Jimmy Herring: all about jazz interview

News:
22-04-2009:
Nothing fishy about this guys... Lifeboat strikes me a lot like Jeff Beck's early solo albums, where there's immediacy of playing but also real compositional acumen.



Jimmy Herring:

Thank you very much! That's one of the things I was shooting for. When we started playing together - Jeff, Oteil, Kofi and myself - we were fusion heads. We were into anything from Weather Report to the Dixie Dregs - one of my favorite bands - to Mahavishnu Orchestra and the bands that Miles Davis had. And Allan Holdsworth is my all-time fave. He's in a class by himself, and I'm just happy to be in there somewhere [laughs]. He's somebody I have the utmost respect for. Both he and the Dregs, too, battled uphill struggles for years, being told by everybody, “You can't do this." They told the Dregs, “You can't have an instrumental rock band. It just won't work." And Holdsworth was always being told no, too, by record company people and such, but in the '80s Eddie Van Halen discovered Holdsworth and [Eddie] was the biggest guitar player on the planet at the time. He started telling anybody who'd listen, “If you think I'm good then you have to hear Allan Holdsworth. He's doing things that I couldn't even dream of." He got him a record deal, and if Holdsworth had wanted to get rich he could have. He's one of the few true masters that we have. He doesn't think so but the people who listen know. I stayed away from listening to him for years [to avoid being overly influenced by him]. He's one of my favorite musicians, period, and the guitar just happens to be what he plays.

full interview