Allan Holdsworth in 1969

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AlChuck

AlChuck

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I was in Tower Records today and I stumbled on a re-released edition of a 1969 recording from what I guess was the first band Allan Holdsworth recorded with -- 'Igginbottom's Wrench. (The band was 'Igginbottom, the album was their Wrench...) I had heard of them before, but never realized there was any exisitng recorded material...

Of course I had to buy it...

The music is more interesting and satisfying than I would have hoped (I've learned to expect to be disappointed by old unearthed stuff like this). Holdsworth's harmonic and melodic conception was already pretty full blown. They tried to do pop music with jazz chops. Holdsworth wrote most of the songs and he sings -- actually not too badly, either, in a soft, Chet-Bakerish sort of way, or like Sting when he's singing old standards... It definitely doesn't rock, it's very soft and dreamy overall, with some bad quasi-psychedelic "deep" lyrics (I presume also by AH), but all in all very interesting. Two guitars, bass, and drums. Guitar tone is all very clean and simple -- none of that rich, fluid distortion we expect from him. The other guitarist (Steven Robinson) also solos in a similar way to Holdsworth, a little more stiffly. Lots of interestingly worked-out interplay in the guitar parts. Robinson and the other guys in the band (drummer Dave Freeman and bassist Mick Skelly) all disappeared.

Interesting liner notes. One story in there relates how their managers interested Ronnie Scott in the young band, and they ended up playing last in a special guitar show after John Williams and Barney Kessel.

An interesting side note: apparently one of their managers had a personal connection with vocalist Mike Patto and the great and under-appreciated guitarist Ollie Halsall, who also had a band (Timebox at first, and later Patto) that fused rock and jazz.

-AlChuck
 
Wow, AlChuck

Thanks for the a fascinating account of that album. What a collector's item. Allan even sings -- wow.

First time I saw Holdsworth live was in 1976 with Tony Williams. Allan played a Gibson SG through a Marshall 100 watt with single cabinet that was turned around facing the wall (since it was a small club). He had one effect -- an MXR phase 90.

I liked his sound better back then -- more natural instead of the kind of clinical tone that he gets now. I'm sure this new setup lets him rip without the tonal variations holding him back, but he could really give some of the ripping a rest. When there's no contrast to the constant stream of notes, there's no room to breathe and it has a numbing effect.

Nevertheless, he's still one of the great genius talents of the guitar and I'll always be listening.

spwee
 
Yeah, it does get to be a bit much sometimes... there is the inherent contrast in most of his stuff of the flying single notes with the chord-and-melody parts...

I saw that New Tony Williams Lifetime group too, twice -- once in Long Island, NY at a club called My Father's Place and again at Joyous Lake in Woodstock, NY. (His tone was just awesome, I agree...) But the first time I saw him I didn't even realize it was him. It was with Soft Machine at the Academy of Music in NYC in maybe 1974? I go there late, and while making my way to my seat their guitar player starts to play... my jaw started to hang and I almost tripped over the people in the row as I stumbled to my seat and tried to watch at the same time. They never announced who it was. I was already familiar with Holdsworth from Jon Hiseman's Tempest, so I might have guessed, but I only found out a couple of years later. (At the time I thought it might be Ollie Halsall -- are you familar with him?)

Since then I've seen Holdsworth with UK (Bill Bruford, John Wetton, and Eddie Jobson) and several iterations of his own groups. It's been quite a few years since he's been up here (I live in the San Francisco Bay Area nowadays). I just love the way he plays -- he puts notes together like no one else, and he's so unfettered and fluid. Funny, I remember thinking that it was neat that he would occasionally play really sparsely once in a while, and I thought it was great and wished John McLaughlin would do that once in a while too... :) I'm thinking of the solos on "Snake Oil" and one other one on Believe It, can't remember the name of the song but it's the one where he plays a very nice lilting solo of very few notes, then Williams snaps into a great groove that Alan Pasqua starts dancing on... maybe the next to the last song on that record? There was also one like that on Million Dollar Legs. And maybe one on the UK record. But ever since it's been tons of notes almost always...
 
Yeah, I too have seen Allan several times with different bands. The day before I moved to California from Philadelphia, U.K. was playing at an outdoor 4th of July concert. They were a great band -- Eddie Jobson, wow, what a talent. And yes, it's almost frightening how easy it seems to be for Allan to play the most amazing stuff while remaining entirely at ease.

That's cool about seeing Soft Machine, damn. I only found out about Tempest years later. Can't say I've heard of Ollie Halsall.

Loved the I.O.U. stuff -- he plays some tasty, restrained stuff on that. One in particular that comes to mind is 'Checking Out', where he begins his solo wonderfully slow and thoughtful, then of course, it ends with a blinding flurry of notes. I think the song you are referring to on 'Believe It' might be 'Wild Life'? He plays a beautiful solo on that, then like you said, Williams and Pasqua funk it on up.

The only album I've purchased in the last few years is the jazz album that Allan did called 'None Too Soon'. It's pretty cool, but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool jazz person and like my jazz with a real sense of swing. Despite the brilliant playing, that album just doesn't have that element going for it. But that Kirk Covington on drums and Gary Willis on bass -- dag, those guys just kill all the way through.

Loved Holdsworth with Gary Husband playing drums too. Wow, what a monster. He released a jazz album with him playing amazing piano! Have you heard that? I wanted to cut my throat. Not only is he one of the greatest drummers but he has to be a killer keyboard player, too. Man, some guys just have
some deep resources. Amazing.

spwee
 
spweedah,

Ollie Halsall was a great guitar player who was in several bands with the singer Mike Patto -- Timebox, Patto, and Boxer. He also played with Kevin Ayers and Tempest, interestingly enough, and probably got the most exposure playing the dead-on George Harrison "impersonations" on the Rutles records. His best work is probably on the first Patto album. He also played piano and vibes, quite well. He died in 1992.

Yes, it is "Wildlife" I'm talking about...

None Too Soon is pretty cool, but you're right, it doesn't have that real jazz swing going on, Holdsworth doesn't really sound jazzy though he's often called a jazz guitarist... The latest one, Sixteen Men of Tain, is pretty good too, more like his earlier ones of the late 80's and early 90's like Sand or Wardenclyffe Tower or Hard Hat Area.

That Gary Husband album, it's called The Things I See
(Interpretations of the Music of Allan Holdsworth)... sounds interesting... I remember him playing a little piano with IOU once...

-AlChuck
 
AlChuck --

Wow, looks like I've missed the boat with these bands and players you are speaking of -- Timebox, Patto, and Boxer. I'll have to see if I can dig up some of this stuff. Thanks for drawing my attention to them.

I was on Amazon.com last night listening to some of the sound streams of Allan's older music. Looks like they have re-released the 'Igginbottom' album. It's being offered with all the rest of Allan's material.

There was this other guitar player who was on one Bruford album. The guy's name was listed kind of tongue-in-cheek as 'The Unkown John Clarke'. He played pretty well, not in Allan's league (but then again, how many are). Never heard anything from this guy again.

The album that Allan did with Frank Gambale is pretty intense. No shortage of blazing lines. Gambale has been playing with his band at a club north of L.A., in the Valley. He plays on alternate Wednesday's and Scott Henderson does the other Wednesday's. I live about 50 miles away but it would be certainly worth the drive to check out those gigs. I saw Gambale a couple of years ago playing with a straight jazz combo. He played a traditional big-body jazz guitar and played authentically in the post-bop tradition with an excellent sense of swing. Very well-rounded guy.

spwee
 
Timebox was a little interesting, almost a little of a novelty act. Boxer was an attempt to be commercial with short 3 minute hard rock songs, almost no soloing of note... very disappointing. So was the last Patto album (Roll 'Em, Smoke 'Em...). Ahhh, but the other two Patto albums...

The Unknown John Clark played on Bruford's Gradually Going Tornado and the live album The Basement Tapes. I never did get those two. I should because I love Bruford.

Never heard that Gambale/Holdsworth record either. For some reason I was always under the impression it was a compilation of some of each of their stuff, not an actual project. I should check it out. Gambale is pretty hot. I've always really liked Scott Henderson. Saw him with both Chick Corea's Elektric Band and with the Zawinul Syndicate, and I've got all the Tribal Tech records except the latest one (which I plan to order next week when I order the new Jack Bruce and Pat Martino CDs)...
 
Wow

Now you're talkin' my language -- Jack Bruce, Pat Martino -- excellent. Bruce has put out several solid albums. His first, 'Songs for a Tailor' was really good. Had one of my favorite tunes, 'Theme for an Imaginary Western' on it, which was covered later (and quite nicely) by Mountain -- great guitar solo by Leslie West. Didn't know Jack has a new one out.

I studied guitar with Pat Martino back in Philadelphia in 1978, before he had has brain aneurism. He's a heavy dude (despite his dimunitive physical size) and I was nervous as hell when I first met him. Very deep and philosophical guy -- I remember my first lesson, he drew a sine wave on a piece of paper and said 'that's what you're striving for.' Oh yeah. After his brain surgery, his style changed so drastically since he essentially forgot how to play although he retained all the intellectual musical knowledge. Also didn't know he had a new one out.
I didn't hear it, but he did an album with Joe Satriani, but apparently they didn't get along too well. Somehow that doesn't surprise me.

I guess I tend not to buy a whole lot of guitar albums since I'm not really a guitar nut, even though I play one. Also, I get depressed at how incredible these guys are, and it makes me want to just hurl my guitar in the dumpster sometimes! I tend to listen to alot of Miles, Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, from the late 50's and early 60's. Also love Weather Report -- what a band.

spwee
 
spweedah,

Seems we have a dialogue going on on this thread... :)

Sounds like our tastes are very similar...

Jack Bruce is one of my all-time favorites ever since Cream (the band which I have to credit with triggering my musical impulses). I love Songs For a Tailor and recently bought it on CD. I'm thinking of trying to work out a cover of "He the Richmond" and/or "Rope Ladder to the Moon" for one of my current recording projects. "Theme From an Imaginary Western" is great and the Mountain version was the best thing they did.

I also really like Out of the Storm with Jim Gordon on drums and Steve Hunter on guitar.

In the 80's Jack collaborated with bandleader/composer/producer Kip Hanrahan and made a couple of post-modern jazz albums with lots of fantastic Latin percussion and literate intellectual lyrics about damaged and doomed relationships... Jack played a little bass but mostly sang, and he won Downbeat's Best New Jazz Vocalist award for it! One was called Vertical's Currency, another was Desire Develops an Edge. His new record, supposedly being released tomorrow, was produced by Kip Hanrahan, who also wrote lyrics for some of the new songs. There are also covers of some from his back catalog, including new takes on "White Room" and "Sunshine of Your Love" with Eric Clapton on guitar and vocals, played pretty straight but with Latin percussion percolating underneath...

Pat Martino's new one is a live set was recorded in December at Yoshi's, the wonderful jazz club in Oakland. It's a trio -- Joey DeFrancesco on organ and Billy Hart on drums. The one you mentioned with Satriani was a bunch of duets with various folks, mostly guitarists, including Michael Hedges, Les Paul, Mike Stern, Charlie Hunter, Kevin Eubanks, and Tuck Andress. There's also a beautiful recording of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" (which he did before as a solo guitar piece back in the 70's) sung this time by Cassandra Wilson. It's an uneven album, but it has some great moments. It's called All Sides Now and was his first one for Blue Note. Wow, you took lessons from him? I have been (very) slowly working my way through his book on his minor conversion approach to improvisation... he slays me. Love the story about the sine wave. He comes across in some of his writings like a -- I hesitate to say -- a loony. But man can he play that axe!

I also love Trane and Miles, especially the great quintet of the sixties with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. And Weather Report is my all-time favorite band. I still remember running down to the record store the day the latest Weather Report album came out, and playing it for days in complete sonic ecstacy. I saw them a number of times live, including once with Miroslav Vitous, once with Alphonso Johnson, four or five times with Jaco, and two or three times with Victor Bailey.

-AlChuck
 
saw holdsworth live in charlotte nc in '92

an extremely good gig, in a really small blues bar.

it was so funny, the light show was 4 pars hanging from the ceiling.....

the pa was a single scoop and mid and high tweeter a side......

i think the only thing going through it was a little of the keys and maybe a touch of bass and guitar.....

pretty much the whole thing was stage volume, i don't even remember seeing any mics on the kit........

holdsworth had such a rich tone, sort of like a huge giant violin with a pickup on it..... or maybe a cello, yeah, much deeper tone..... it would rumble the walls.......
he had a stereo rig, 2 mesa boogie 50 watt heads, going into that rocktron loading device he used to pitch, then into a mesa stereo tube amp..... into a pair of 2x12 mesa cabs......
the drummer was chad wackerman, and geez, this guys' got to get the most valuable player award...... what chops!
holdsworth really played left field that night, i personally like it when he's more melodic, but this night was all about showing off the chops, and he did...... he was playing shit that i couldn't believe....... for example, at one moment, he was going up the neck, but the notes were going down......and i saw it, and i heard it, and i couldn't understand it.......so fluid, it was like listening to water come down a rock face, flowing freely which ever way the rock would twist and flatten.....

he had the young swedish dude playing bass with him, he was good, but not as good as some he's worked with in the past......

i have a tape, i used one of those dictation devices..........
it's a terrible recording, i'm thinking about trying to clean it up with the mastering toolkit program on my vs880ex........

at the end of the night, they were all signing autographs, and i just couldn't bring myself to go be one of the maddening crowd....

so i just hung out, and watched...

and after all the guitar heads and drum-heads (HA) came and went, he finally went to the bar to get himself a pint......

so at this time, i decided i would approach him, and offer to buy his beer... but someone shot in there, with albums in hand, and asked him to sign the album that he did inbetween igginbottom and tony williams (?), and he became so pissed, going off about how they had released the album without the bands permission, and they didn't get any cut of the money from it, and all this stuff, and basically just blew his mood!

so this guy tucks his tail and splits, i wait a while, then go up to him and say "i just want to tell you that you're quite an inspiration, please come back."

and he just totally chilled, smiled, and shook my hand...

it was like shaking hands with a baboon.
biggest hands i've ever seen.
scary big.
LOL.............
 
Great story, Gonzo!

ABout the moving up the neck while the notes descend, yeah, I've noticed that too... it's funny, I think every one of us guitar players automatically ascends the scale when we ascend the neck, just one of those things that seems natural, but there's no reason you can't move your hand up and play lower notes on the lower strings... I suspect that maybe a lot of really nice interval motions fall out if you work that way too, that add to fluidity...

or maybe it's just a personal challenge.. I read once where he said he worked really hard when learning to play to keep changing the melodic direction of his lines and avoid repeating intervals, to avoid cliches like climbing up and down scales linearly or with interval patterns.. I think it worked, he certainly does not choose his notes like anyone else I ever heard, and he is the most lick-free player I've ever heard.

Figures he's got baboon hands. I only have spider monkey mitts myself. Maybe I should get a transplant?

-AlChuck
 
I think the Holdsworth album that got Allan pissed off was 'Velvet Darkness'. He always goes ballistic when that subject comes up. I think it was a Creed Taylor production. They let Allan and his band come in the studio for like one afternoon to do the whole album. Then they released it and dicked him out of the money.

Hi, Gonzo -- I've exchanged Holdworth lure with you before on the VS Planet BBS. Great description of that evening -- I can practically hear his tone with that Boogie setup. Whoo.

AlChuck -- yeah, I saw Cream live when I was in high school. My best friend's father was the producer of American Bandstand with Dick Clark. He got press box tickets for us so we were right up front. Damn, the sound of that wall of Marshall amps -- I thought I was going to die. And Ginger Baker attacking a hundred drums with a dozen hands and feet. One of those defining moments like you no doubt had.

I've got to pick up some of the Jack Bruce stuff you spoke of. Jeez, the new one sounds really cool.

Regarding Weather Report -- one of my all-time favorite albums was Procession, which I tried for years to find on CD. After several attempts and dead ends, I finally got one from Rockhouse Records in Holland, of all places. The title song on that album is so quintessentially WP, the way it is kind of born from silence and just builds like a giant wave. That whole album is outstanding. Victor Bailey had a tough assignment trying to follow Jaco, but he proves himself to be as fine as can be. He might not have Jaco's bravura and mondo-chops but his musicianship is beyond reproach. Plus Omar on drums just kills. Man, Joe and Wayne are so cool -- like Miles, the best people always show up.

AlChuck -- are you a singer as well as a guitar player? I know Gonzo is. Do you have any MP3's posted? I'm just finishing a project, and actually per Gonzo's advice, I'm signing up with IUMA.com. and will post some tunes there.

spwee
 
YEAH, HOLDSWORTH SUCKS..........

FOR HAVING SUCH BABOON HANDS!

ALCHUCK WROTE:
"Figures he's got baboon hands. I only have spider monkey mitts myself. Maybe I should get a transplant? "

LOL

yeah spwee, velvet darkness, that was it! i use to have a tape of that album. kinda cool, holdsworth's tone at that time was very clean.....

much different than now......

when i first heard holdsworth, it was with uk........
at that time, my other guitarist and i were quite enamored with his "pickless" attack, and went on a mission.....
we tried picking entirely on the neck, at about the 22 fret.....
we put contact pickups on the back of the neck, and put that signal through a clean amp with all the treble rolled off...............lol.........

ultimately, we developed the "flesh pick" !!!!!

this was a pick fashioned out of the top of a 35mm film canister, the grey plastic lids to the black plastic container........

we would cut them into the shape of picks, and honestly, they give almost no pick sound, sounds like your using the flesh of the end of your finger, hence "flesh pick".......

actually worked!

but didn't make us play like holdsworth!!

LOL
 
Flesh pick, yikes, you scared me, gonzo-x, I'm glad it was actually film canister plastic... :)

I remember when Velvet Darkness came out -- I put it on and I immediately could tell it was not a finished album -- it soundedf like they recorded the first run-trough of parts of songs, and ended up putting that out. Very strange. When I had heard Holdsworth got signed by CTI I thought it was odd, but it was a fairly big outfit so I hoped it would help his solo career... fat lot of good it did.

In the liner notes of one of my Columbia Contemporary Jazz Masters remastered reissues of something or other, they had a list of their other re-releases at the time (mid 90's, maybe?) and one of them was, believe it or not, Velvet Darkness, with a bonus track or two, and a little blurb that made it sound like it was a great recording like Heavy Weather or some of the others in the series (I'kll have to dig it up and transcribe it here for you)... funny, I can't find a trace of it now at CD Now or Amazon... maybe Allan sued them and they stopped producing it? Or maybe it's been enough years now that it's not in print any more...


Procession is a great record... I wonder why that is the only one that is not re-released? Bailey and Hakim did a great job.

No, spweedah, I just play guitar -- occasionally I try to sing something, but I lack all confidence and so far have not tried to break through my impediments... I do have an MP3 posted, just one 'cause I only have 5 MB of webspace:

http://www.mindspring.com/~wolcott.oehler/music.htm

I pretty much just play by myself in my room and dick around with loops and MIDI backing tracks... think a lot about starting another band someday but never do anything about it... also interested in trying to do some scoring, maybe some independent film very cheap or free to get a start...

I'm also thinking of checking out one of those online services, but I need to read up on them all and see which one would be right for me. IUMA, eh? They're one of the earliest of these sites... I guess if they are still around they must be doing something right.
 
AlChuck --

Hey, I liked your tune. You definitely got that Stern tone happening, plus the guitar has a really nice ambient quality to it. I'm assuming that you are micing an amp? (Please don't tell me you are using a POD, since that's what I use alot but don't get that good result). Cool bass groove too.

I'm doing the same thing, recording in my room. I have an Akai DPS16 recorder, but I don't use any sequencers or MIDI anything. I hand program my Boss DR770 drum machine and play the other instruments around that.

I too keep threatening to start a band but never do anything about it. I played professionally in the 80's, then stopped playing altogether for seven years, then took it up again a couple of years ago. I'm much happier since I'm back into it, despite the frustration of never being quite as good as I'd like.

Regarding 'Velvet Darkness' again -- the story is that George Benson got Allan the shot with CTI. Benson was apparently walking down a NY street one evening when the door to a club opened up. Benson said "I heard all this amazing guitar work coming from inside, and dashed in to find A.H." He told Allan to call his producer Creed Taylor. But, Benson was heading out of town on tour and couldn't follow up, and Allan got jerked around in the session and just ended up with a completely unsatisfactory experience.

I've been looking for a site to post my tunes. I was thinking of MP3.com, the big boy on the scene, but they were just purchased by Vivendi/Universal, the largest record company in the world. I don't know what they have in mind and I don't think I want to find out. IUMA has been around awhile, and they give off a pretty cool vibe. Actually, they were just purchased by some European outfit called Vitaminic, which sounds more like a health drink than a music distributor. Then there's Ampcast.com and also Broadjam.com which has a really nice site. Each service specializes in a different aspect of the music scene. Broadjam, for instance, only has audio streaming, no downloads so no one can own the tunes except the composer.

I'm going to pick up one or two of those Jack Bruce CD's. Maybe even the new one which sounds really cool. I kind of forgot how much I love his voice -- his whole bag really.

spwee
 
spweedah,

Thanks for the comments on my tune... though I regret to inform you that those guitar parts were indeed tracked with a POD...

I played in some bands in the mid seventies through about 1980, pretty amateur stuff. I never actually stopped but I came awfully close when I put myself back through college in the 80's. But somehow even though my playing dropped to almost nil, I still improved over those years, not in technique really but in things like phrasing and note choices and such.

On Velvet Darkness, yeah, wasn't that story in the liner notes to the LP? (It's buried in my closet somewhere.) It wasn't too long after this that Benson moved to Warner Brothers and became a pop star...

My copy of Shadows in the Air is on its way... I also ordered that Gary Husband record you mentioned...

Oh, I heard yesterday from AH's record label that they are going to re-release Road Games (there's another Jack Bruce connection!), another time AH got a record gig due to impressing someone, this time Eddie Van Halen. The result was an EP that was better than Velvet Darkness, but Warner Brothers didn't want AH to use Paul Williams as the singer, they insisted on a "name" vocalist, and that's how Jack Bruce ended up singing a few tunes. They also said that they are releasing a concert video of AH from last year on DVD in the fall.

-AlChuck
 
AlChuck --

All right, dammit, how are you getting such a 'live', ambient sound when recording direct with a POD. What kind of reverb are you using? Are you routing through another pre before the recording input? Are you using one of the standard patches or did you do the Soundiver drill and find some new sounds?

I've been using the POD along with a SansAmp PSA-1, mixing the two tones together. They seem to complement one another, each filling the gaps that the other has. I get okay results but I know there's gotta be a better way -- especially after hearing your tune.

I also ordered 'Shadows in the Air' today, along with Coltrane's 'Live at the Village Vanguard'. I've always wanted a copy of that version of 'Chasin' the Trane'.

Have you checked out these other 'media file exchange' websites like Kazaa.com or Morpheus which is on the MusicCity.com site? Kind of second generation Napster concepts. I was thinking ot just having my mp3 files on my computer and having people download them from me, but they would need the software interface. I've been procrastinating posting my tunes since I just got a GR-30 guitar synth a couple of weeks ago. I want to re-do the bass parts on two of the tunes using it. There's a nice fretless bass patch that would work wonders if I can get myself to do it.

That's cool that 'Road Games' will be re-issued. I was just talking with a guitar player friend about that album a few weeks ago. Wasn't it produced by Ted Templeman? I felt bad that Paul Williams kind of got dumped for most of it, but at least it was Jack Bruce who got the gig, so how could you really complain? Allan's solo on the title tune is great -- opening with that bent note that he squeezes the stuffing out of before launching into a frenzy of notes.

major240 --

Thanks for letting us know about that book -- it sounds very interesting. Nice that somebody would write it. I tried to use the link you provided but it wouldn't open.

spwee
 
spwee,

I hate to tell you I'm not doing anything special with the POD. It goes straight into two inputs of the Delta 66. I don't recall which model I used for that tune; I might have written it down in my notebook but I'm usually bad about documenting my sessions. I tend to pick the models manually and just fiddle with the knobs a bit; haven't taken the time yet to figure out Sound Diver. There's one of the Delay/Flanger or Delay/Chorus effects on it, most likely. I usually can get a sound that I'm not displeased with, but I'm not a perfectionist by any means. I might have applied a touch of plug-in 'verb after the recording but I might not; I can look back at the ACID file. If I didn't, it's just the POD's reverb.

Shadows In the Air arrived yesterday. It's quite nice. The new material is excellent and the revisits to old stuff all work pretty well. I wish Clapton would get rid of that awful nasal distortion sound he's been favoring for years and uses on "Sunshine." EC has better results on "White Room" in the tone department. Gary Moore plays some really nice stuff on the two songs he appears on. Vernon Reid plays most of the guitar on the disk and does OK for the most part, but he's not a player I've ever particularly liked much; I think he kind of ruins "Out Into the Fields," the opening track, a bit.

Along with it came Rocket Science, the latest Tribal Tech CD. Great band, though they seem to have settled into a lot of sameness over the last ten years. Scott Henderson is a monster, but sometimes I wish he would turn down the heaviosity a little and play a little more pretty once in a while. His writing is terrific though, and Gary Willis is fantastic. There are a couple of very nice Weather Reportish tunes, and the recording quality is top notch. A funny thing in the liner notes about which strings Scott and Gary use, and an amusing list of equipment for each player.

But Pat Martino's Live at Yoshi's was backordered... sigh...

That's a great Trane date, I have it on LP... I need to get some more of that stuff on CD.

Haven't really checked out the file sharing stuff. My computer's not on all the time and when it is it's not connected to the 'net all the time -- so it probably wouldn't be ideal for me.

You have a GR-30? I've been lusting after one of those for a few years now. My keyboard playing skills are rather limited, shall we say, and I think being able to play parts into MIDI sequences with a guitar would be far easier for me that playing them shoddily on an instrument I can't really play and then endlessly tweaking afterwards. Plus I could be Robert Fripp! But I won't be able to spend that kind of money for a long time, it looks like... one of the bad sides of living in the SF Bay Area...

I think Ted Templeman was the producer of Road Games. It's been a long time since I heard that; my LPs are a bit difficult to get at and consequently I rarely play any of them. I remember it being really quite good overall; Jeff Berlin was a great bassist, whatever happened to him? His little solo at the end of "Road Games" is a gem.
 
AlChuck --

Guess I'll have to keep twiddling and tweaking with the DI devices. My big problem is, the sound I hear when I record is fine, but sounds kind of thin and brittle in the finished product. Really needs aggressive EQ'ing to sound like it should on the burned CD. I'm using the onboard reverbs on the Akai DPS16, and even though they're are touted to be 56 bit processing, they really kind of bite. Just not very smooth, which adds to the harshness problem.

Yeah, the GR-30 -- same as you, I lusted after those for years, and now that I'm in the middle of a recording project, I finally just went ahead and got one. Only $405.00 on eBay, including the GK2A picktup, not bad. Also like you, my keyboard skills are pretty paltry and I found myself wasting so much time learning keyboard parts and playing them correctly (I have a Roland D-50 synth -- great machine). So, I thought the GR-30 would save me some time. It does just that, but it has its own little quirks and quibbles as well. The tracking on some patches is not so great and you have to play absolutely pluperfectly to get it to trigger correctly. I just used it to put some Hammond B3 on a tune and it was way fun. I even doubled 3 bars of the guitar solo on the organ which really made me laugh to hear. Very cool. And like I said, the fretless bass patch is great. I'll be 'Jaco'ing' the place up soon. Excellent Fender Rhodes patch that tracks really well. I can play my fastest jazz phrases and it keeps right up. Gotta write a tune with that in mind.

I agree with your assessment of Clapton's tone. I've never liked it since he switched to Fender Strats and started in with that 'nasally' sounding crappy tone. Why, oh why does he do that?

Yeah, as great as he is, Scott Henderson is another guy who needs to take a chill pill once in a while -- just too frenetic. What happened to the 'less is more' concept? What are these guys trying to prove -- louder, faster, longer? I listen to Wayne Shorter's 'Speak No Evil' album, and at age 27 he sounded like a veteran of 30 years -- playing one note to the next -- all about the music, not trying to show off or prove anything. That's so refreshing and really defines what means to be an artist rather than an artisan. Oddly enough, Henderson credits Shorter as one of his main influences.

Yeah, the SF bay area -- one of my favorite places in the world but so prohibitive in the cost of living. Things in Silicon Valley have finally lost some of their steam, and property values are starting to adjust downward for the first time in a long time. Do you own a house yourself?

Haven't heard much from Jeff Berlin in a while. He was living down here for years and I saw him play several times with all kinds of bands. He even played a straight jazz trio gig with a guy I studied with, Joe Diorio on guitar, and Vinnie Caliuta on drums. I was awestruck by Berlin's musicality. He just leaned into Joe's direction and completely zoned in on what he was playing, and was constructing all kinds of chords on the bass and playing the most tasteful, musical fills -- all this while reading charts. I was in a daze after seeing this. Like I said before, some of these guys are just too good to believe.

spwee
 
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