Centrifugal Apotheosis: Allan Holdsworth’s Fluid Dynamics

That old dinner party number: if you could spend some time with any one person, living or dead, who would it be? I usually come up short. Plentiful extraordinary individuals enrich my life on a daily basis. What need have I of a brief, limping moment spent with a distant, unfamiliar human, likely at odds with the vicarious construction occupying some dusty corner of my internal reality?

But there’s always Allan Holdsworth, a human who was gone before I knew what I’d lost, and indeed what the world had lost. An enigma to the very end, an artist in the truest sense of the word, equal parts mad scientist, tidal instrumentalist, visionary composer (you’ll forgive me the hyperbole when rhapsodising over one of my heroes) and reluctant sage. Holdsworth’s alien landscapes, oftentimes jarring, disturbing, nightmarish even, belie a profound spiritual beauty and an unshakeable integrity, the latter coming at economic and professional cost, situated as it was within a commercial marketplace driven by the low-risk, low-investment, disposable easy-sell (an environment that has become increasingly superficial over the subsequent years; a mindless, relentless hunger). That Holdsworth was able to secure a place at the table at all given his outlandish idiosyncrasies is testament to the undeniable force of his artistry.

What could I really expect from fifteen minutes or so of polite conversation with this diffident druid, a man who so often seemed uncomfortable to find himself in front of a camera or a surging audience of diehard fans? Holdsworth never gave much away, not even to his colleagues. Cocooned as he was behind a (for many, impenetrable) wall of esoteric harmonic movements, breakneck and asymmetric rhythmic cycles, bewildering improvisational language, disorientating formal constructs, and an occasional synthesizer sound-world more commonly associated with eighties pop, it is hard to imagine this private person, this introspective artist suddenly launching into quickfire truths and kernels of wisdom, softened by my wide-eyed naïveté. Holdsworth’s legacy is one of challenge, not charity. Like any great artist, he laid a path for those who would follow, not in demanding that others become like him, but that they become more like themselves.

There was something of the elemental in Holdsworth’s music, something fluid: illimitable, fundamental, alchemical. At his most vulnerable, Holdsworth could conjure the stillness of a softly-rippling mountain lake at twilight, gently reflecting rose-dappled light. At other times, the awesome intensity of his playing could be suffocating, the fury of an ocean deity riding the primal storm. As the waves receded, however, as pedestrian reality pedantically pieced itself back together, Holdsworth seemed to retreat into painful self-doubt, oblivious to the stunned, almost baptismal, elation radiating from nearby witnesses.

In a rare moment of public self-reflection, in the liner notes to his 2000 album The Sixteen Men of Tain, Holdsworth quotes from James P. Carse’s 1986 work Finite and Infinite Games: ‘Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.’ This constant need to redefine the borders of his own creativity (and humanity), an almost Buddhistic awareness of the moment-to-moment arising that insists on an absolute here-and-nowness, can clearly be observed in the scope and breadth of Holdworth’s output, both in the studio and on the stage. There is a palpable evolution in his work, perhaps not as definably linear as that of Coltrane, to pick one example (salient, as Coltrane was a major influence), but more meandering, occasionally devolving even, ebbing and flowing. Holdsworth’s voice is always immediately recognisable, but there is often a feeling of bumping into an old friend after years apart: different hair, a few more wrinkles, stories to tell, new turns of phrase, peculiarly mutated mannerisms, and so on. Were I to get my fifteen minutes, I might ask what was to come after The Sixteen Men of Tain, a record in which it felt to me as though multiple strands of Holdsworth’s creative hunger began to merge into a breathtaking and incandescent totality. Only one other album, Flat Tire, subsequently emerged, followed by sixteen years of studio silence.

Holdsworth was never the king of his universe, but a willing comrade, co-creator of an inexorable logic and an ineffable beauty, astonished and gleeful at the blossoming phantasmagoria surrounding him, whilst blissfully unaware of his own agonising grasp for the summit, the titanic effort required to bring this utopian temporal tear to its boundless crest. Transcendence through motion: desperate plea for absolution, or centrifugal apotheosis - gyrating at light-speed in a galactic washing machine.

I will be forever grateful to Allan Holdsworth and his many colleagues for their radical world-making and their courage in pursuing a vision that was, and remains, so singular and strange, so disarmingly honest. Although I will (likely) never get my fifteen minutes together with him, I will take Holdsworth’s teachings into my life as an artist, student, educator and human, in the hope that this spirit of empowerment, integrity and joyful curiosity may bring as much to others as it does to me.

‘The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.’ [James P. Carse, 1986]

Postscript For those unfamiliar with Allan Holdsworth’s music, it can take some time to move beyond the sheer confusion and shock which people commonly report on first listen. The Sixteen Men of Tain is a good introduction, somewhat less enigmatic in instrumentation than other records, and with clearer allegiance to the ‘jazz tradition’. From the other end of his career, the Road Games EP features a number of his ‘greatest hits’ and predates most of his more experimental inclinations, presenting him in a more orthodox jazz-fusion guise (although there’s still plenty of astonishing music-making on display). May your discoveries be rich and bountiful!

References

James P. Carse, 1986, Finite and Infinite Games, New York, Free Press