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January 02, 2008

All In The Family

Sometimes my iPod amuses the heck out of me. With a brief Wilco interlude, I've gone from father to son with Bill Bruford's Master Strokes and then We Are The Infadels from the Infadels, where Bill's son Alex plays drums. And this is after seeing the elder Bruford on two magazine covers at Guitar Center, which is where I learned about his son's band. Who then came up in another random shuffle last night. The Brufords are following me!

Speaking of Master Strokes, it dawned on me this morning that the song "Joe Frazier" was probably originally written while Allan Holdsworth was still in the band. The guitar parts themselves sounded very Holdsworth-esque, although played with an entirely different -- and fundamentally wrong, the more I thought about it -- guitar tone.

I may have to see if there's any video footage of the early version of the Bruford band playing that one.

Comments

It is true the guitar lines on Joe Frazier are reminiscent of Holdsworth. This, however, doesn't imply that Holdsworth had been a member of the band at the time that tune was introduced. There was little in John Clark's style during his tenure in Bruford that wasn't clipped from Holdsworth. However, Clark's playing showed skill and musicality, if not originality, and GGT was better than most would have supposed a Bruford/Stewart/Berlin record sans Holdsworth to be. Note that "Land's End" may be the best National Health track ever, and it's not even National Health.

It's mostly that one section where the guitar lead hits, where it sounds like it should have one of those reverb-drenched stacked contrapuntal melodies like in "The Abingdon Chasp."

Then again, I may be misremembering something here, because there might be something sort of like that on Jeff Berlin's updated solo version. I only have that on vinyl, though, so I can't check.

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