the sixteen men of tain

I'm not writing this post to plug this fabulous Allan Holdsworth album (but hey, if you don't own any Holdsworth and dig on fusion why not leap in with this one?). I was listening to it the other day and I realized how mis-characterized Holdsworth really is. He's seen as a guitarist's guitarists, a shredder with awesome technique who's really only interested in the technical and so on^{FN 1}. So wrong.

If you listen to the tune "Above And Below" you'll see what I mean. It's triadic, extremely pretty, no soloing (although the stretches for holding the chords are probably virtuosic at times). Overall he seems very concerned with emotional content. There are blistering solos throughout the cd, but it's still not hard to hear that feeling is of paramount import, as is lyricism, particularly on tracks like "0274" and "Downside Up".

And of course you can hear some pretty wild and out-ish sounding stuff: "The Drums Were Yellow" features this in spades, with only guitar and drums. The soloing on all tunes is great, and a good model generally for soloists (usually progressing from simple ideas to more florid, but often interjecting nice lyrical passages).

I don't want to over-simplify this album: it's harmonically complex and very interesting compositionally, and all the performers are hot. But it does bear mentioning that this is not an album unconcerned with mood. Music is multi-dimensional, and an intellectual apprehension of it is often needed to fully enjoy it (think of fugues where we have to keep the theme in our head, or keeping track of a song's form, etc). But still music accesses our 'precognitive' areas, areas that trigger moods and feelings. As Ricardo Muti said before conducting Beethoven's Fourth (I believe with the Philadelphia Orchestra) "Music is feelings." And this is its strength.

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1. I dig on guitarists whose main motives these are all the same, so I'm not defending Holdsworth from something I don't like.