Comments on the Wikipedia article

This page is a draft of comments on the Wikipedia article on Allan as it stood sometime around 2020. The point was to try and critique some of the descriptions on Wikipedia, which to the editor of this website sometimes seems misleading, and in other cases outright wrong. As it is, I'd forgotten all about this page for years. These are the comments I wrote around 2020. The rest of the Wikipedia article surely could do with some comments too, but that will have to be at later time...

Wikipedia: Allan Holdsworth (6 August 1946 – 15 April 2017)[1] was a British jazz fusion and progressive rock guitarist, violinist and composer.

It is objectively true that Allan was a guitarist, violinist and composer. The violin playing was a side project, however. Allan's last known public performance on the violin was on "Temporary Fault" from the I.O.U. album. Describing him as a jazz fusion and progressive rock guitarist is a subjective statement though. While it is true that many applied the label to him, Allan never described his own music as either "jazz fusion" or "progressive rock". He actively objected to the term fusion. For example, he told Anil Prasad in 1993:

"Fusion? Well, that's a perfectly good word, but when I think of fusion, I always think about the wrong thing. When someone says fusion, I think of what you hear in elevators now. [laughs] It used to be muzak, but now it's fuzak. GRP seems to be really commercial for me. It's really highly polished. The guys are really great players. I'm not knocking it, but it doesn't seem to be 100 percent there—the creative aspect of it."

He also said to the Montreal Gazette in 2009:

Some call it fusion, Holdsworth acknowledged, but that's not quite it. "When I hear 'fusion,' I think of Tricky-Dick stuff - really hairy melodies played in unison," he said. "It's like, 'Why?' If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about."

And this is what he said to Guitarist in 2000:

"When people mention the word 'jazz' I think of it as music that's harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and a vehicle for improvisation. And that's it: it's not a particular form of music. When you mention jazz to some people they'll think of Acker Bilk and others will say Charlie Parker. Jazz is a very good word, but people have shrunk it by using it in the wrong way. It's like fusion. What I have come to know of fusion is a music that I detest, but there's nothing wrong with the word; it's a perfectly good word."

Further examples can be found in Sound Waves 2012.

As for calling Holdsworth a progressive rock guitarist, some of the same applies. It is true that Holdsworth played in a few bands that could easily be labeled "progressive rock" (most notably perhaps with U.K.), and played on several records in the genre, he himself never described his playing that way. Since 1982, Allan's main body of work was as a solo artist, and this only had a superficial resemblance to progressive rock. This writer thinks simply saying "jazzrock" would be a more apt description.

Wikipedia: Holdsworth was known for his esoteric and idiosyncratic usage of advanced music theory concepts, especially with respect to melody and harmony. His music incorporates a vast array of complex chord progressions, often using unusual chord shapes in an abstract way based on his understanding of "chord scales", and intricate improvised solos, frequently across shifting tonal centres. He used myriad scale forms often derived from those such as the Lydian, diminished, harmonic major, augmented, whole tone, chromatic and altered scales, among others, often resulting in an unpredictable and dissonant "outside" sound. His unique legato soloing technique stemmed from his original desire to play the saxophone. Unable to afford one, he strove to use the guitar to create similarly smooth lines of notes. He also became associated with playing an early form of guitar synthesizer called the SynthAxe, a company he endorsed in the 1980s.

This paragraph really is a mess. For an encyclopedic entry, it would perhaps be best to separate between what could be inferred from Allan's own description of his playing in contrast with external descriptions of it. From Allan's own perspective, he did not describe his music in traditional terms. Instead, he worked out his own system. He did recognize basic terms such as major and minor chords and scales, but beyond that, he hever used standard terms. Neither did he ever learn reading music beyond a very basic level. A primary influence seems to have been Slonimsky's Thesaurus. Bill Bruford said "He worked like a dog on Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns." (Guitar Player 2008). Allan himself said:

"Nicolas Slonimsky's 'Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns', for example. It was harder for me to go to that than it might have been for some other guys, but at least it was written enharmonically - not written in any key - and all the accidentals are added. " (Guitarist 1987)

Allan describes in several interviews as well as on his instructional video that he went through the construction of scales, in particular analyzing them in terms of their interval structure. He then worked out which scales he liked the most. But he never referred to them by their common name. And he never referred to them in terms of modes either. For example, he would never use the term "Lydian". On numerous occasions, he would point out that all the modes were just permutations of a regular major scale, and he would consider them as such. For example he told Guitar Player in 1993:

"There are things I work out away from the guitar, like various scales. I’m not concerned with modes, rather the permutation of intervals that differentiate one scale from another. I never think of a scale as having a set bottom or top. To me, it goes from the lowest available note to the highest on the instrument itself."

His harmony was an extension of his studies of scales. As he told Guitar Extra in 1992:

Q: Was this done at the same time as learning about conventional major and minor scales?

Allan: No, obviously this came after that, but what I knew was inadequate, and I couldn't play over certain chords, because I didn't know what scales to use. I knew if I did this, I'd have them, and then I could use my ears to guide me as to how I wanted to use them, based on what I felt musically. I cataloged them all, and I set aside all of the ones that had more than three semi-tones in a row, because they would be impractical. I finished up with this huge ream of stuff that I needed to learn. That stuff still applies now, I still only remember a small amount of it, but I learn more and more each time. Basically, I did the same thing with chords, I'd build chords from the scales, which is how I think of chords.

Q: Were these specific things that you were thinking, "I can't play over that," or was it that you just wanted to expand your knowledge and find new chords?

Allan: It was more like I wanted to find chords and voicings of chords, then I'd work on those separately from trying to figure out how to play over them. That's why, when I see a chord symbol, I sometimes don't even play a chord that might even constitute that one, I might just play some other chord that's built on the scale, because that's how I think of it. When the chords change, it's the movement, you can hear the scales change from one to the other. When I see the neck, when the chords change, it's like you can imagine a neck with LED's on it, and they're all lit up. When it gets to the next chord, all the dots change. The what I have to do is try to make a melody out of it, or make some sense out of it, or combine that with other things I want to do, like superimposing things on top of other things or whatever. Then you can play on things and add extra chords, playing something that suggests another chord between that chord.

Summing up, he arrived at his chords by testing out combinations of notes from the scales he worked on.

Furthermore, it is true that his primary influence was the saxophone. However, the statement that the SynthAxe was an "early form of guitar synthesizer" is wrong. The SynthAxe was NOT a guitar synthesizer. Instead it was a guitar-like MIDI controller that did not output any sound at all beyond MIDI data.

Wikipedia: Holdsworth has been cited as an influence by a host of rock, metal and jazz guitarists such as Eddie Van Halen,[2] Joe Satriani,[3] Greg Howe,[4] Shawn Lane,[5] Richie Kotzen,[6] John Petrucci,[7] Alex Lifeson,[8] Kurt Rosenwinkel,[9] Yngwie Malmsteen,[10] Michael Romeo,[11] Ty Tabor,[12] Fredrik Thordendal,[13] Daniel Mongrain,[14] John Frusciante,[15] and Tom Morello.[16] Frank Zappa once lauded him as "one of the most interesting guys on guitar on the planet",[17] while Robben Ford has said: "I think Allan Holdsworth is the John Coltrane of the guitar. I don't think anyone can do as much with the guitar as Allan Holdsworth can."[18]

This section is factually correct, but sadly, it also displays a problem: All the people listed are guitar players.