Allan Holdsworth gone

Started by mchad, April 16, 2017, 04:14:42 PM

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Antonuzzo

I've started work on transcribing Atavachron, my favourite AH track. Here's how it's sounding so far, courtesy of Guitar Pro...



aliensporebomb

OMG.

Someone on the "The Unreal Allan Holdsworth" facebook page posted a picture of his VG-99 that Allan Holdsworth autographed expressing delight that the user was using that box and had created a patch for Allan's tune "ZONE".   

I invited him here to post a pic, that blew my mind.
My music projects online at http://www.aliensporebomb.com/

GK Devices:  Roland VG-99, Boss GP-10, Boss SY-1000.

pasha811

I saw him years ago with Spontaneous Compositions Tour with Terry Bozzio, Pete Mastellotto and Tony Levin. 2h of incredible music and mastery. Still shocked. RIP AH.  :'(   
Listen to my music at :  http://alonetone.com/pasha/

Antonuzzo

Quote from: aliensporebomb on May 09, 2017, 12:27:31 PM
OMG.

Someone on the "The Unreal Allan Holdsworth" facebook page posted a picture of his VG-99 that Allan Holdsworth autographed expressing delight that the user was using that box and had created a patch for Allan's tune "ZONE".   

I invited him here to post a pic, that blew my mind.

Yup. That ends any argument about who has the most valuable bit of GK kit...

admin


thebrushwithin

#30
 I've seen videos where Allan used the external GK pickup on guitar, in the early days of the VG series, but in this video it looks like he's got an internal GK pick up installed and his clean tones sounds like out of phase two pick up strat selection, but he only has 1 humbucker, and an extra knob as well. I've never heard mention of this before. This is also an excellent lineup!


thebrushwithin

#31
 Here's another video from 97. Same period as the concert I posted before it's at a Carvin NAMM booth and it sure looks like a GK install .


arkieboy

Main rig: Barden Hexacaster and Brian Moore i2.13 controllers
Boss SY1000/Boss GKC-AD/Boss GM-800/Laney LFR112

Other relevant gear: Line 6 Helix LT, Roland GR-33, Axon AX100 MkII
Oberheim Matrix 6R, Supernova IIR, EMu E5000, Apple Mainstage, Apple Logic, MOTU M4

Elantric


arkieboy


There are musicians who reach beyond my lack of superficial understanding and touch something far deeper.  Allan Holdsworth was the only guitarist in that category for me - as a soloist he shares a space almost exclusively occupied by those who have passed through Miles Davies' band.

He is without compare.
Main rig: Barden Hexacaster and Brian Moore i2.13 controllers
Boss SY1000/Boss GKC-AD/Boss GM-800/Laney LFR112

Other relevant gear: Line 6 Helix LT, Roland GR-33, Axon AX100 MkII
Oberheim Matrix 6R, Supernova IIR, EMu E5000, Apple Mainstage, Apple Logic, MOTU M4

Elantric

Quote from: arkieboy on August 24, 2017, 02:59:32 PM
There are musicians who reach beyond my lack of superficial understanding and touch something far deeper.  Allan Holdsworth was the only guitarist in that category for me - as a soloist he shares a space almost exclusively occupied by those who have passed through Miles Davies' band.

He is without compare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg6ZL9adjKg&feature=em-lss

arkieboy




Back when I had serious hopes of 'making it' our manager said there was three modes to creativity: freedom; discipline; freedom.


Original freedom comes from knowing no rules - throwing stuff together and haphazardly finding interesting things.  Learning to reproduce these initial successes leads you to the 'discipline' phase - you understand by rote what you're doing, and can reproduce it at demand.  Ultimately, a proper instinctive understanding of what you want to achieve yields the third phase of freedom, which has to be your ultimate goal.  This video was 'discipline' level stuff - an empirical understanding of how it works, rather than the final 'freedom' level which clearly Allan had achieved.  "This triad over this bass": but =why= does it make you feel like that?  What does it mean musically?


That said, the observation at 19:38 - "Allan was a rock player who played Jazz over modern classical chord progressions" I think is worth the whole 38 minutes.  I'm pretty comfortable with triads over odd bass notes so I'll work through some of this.  I don't think I simply have enough time to glimpse final freedom, sadly :-(



Main rig: Barden Hexacaster and Brian Moore i2.13 controllers
Boss SY1000/Boss GKC-AD/Boss GM-800/Laney LFR112

Other relevant gear: Line 6 Helix LT, Roland GR-33, Axon AX100 MkII
Oberheim Matrix 6R, Supernova IIR, EMu E5000, Apple Mainstage, Apple Logic, MOTU M4

aliensporebomb

If you search on "The Unreal Allan Holdsworth" group on facebook today, the page has an instructional video by the guitarist of the band Marbin who spent a month hanging around with AH when he was on tour with his band along side Allan's and he studied what AH was doing and goes into depth into how AH was doing four note symmetric scales in a dominant tonality - really fascinating - he nails the sound and feel.

Here is the link:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1406194282809375&id=241606069268208
My music projects online at http://www.aliensporebomb.com/

GK Devices:  Roland VG-99, Boss GP-10, Boss SY-1000.

DreamTheory

I saw Marbin with Holdsy on that tour. I drove 10 hours to TNeck, NJ, because I knew someone who knew someone who knew Michael Alan Lawlor, the opening act,  and I hoped to meet Holdsworth. Well Holdsworth slipped out of the cabaret, but Marbin hung around and they were really cool. Also Allan's bass player was super friendly and kind. Lawlor was super cool and even let me play his guitar.
electric: Epiphone Dot semihollow body, acoustic: mahogany jumbo, recording: Cubase Artist 11 or Tascam DP008

drbill

I saw them, too & they were amazing. Nice fellows, too.
GP-10, KPA
BM i2.13p, '76 Les Paul Deluxe w/GK-3, MiM RRS, Ibanez RG420GK, Charvel strat copy w/GK-2a, FTP

Elantric


admin

#41
Byron Fry article on Allan Holdsworth
http://byronfry.com/2017/02/22/allan/
Allan.

Where to begin.

In the early 1980s, the highly-stratified hierarchy of Southern California guitarists was abruptly and violently flattened by a very humble, painstakingly polite, extremely sweet and soft-spoken British genius named Allan Holdsworth.  Despite his genuine belief that he sucked, he was on a level so far above the entire community of guitarists that our unanimous reaction was one of stunned horror, punctuated by the kind of nervous, unbelieving, crazy laughter one might adopt if one's legs or fingers had been suddenly amputated, or if a planet-killing meteor had been discovered and we all knew that a swift death was immenent.  All of us, from the top echelon of famous studio gods down to lowly music students, now occupied one and the same strata.  It was surreal, it was wonderful, it was scary, and inspiring, and awful; it was blindingly brilliant, like staring at the sun, and we might as well laugh about it.

At no point was the effect he had on the scene in SoCal more powerfully driven home than after his first (now famous) show at the Roxy on Sunset.  Pretty much every noteworthy guitarist in LA was there—200 or so of the best cats in the world, several of whom had been on the covers of the guitar mags more than once—waiting to see what all the hubbub was about. I was there with my partner in fretmadness, Pebber Brown.

Allan began to play, and immediately all the air was sucked out of the room.  Nothing he did was in the slightest bit conventional, much of it wasn't even remotely within the scope of what was considered possible; our disbelief couldn't have been greater had he levitated off the stage, sprouted two extra heads and vomited fireballs.  And he was just getting started; he went on from there, with the effect of a physics professor from the 24th century transported back in time to teach a class in the dark ages.  By the end of the show, our collective game had been so effectively tossed out the window—glinting here and there as it tumbled down into the abyss in free fall, there to remain pathetically irrelevant for all time—that we were all brothers, where just 90 minutes prior, we had peopled all the various stations and elevations of musical society, from serf to royalty.  We were all unbathed beggars in His temple yard, now; we all knew it.  And we all knew that the world of guitar would never be the same.  At the end of the show, he left the stage and the lights came on—and that's when it happened:

No one moved; no one said a word.  We all just sat there, pasted into our seats, blinking around at each other in total, stunned silence, for what probably was a solid minute.  Imagine it!  All the lauded hierarchy of the SoCal guitar talent pool, having been steamrolled into one level plane and staring silently at each other, as the stagehands coiled cables!  We were all brothers, now; the stratification was gone.  It remains to this day one of the most powerful moments I've witnessed in this life, in all my travels and experience.  At about the 30-second mark, a certain singer named Roth stood up to leave the room with his two supermodel escorts, as if to illustrate that too many elements of Hollywood are too predictable. The rest of us remained.  When movement and cognizance finally began returning to us, I went upstairs to the greenroom to congratulate him on ending so many brilliant careers.  He seemed a bit distraught and apologized for sucking so badly: "I just couldn't play a thing."  This was to become a pattern.

I had first met and befriended Allan just a few hours prior to that.  The explanation for how that happened is this:  He had been my biggest and most consuming guitaristic influence for years, though like almost every American guitarist, I had never seen him live. I knew that he was finally in town and would be playing the Roxy—had in fact been watching the date approach on the calendar for weeks—I lived about half an hour away, and knew when soundcheck was.  So when he pulled into the parking lot and went to get out of his station wagon, I was there in the poor guy's face introducing myself, hand outstretched.  He was too polite to tell me to get lost, I attached myself to his ankle like a barnacle and we became friends.

I wound up hanging out with Allan a good bit back in the IOU days and while Road Games was being recorded.  I went over to his pad several times, he even came to a couple of my Orange County top40 gigs, which REALLY sucked—there he sat nursing his ever-present Coors, watching me suffer through that godawful 80s set-list nightmare, so ****ing professionally embarrassed I could feel myself blushing onstage.  But at no time did he ever give me the slightest hint of elitism or one-upmanship; not even a friendly chiding about the nature of the gig.  He really didn't seem to understand who and what he was, or what he had accomplished—and besides, even if he did, I think he'd rather die than be the slightest bit rude to any living being.

The memories I have from those times in Allan's life are many, and paint a picture of a soul too good and too artistically pure for the turd-infested waters of Hollywood; an inhumanly talented god, cast as an underdog into the ring with the prince of darkness from Warner, but who nonetheless somehow won his way to freedom (THAT is a great story), and was able to resume his pursuit of The Impossible.  But the memory that really illustrates what a wonderful cat he is is that he offered to trade axes with me for a while.  He gave me a prototype White Charvel of his with a Jelutong body (which he had been playing at his recent shows, and which had been on the cover of Guitar Player—and which said axe began my love affair with Jelutong) and I gave him my 1960 Blonde L5 with the Florentine cutaway in return.

In depicting my Allanistic experiences, I would dishonor the truth if I didn't mention that he has been a pivotal part of some very defining moments for me and my mental landscape, to wit:  When I was a young buck, barely old enough to get into bars and sufficiently lacking in life experience to believe that beating others at their game was what musical ability was all about, I was also dumb enough to believe that I hadn't heard anyone do anything on the guitar that I would never be able to do, if I dedicated my life to doing that one thing, and for long enough (Such were the things that I thought mattered at the time).
Then I heard Allan, and I knew that no matter how hard and how long I tried, I would never be able to do that.  Any of it.  It would be like a dog chasing an airplane.  It was shattering to me, since up to that point I had entertained delusions of grandeur, the like of which are only possible in the chests of sufficiently young men, who are sufficiently full of their own bullshit.

Years went by, and as the post-Allanpocalypse guitar landscape in SoCal adjusted to the New Normal, I became ever more consumed by his brilliance.  Despite my having been educated as a composer / arranger / orchestrator of all styles and trained to have an abiding, open-minded love of good music from every century, decade, continent, culture and genre, nonetheless well over half the music I listened to was Allan.  I started becoming dimly aware that I was losing sense of my own identity as a musician; this could not end well.  It was about this time that the following occurred:

On the Road Games album, Allan's entry into the solo on Tokyo Dreams (a blistering salvo I would never be able to play) somehow got confused by yours truly with mine very own licks, and I went to enter into a solo on a top 40 gig in a hotel lounge with said salvo.  I got exactly three and a half notes into it, realized what I had done, abruptly hung my arms at my sides, looked at the ceiling and had a good laugh as my rig fed back.  All good fun in the moment, as the businessmen and waitresses looked up from their martinis and scotch to see what had caused the Stratus Interruptus...but in the solitude of the drive home afterwards, I had to admit that a line had been crossed, and I had a serious talk with myself.  The upshot was that it was time for me to distance myself from Allan's influence and rediscover who the hell Byron was.

So I did.

Other than going over to his pad to visit a couple of times several years later, I got away from it.  It was a necessary move; I guess that at the time, his brilliance was too strong a drug for me to resist an untoward amount of influence.

A few years later, around 1990 or so, John Pena called me to his pad to do some guitar tracks for a project he was producing.  This was very humbling for me, given the company he keeps.  I asked him why he had called me instead of Luke or Landau.  He said, "You're the best Byron Fry I know."  This led to a longer conversation about musical identity, where it was finally—FINALLY—drilled through my thick effing skull that everyone brings something to the table that is uniquely all their own, and that the point of your musical journey is to find and nurture that voice and to become the best SELF that you can; who you truly, creatively, spiritually, musically, naturally and ultimately are.  I owe my buddy John a great debt of gratitude for that talking-to; it has set me free.

A couple of years ago, I went and saw Allan for the first time in over 20 years.  It was great to say hi and to be face-to-face with him after so long, if only for a few minutes in the crowded hubbub of the Baked Potato; it's not like I hadn't missed my old friend.  Then I sat there with my fiance, listening to him play and staring into that old, dark, familiar forest, that mental and emotional wilderness I had had such a cathartic time clawing my way out of...feeling the unlikely mixture of the coldness of an ancient battlefield and the warm, unabashed adulation of something impossibly beautiful, knowing that he is so much better than I, or anyone, could ever be.  But unlike in my 20s, or in my 30s, now that I'm in my 50s, I was able to smile about it on the drive home, knowing that I'm the best Byron Fry there is, and feeling that on a good day, that's good enough.



http://byronfry.com/2017/04/20/goodbye-good-sir/

admin

http://byronfry.com/2017/04/20/goodbye-good-sir/

**********************************

Allan has left us.

I don't know why—maybe that's a fool's question—but it's hitting me hard, it hurts like hell and it feels a bit surreal.  It feels like some cosmic crime has been committed; like there's an indignity here that has to be answered for.  It's a very real desecration of intense human beauty, and I feel...offended.

It has taken me several days to be able to write, as I felt myself cycle through denial, shock, a sort of numbness for a couple of days, then grief and some tears, then finally today what may be the beginning of acceptance.  As John Steinbeck said of his brilliant close friend Doc Rickets, upon his untimely death:  "He burned a deep scar."  The quote fits on many levels.

I revered Allan, his vision and his work to a degree that grew so large, it started to change my inner landscape; I had to cut bait and flee to rediscover and nurture my own musical identity.  But I left some things unsaid, and I can't hit "rewind" to get it right next time.  And that's always gonna hurt.

Allan was many things to me: A friend, the greatest musical hero I've ever had, the greatest musical genius I've ever known, one of my biggest influences and a de facto pioneer.  His was the light showing us all how tight, narrow and confining are the corridors of convention.  He joins Igor Stravinsky, Miles and Michael Brecker in being one of the four musicians I admire most, though Allan was more of an influence on me than perhaps all the others combined.

As much as anything else, though, Allan was and remains to me an enigma:  How does one think so differently?  I have wondered for decades what his processes were and what goes on inside that head; how it's possible for one person to be so acutely inventive and so much faster, clearer and concise in his thoughts and execution; why he was so clear-minded and unerring in his innate distrust of convention.  There is only one other person whose ideas made me wonder thus, and that was Albert Einstein.

But whereas I never knew Einstein, I did know Allan, and knowing him didn't make the wiring of his brain any less of a mystery.  Hanging out and talking, eating, drinking or playing, he was always off-handedly dropping casual perspectives and premises that dispelled long-held beliefs on almost any subject, like a breeze blowing away the fog and exposing a better way forward.  He wasn't about to accept status quo without scrutiny, and almost always had improvements to offer up to the world, whether regarding guitar design, capturing the real magic of music during production, brewing beer, or any other area of living that crossed his "mind's chaotic lumber room".  And he sometimes couldn't stop his fingers from crawling around a table or counter as he spoke; I think he garnered some playing tricks from his pet tarantula.  He was nothing if not wired differently, and better, than us.

His was a high-octane, high-performance, supercharged intellect with lots of horsepower; he couldn't help it.  Maybe he was just born that way, who knows, I can't explain it.  Maybe some sort of cerebral genetic mutation was involved.  I don't believe in the physical possibility of aliens from other worlds among us, simply because of the distances involved and radiation during travel, but I've often regarded Allan as being as good a reason as any for someone to entertain the notion, were they so inclined.  I watched him sit down at a Space Invaders video game—which he had never seen—at a restaurant-bar I was playing in Orange County, and set the high score with one quarter.  He was just that way.  Never have I known anyone who was so radiantly brilliant and capable.

I'm talking about his brain and abilities a lot here, but as magnificent as his intellect and skill was, to me the gentleness of his spirit was just as striking.  You can hear the beauty and unspoken exuberance of the man's heart in his playing; if you knew him, you know that he would neither insult nor criticize anyone, nor degrade anyone's efforts, though all paled next to him when measured by any yardstick.  He was famously humble, an attribute as rare among performing artists as it is a thing of beauty, and—we can hope—a progenitor of like behavior in others.

If there was one fault I might find with Allan and justify giving a voice here, it is that he took humility too far.  Back in the IOU days, he apologized to me in the green room after his first show at The Roxy had destroyed the hopes of every guitarist in the room—and that room had held pretty much the entire guitar talent pool of the music industry.  He looked dismayed, like he was a failure. "I'm so sorry.  I just couldn't play a thing", he said.  I pointed out that he had probably just ended hundreds of careers, but he wasn't having it.

Allan never got his due share of recognition, not from the public and not even from most rank-and-file musicians.  He was too far up in the thin air, too far beyond human ability, for most musicians to grasp what he accomplished.  And he was far too pure, and too real, to garner the understanding and appreciation of a music industry that runs strictly within the confines of its shallow, sophomoric, pedantic, money-driven paradigm.  He was too beautiful and true to his art for such a cesspool of banality and posers.

Nor did he care; I don't think he had much of a choice but to follow his road the way he did, despite being well aware of the costs and rewards.  I believe that his path followed the only choice his constitution would allow.  He lived his life and made his music with brutal honestly and unyielding commitment to expression, which is far more than I can say for myself.  In short, he put his money where his mouth was; he walked the walk.  Here am I, a comparative coward, having largely misspent my decades thus far compromising ideals in pursuit of mediocrity, trying to placate a pop Zeit that embraces a level of over-simplification I find nauseating.  And to what end?  Paying the rent?  When I'm crossing the finish line and looking back over my life, I'm not gonna be pleased that I wasted so much of my precious time here on Earth failing to answer my calling in the best way that I could.  As Leonard Cohen brilliantly intoned, "It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender."

I should've written twenty symphonies by now, not one.

Anyway...so here am I, still alive with all my ragged ugliness, and he and his beauty have been taken away.  This has me reassessing my road and wanting to live my life more honestly, lest I risk more spiritual oblivion in the creative void.  I need to create more beauty, less ugliness.  More truth, less bullshit.  Besides owing that to myself, to those around me and to world, I feel like I owe it to Allan...as do we all owe him such a great deal.

Allan, good sir, you showed me a better way to do many, many things and gave me more inspiration than perhaps any other single musician.  Your absence hurts like hell and to say that your voice and perspectives will be missed is an understatement.

So I will just say thank you.  And good night.

admin


Hi all - just wanted to invite you to the Public Memorial event for Allan Holdsworth which is being held at 2PM on April 15 in Anaheim.

Lots of great special guests will be speaking, there will be Allan's guitars, lots of previously unseen footage, some exceptional musical performances and a glimpse of the doco we are producing (with footage from Steve Vai and others).

Guitar Player are supporting us, and here's the article they wrote. (It includes all of the details for when and where)
https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/allan-holdsworth-memorial-open-to-public




chrish


plexified

Funny you mention this stuff. I've been on this for a week and love it. I saw him up close in a small club in Roslyn N.Y. a long time ago. And again in Radio City Music Hall. Its like watching someone speak another language. I learned absolutely nothing watching him, although it was jaw dropping awesome. Bruford is one of my favorites too alongside Chad Wackerman. I truly was about to give up guitar on these nights, it really hurt me. Its hard to describe. I loved the Metal Fatigue recordings and he really pushed me into a Marshall. Meaning 'live without a net'. No effects, just a volume knob. And aside from his led playing. His chords are virtually impossible to finger. I mean I heard the chords and ambient mastery and then went to watch him live and was like ' no man can do that ' . For real, his fingers jumped from ridiculous chord to chord. Nobody else can do that stuff.

So I had to come home and literally come to terms of, 'I will never be able to do that'. That was the first time I EVER had to realize that I could not do something. Other wise I was able to do anything at that point in life. I was game. Here is a very early recording he did where he shows off his funk and wah, and then goes into never never land again like usual. I am still wondering WHERE he learned this style from. I get its Jazz Fusion and I hear the early early influences, but who taught him this? Where did this fire come from? I wanted a sax too and wound up with a cheap guitar in which it sucked so bad I smashed it into pieces. I got a job as a kid to buy guitars so, its not new. But man this young kid must have had a fire. So my point is he was born in 1946, what happened in the 60's with him? That's when he learned. Here in this vid you can hear he had his act together BEFORE 1970! He should have been a cult monster before Hendrix and the Cream , right? Check it out....22:00  &  38:00


thebrushwithin