|
|
He learned to play guitar as a grade school kid, his cousin teaching him, coming from Chicago once or twice a year, coaching him and giving him note-for-note copies of the most difficult jazz and rock songs from Johnny Smith, Barney Kessel, Chet Atkins, the Ventures and others.
Brian first became a professional player in high school, playing in a band named ‘The Prophets’, through its history playing everything from soul music and James Brown to Top 40 and hard rock and Jimi Hendrix. He worked through a few bands into college, playing sometimes as a full-time occupation, and studying rock greats Clapton, Hendrix and others, and jazz greats Wes Montgomery and organist Jimmy Smith among others.
One day he was listening to Peter Townsend of the Who, playing on a live album called ‘Live at Leeds’. Brian listened to the band stopping periodically and Peter Townsend then starting a lone guitar part, quickly picked up by the rest of the band.....
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
.....Brian was very impressed that Townsend could make up parts like this on the spur of the moment, and then the band pick it up, and he ultimately realized that he could do this as well, so there he began giving much thought to this ’art’ of improvisation, making things up on the spot.
For the next 15 years, Brian played maybe an average of only 10 or 20 songs in a whole year, every minute of the rest of the time, just making up what he played on guitar right at the moment he picked up the guitar, and as he played it. And during these same years of working in management in the ‘business world’ and then later in the computer field, and then working on a Master’s degree in something-something ya dee da , he decided that since he had always wanted to do nothing but play, he would turn back to music to give his most serious effort to now recording what he did, and selling it.
The music that he writes and that you will hear him play, adheres to a very high degree of improvisation. Much of it was made up at the moment it was actually being recorded and this original recording of it is the self-same, actual take that you hear off his CDs or off his site. Other songs have a generous part of them recorded like this as they are being made up, while the rest of the song is composed improvisationally, then recorded after it has been played a small number of times.
He is entirely convinced that music which he records after being played the fewest number of times has the most sincerity and freshness, and as he believes, hence the most feeling of life, or actual ‘aliveness’, presence. Axuality is a pun on ‘ax’ (or guitar) and on ‘actuality’ as the aliveness or ‘realness’ that he believes the music posesses due to its nature of not being practiced for perfection.
(Ironically, Brian laughs to think, years later after he heard Peter Townsend making up those parts on ‘Live at Leeds’, which was what originally inspired Brian to turn to all ad-lib guitar, he learned that Peter actually wasn’t making these parts up, but knew exactly what he was going to do before he played them, as these parts were already songs on previous albums that Brian just wasn’t aware of-
what an idiot! :)
|
