it distort. All of sudden it sounds like somebody clearing their throat. It's like, man, this isn't even an electric piano. It really morphs so quickly into something so unusual and then it stands up on its own | |||
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/alan-pasqua-lifetimes-aglow-a-non-antisocial-interaction-alan-pasqua-by-phil-dipietro#5 | |||
[[Category:Musicians]] | [[Category:Musicians]] | ||
https://youtu.be/wesA01_jeYY | https://youtu.be/wesA01_jeYY | ||
