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In Reply to: RE: Gabor Szabo find posted by Frank_Locke on July 19, 2014 at 17:16:45
I fully agree on Szabo playing in “a stiff style,” but I would never follow that with “like Howard Roberts.”
Roberts was one of the most swinging jazz guitar soloists ever, IMHO (of course).
Can you name a tune or an album where you thought he played stiffly?
Have you ever heard his “Antelope Freeway” LP?
-=- Charlie F.
Follow Ups:
I just picked up a copy of Howard Roberts' Spinning Wheel. It's all funk/rock numbers, late 60/s, LA session guys, etc. Great record, great sound, but his playing is the least funky part of the whole affair. Don't get me wrong, he is great and, as I wrote, his straight ahead playing is superb. But the string bending is painful! The producer should have told him to switch to a lighter gauge of strings.
You can also hear the musicians furiously turning the pages of their sheet music during the breaks, which made me chuckle.
Thanks, Frank.
I can understand where you're coming from. And, yes, during the heyday of his recordings (late ’50s – late ’70s), he used very heavy strings.
Just to continue the "stiff/not-stiff" conversation for a moment, even on the “Spinning Wheel” LP, his feel doesn't strike me as being stiff. To me, stiffness relates to groove and flow; I don't hear his playing as mechanical or square at all. No, he certainly wasn't playing with a rocky funk feel. But I doubt that that would have flown with the album's producer, even if Roberts had wanted to do something along that line. I can imagine an A&R guy saying, "Hey! The kids are goin' for fuzz guitar and stuff. Let's see if we can get a little of that airplay … without losing our target market." Or something equally vapid.
I wouldn't have expected him to put out an album with that sort of voice. Make no mistake: almost all of his many releases were oriented for the "smooth jazz" side of FM radio – very commercial. The tunes/arrangements were indeed creatures of the studio; the songs tended not to be part of his live performance repertoire.
If you ever want to hear something quite a bit looser from Howard Roberts, you might look for "Antelope Freeway."
Happy spinning,
-=- Charlie F.
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