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Allan Holdsworth dead at 70


treeduck
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Sucks.

 

His playing with the Tony Williams Lifetime, Bruford, and UK is just amazing. Took me a while to assimilate. Brilliant...

 

I'd been meaning to check out more of his work.

 

Had no idea he was sick.. he just played here a couple weeks ago!!

 

R.I.P. good sir and thank you for your innovations!

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Sucks, I saw him a few years ago with Zappa plays Zappa. For those not familiar with the first UK album, it features some of his best work.

 

http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/341/cover_53411029112010.jpg

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So sorry to hear of Allan's passing. I was fortunate enough to see him play twice. Once at a Carvin in-store clinic. And once on stage with Dweezil Zappa's band. I also met him at both of these events. He was a very friendly and humble man. I will miss his playing a lot.

RIP Allan.

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Bill Bruford wrote:

 

R.I.P. Allan Holdsworth (August 6, 1946 - April 16, 2017).

With enormous sadness I write to express my condolences to Allan's family on the loss of a much-loved father and grandfather, my friend and colleague. For several years in the 1970s, through my own band and 'UK', I listened to him nightly, launching sheets of sound on an unsuspecting audience, changing perceptions about what guitars and guitarists should or could be doing, thrilling me half to death.I would have paid to be at my own gig.

Allan wasn't easy, but if it was easy it wouldn't have been Allan. Like all creative musicians he was restless and relentless in pursuit of 'the perfect sound', the one that he couldn't get out of his head, the one that would never leave him alone. Now he will be at peace. Still, my guitar gently weeps.

Bill Bruford

18011160_10155401835017384_6258363634869034917_n.jpg?oh=f34a21414f2466b43c558cd73d509ed5&oe=5986BADC

Edited by Self-Indulgence
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Allan Holdsworth made music and the world an amazing place.

Dweezil Zappa blog - http://www.dweezilza...llan-holdsworth

 

Allan was Frank's favorite guitarist.

 

I saw an interview a while back where Frank Zappa said Allan Holdsworth, was someone that he respected. Frank Zappa didn't do that very often, if at all.

Edited by condemned2bfree
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Sucks.

 

His playing with the Tony Williams Lifetime, Bruford, and UK is just amazing. Took me a while to assimilate. Brilliant...

 

I'd been meaning to check out more of his work.

 

Had no idea he was sick.. he just played here a couple weeks ago!!

 

R.I.P. good sir and thank you for your innovations!

 

Another tough one. Very sad. Few are of the caliber as this guy was.

 

Had been considering seeing the trio in early July. Who knows if I would have made it...

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this sums things up quite well, I thought.

 

Think the music world will only realise the genius, years after this great mans death;

Snardbafulator

 

Well the difference is that the improv skills of Mozart and Beethoven (JS Bach, too, for that matter) are the stuff of legend because their art doesn't depend on it. A cadenza is a very small part of a violin concerto and it quickly becomes routinized in performance practice. Allan's art, OTOH, is in the jazz tradition. Improvisation is its breath. So it's better to compare Allan's formidable harmonic innovations with the epochal upheaval in postwar jazz thanks to Parker, Monk, Gillespie, Powell, Clarke and the other rebels of bebop, and then the codifiers who made hard bop the reigning jazz style ever since. Unfortunately, there will be no comparable Allan Holdsworth Revolution in fusion. It's important to recall how much bebop terrified jazz musicians of the 40s. It was the speed metal of its day, with soloists waiting their turn to try to cut the competition to ribbons like boxers in the ring. But bebop, harmonically speaking, is just jazz on steroids (the way speed metal is just rock on steroids), its quicker harmonic movement firmly rooted in the cadence. Holdsworth was a big admirer of Debussy, that great defier of Germanic cadential movement and the dominant 7th. His deep study of octatonic, symmetrical and non-repeating scales more closely resembles Messiaen than anything out of jazz. So if we put a chart of Holdsworth chords in front of musicians, will we get Holdsworth music? I'm afraid we won't. There will be no Holdsworth tribute bands, let alone on the level of Zappa Plays Zappa. As scary as Parker's execution initially was to sax players, his solos could be broken down fairly easily and his logic deduced. It didn't take long for Sonny Stitt to arise from the ashes of Bird. Initially dismissed as a Parker clone, he was critical to demonstrate that Parker's music wasn't unplayable. Soon enough, Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro assimilated the gymnastics of Gillespie on trumpet similarly. Today, are there true Holdsworth clones out there?

Well many have assimilated a good deal of his legato technique, but nobody would call Guthrie Govan or Shawn Lane true heirs to the throne. Scott Henderson? Frank Gambale? They play advanced fusion, too, but not quite the way Holdsworth did. Not quite. Nobody did.

 

Allan Holdsworth's music seems to require Allan Holdsworth. And that's both a testament to his immortal genius and a great tragedy to the world of fusion guitar ...

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