Elliot Freedman, Harmony In Or On His Own Terms And Scale-lengths.
The Elliot Freedman Group advances uncompromisingly non-canonically a compositionally elegant, harmonically complex, richly melodious, and rhythmically moving jazz.
Elliot’s jazz guitar music is based in his very personal harmonic vocabulary, his strikingly different chordal voicings, and the techniques & textures he achieves on & from his long-scale baritone guitars. John Stowell, who suggested JGT interview Elliot, recently guested on Elliot’s music and with his group on three gigs up in Victoria, Vancouver, and Nanaimo (Canada)—expanding Elliot’s music and introducing new audiences to his jazz guitar mastery.
JB: Did you study guitar at college? If so, what helped you the
most as a jazz guitarist?
EF: No. My university degrees are in Electrical Engineering (BSc ’85), English Lit (MA ’03), and Economics (MA ’05). I didn’t think I could be either open or diligent enough to do things outside my interests to become the multi-faceted player serious professional jazz guitarists are. Inspired by role models of, John Stowell notwithstanding, eras clearly gone by, I had some reckless confidence that I could advance my own music meaningfully to me, by supporting it and other life’s other pursuits with things interesting to me that left me in a good space to write & play. If I am actually a ‘jazz guitarist’ is debatable, at least semantically: I don’t play the canon, the standards. And I don’t aspire to take up traditional jazz guitar harmonies or sounds. I kind of accept and admit into my jazz guitar that both Hendrix & Holdsworth happened as much as Hall and other legendary jazz guitarists; also, that there’s an abundance of cool and therefore valid influences on jazz guitar beyond jazz guitarists. If I am at all a jazz guitarist, it is only that harmony—games with its flow and structure in time—captivates me (in whoever’s music) and that I try to compose and improvise that way, tonally across many harmonies.
During first year Engineering at Queen’s, I skipped calculus to play in the big band—Rob McConnell’s Boss Brass tunes: joyous, moving, complexly arranged music and the intimacy of the guitar & trombone duo in McConnell’s “TO” especially. But what opened both my ears and doors to and in Europe was studying electroacoustic music composition at Queen’s School of Music while in my 3rd & 4th year of Electrical Engineering.
JB: To you and your musical development, what are three of the
most influential jazz guitar albums and why?
EF: Allan Holdsworth’s IOU & Atavachron Playing jazz guitar at full throat: that’s what I feel about Allan Holdsworth—particularly about IOU (1982) and Atavachron (1985). I am a guitarist who still feels that there are many other uncommon chords worthy of reaching for (if I may riff on Christopher Hoard’s 1980s book on Holdsworth’s development, Reaching for the Uncommon Chord).
Already into complex structures, different harmonies, and other tones from having dug things from YES, King Crimson, Bruford, Queen, and Genesis, its profound influence on me was Holdsworth presenting as composer-guitarist and improviser-guitarist—an album of his conception. Sure, Holdsworth’s single-note improvisatory brilliance hinted at things to come (things to marvel at as a listener, as music transcends us and our technique), but affecting me was clean, chordal guitar prominently leading the tunes. To me, Holdsworth’s postmodern etudes (e.g., “Where Is One”, “Shallow Seas”, “Letters of Marque”) were like Fernando Sor on the Starship Enterprise. Back then, Holdsworth’s finger-style playing was a logically exuberant outer rim-destination vector for the classical, jazz, and rock techniques that, as a teen, variously captivated or embroiled me. Later, Holdsworth’s Atavachron was influential for more sonic & compositional reasons: I never felt that I needed to sound like a jazz guitarist Brian May’s non-guitarist work in Queen). Atavachron is likely the ‘ur’ non-jazz guitar jazz guitar album—taking jazz guitar out of jazz guitar to re-making what jazz guitar album could be, not just for that 1984 point in time, but timelessly. Sure, the SynthAxe MIDI controller work on the album to drive Oberheim and other synthesizer is staggering in both chordal and solo passages. But Holdsworth’s clean guitar work, the clean chordal conceptions of the compositions “Funnels” and “Looking Glass”, is especially beautiful. But it is the well-architected themes and solo section structures of the tunes and the guitar work underlying the often open-fifths tuned, SynthAxe-realized compositions such as “Non-Brewed
Condiment”, “Atavachron”, and “Distance Versus Desire” that are especially cool—and, although I haven’t noodled with them for 30+ years, really rather influential. For similar reasons of sonorities & structures, I note Joni Mitchell’s Painting With Words & Music DVD. Her compositions arguably already re-cast and transcend what may have once been folk music, what the guitar does there, and with whom and how. Joni uses a Roland VG-8 hexaphonic guitar processor to digitally retune to her tunings—and I dug her use of non-guitar sounds from the VG-8’s live guitar string processing, making her early songs, with the dulcimer-derived technique and alternate tunings more moving.
Lenny Breau’s Live At Bourbon St. For a different take on intimately detailed harmony, Lenny Breau’s Live at Bourbon St. (1995) duo album with bassist Dave Young (a 1983 Toronto concert recording) was huge to me when in 1999, I put aside my electrics for 10 years to refocus on acoustic nylon-string guitar, inspired by this album and especially also music by Ralph Towner, to develop myself further compositionally, but also towards a repertoire of my own finger-style arrangements of music by or associated with Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, a lot of lesser- played music by Kenny Wheeler, and some sentimental things. To me, Lenny’s sound on the high-A strung 7-string guitar was at the same time unabashedly modern in being a bright, chiming electric finger-plucked sound while being a homage to chord-melody greats in jazz, transcending their iconic vintage sounds by virtue of his Chordal Chemistry. Similarly, I could have noted the video of Ted Greene playing at that birthday party that is out there: the direct Telecaster’d beauty of his voice leading. Thanks Randy Bachman of The Guess Who, for his Guitararchives label, which released various Breau recordings.
Michael Hedges’ Aerial Boundaries
Michael Hedges’ Aerial Boundaries (1984) influenced me immensely—although not so much, at least not beyond inspiring a few pieces, for the two-handed tapping technique that Hedges is often seen, reductively, as perpetrating and popularizing. Tapping was just one of the many in his array of creative &/or classical techniques. It was Hedges ability to arrange for the guitar’s strings that influenced me: There’s never a chord voicing or single-note moment that isn’t exquisitely designed. Hear “Rickover’s Dream”! Technically, among other wonders, his right-hand commands a clear start and stop of notes; compositionally, his beautifully structured pieces had their own sense of form.
Hedges, while at Peabody Conservatory, studied electroacoustic music composition. I did, too, while doing my Electrical Engineering degree. Pieces of electroacoustic music of mine from ’88 and ’89 received prizes at the Bourge (France) international electroacoustic music festival. (There, in June 1989, Bob Moog rushes at me, urgently asking me to photograph him with his hero, the 90-something festival guest of honor, Leon Theremin.) Hedges inspired me with his post-guitar approaches to the guitar and the breadth of influences he let into his complex music, which soundtracked many years of mine.
JB: What projects have you done with guitarist John Stowell?
EF: It’s not that I have done any substantial number of projects with John Stowell—the Portland-resident relentlessly engagingly gigging master jazz guitarist—but that his approach to the guitar and to indeed relentlessly being a musician for music’s sake has been inspiring to me. Albeit certainly unable to do anything that he does—also because he & I are of different eras and tastes, let alone different life paths—we share that jazz guitarist joy of juggling set theory and odd symbols for the music we wish to be part of. It was a thrill to have had John Stowell take part in my music, as guest soloist and in duo context, both last year for a sold-out concert at Vancouver’s Frankie’s Jazz Club and on three
dates this past September: Victoria, as a trio with my bassist, launching a FURNISHING JAZZ series that transforms a furniture showroom into a cozy, comfortable jazz club; selling out Frankie’s in Vancouver with my full West Coast Quintet; and then doing Nanaimo’s Simonholt with the 5et, where in July 2024 we recorded the live album.
JB: Tell me about one of your more recent musical projects?
EF: Bands of Merriment, Vol. 1 West Coast Quintet Live (2024)
The title, Bands of Merriment, of my 2024 album plays on Robin Hood & his Merry Men, the glee of having a group, and connections among us if not friends, then somehow fratres. Coming out of COVID—whose end seemingly signaled a change in the demographics of who goes out where to see or hear what—I was privileged to do solo sets (things Jarrett, Evans, Wheeler, and my own) at a classical & jazz music festival (Christopher Donnison’s Music by the Sea). Enthused by that to re-casting my music with others, uh, way more
better than me, I called Vancouver vibraphonist Nick Apivor and found fraternity with him immediately, in preparing, in duets, and in him conducting the group, which at that time was courting the elegantly intuitive pianist Dan Reynolds, who then convinced bassist Daniel Howards to add even more to his roster of jazz(-adjacent) obligations. With three harmony instruments (baritone guitar, vibraphone, and piano) providing lots of verticality, dynamics, and color, and my peers digging the music, I thought to have the tunes, techniques, and tones, and team, with which to make another album statement. The heart of the album is “‘becca Suite”, which sees the long, longing melody of “‘becca” (it sings through 4 down a flat 3rd transpositions of a 4 bar progression) bookending pieces of mine that my Mom, for whom the suite is titled, liked or would have liked— swung, upbeat pieces—“Ash Saturday”, “Aire Giordano”, and “Quintessence”. I wrote
“‘becca” at the piano as a big-band piece and only developed it for guitar when Nick Apivor & I started to play it as a vibraphone & guitar duo. In Nanaimo, the mid-island city where the stellar Wheeler-leaning trumpeter Ingrid
Jensen hails from, Malaspina College had a terrific jazz program, and its north end draws audiences who support live music, the English expatriate Luis Porretta runs a concert series. After my more electric group performed, Luis’s Quadwrangle Music Productions offered a nice July 2024 gig with recording options. The gig became the album despite issues of separating powerful drums and heard-everywhere guitar from acoustic bass and vibraphone. The edits, mix, and mastering by my former brother-in-law are a sonic achievement, given the complexity of the tracks.
A review by Anil Prasad of Innerviews captured how I had hoped the music to be heard:
… Elliot Freedman is someone I’ve been listening to since the late ‘90s.
He just released [an album] which documents a dynamic gig built on his distinctive compositional voice and elastic guitar approach, and his ensemble’s deep interplay. Freedman performs on baritone guitar, shaping the music with a resonant low-end presence and a sophisticated harmonic perspective, while vibraphonist Nick Apivor adds a luminous counterpoint that expands the group’s tonal spectrum. Pianist Dan Reynolds creatively extends Freedman’s harmonic ideas and delivers engaging and supportive solos. Bassist Dan Howard and drummer Paul Mason combine into a texturally-aware rhythm section, shifting between subtlety and momentum. together, the group expresses a strong collective identity, as it moves fluidly between written passages and improvisation. Uncompromising stuff. Highly recommended.
