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Authors: Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories
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soon after.
I blew a lot of time and a couple of years of high school because I wanted to play Chet Atkinsâstyle guitar and later rock ânâ roll, and Lenny was teaching me. He was developing his own style of playing, a combination of lead on top, the chords in the middle, and a walking bass line all at the same time, as well as mastering harmonics and clusters of chords. When I put a Lenny Breau record on today I get the same feeling I had the first time I ever heard him on the radio as a teenager: One guy alone canât be playing all those parts.
Lenny moved to Toronto and became a great jazz player, the greatest ever. From time to time Iâd run into him. Iâd be telling him about our success in the Guess Who, and heâd reply in that hipster whisper of his, âYeah, man, thatâs cool, but are you playing any jazz? You gotta do a jazz thing, man.â Lenny wenton to become a true guitar genius. Guitar players would travel thousands of miles to see him play and beg for a lesson. All Iâd had to do was knock on his door.
After Lennyâs tragic death in 1984 I began thinking about the debt I owed him for what he did for me and my career. I remembered his words, âYou gotta do a jazz thing, man.â But while rock ânâ roll was always way easier for me, jazz was frightening. It had all these weird notes in it. I could play all those rock ânâ roll songs with one hand tied behind my back, but I had fenced myself in. Jazz was like jumping over that fence and going out into the world and finding out what itâs like to do something different. It was a huge, gigantic step for me to make a jazz album, but by the new millennium I was ready to take that leap. There was an element of danger for me, an artistic danger. I was a rock ânâ roll guy. I could fall on my face. But it was good for me to be challenged, and attempting to play jazz was certainly a challenge for me.
For years, fans, friends, and other guitar players had been telling me to do an entire album like âUndunâ or âLooking Out for #1,â but I never felt confident enough. Once I made up my mind to do it, though, I took some jazz guitar lessons and practised for several years to be able to tackle that style of playing and its musical language. I wanted to be conversant in that language, and so I immersed myself in it. I didnât have the jazz vocabulary and had to learn it. I would use one lick from Tal Farlow one night and another from Barney Kessel the next night and Lenny Breau the next and integrate these into my own playing style.
I didnât want to do a lot of instrumentals because thatâs what people would be expecting from me. I did an instrumental album, Axe, back in 1970 and it sold maybe twelve copies. Now I wanted to write jazz songs. I wanted to write a new jazz standard. I think âOur Leaves Are Green Againâ is that kind of a song. I wrote it with Stephan Moccio, whoâs written songs for Celine Dion and Josh Groban. I worked real hard for three years in betweenGuess Who reunion tours, getting jazz musicians together and writing these songs with some of the best songwriters. I think my instincts were right.
I also tackled reinterpreting some songs on the album. One in particular came from my earliest experiences on guitar. The first three chords I ever learned were the chords to Johnny Cashâs âI Walk the Lineâ on my cousinsâ big Gibson guitar. The song is really a love song, but he never says âI love youâ anywhere in the lyrics. Itâs got no chorus, no bridge; every verse just ends with âBecause youâre mine, I walk the line,â saying that to his woman. Itâs very moving. I wanted to arrange it in a jazz style. I was fooling around with that song one day, and when I tried it in minor chords it sounded even more haunting and beautiful. I really like the way it came out on the album.
One
I blew a lot of time and a couple of years of high school because I wanted to play Chet Atkinsâstyle guitar and later rock ânâ roll, and Lenny was teaching me. He was developing his own style of playing, a combination of lead on top, the chords in the middle, and a walking bass line all at the same time, as well as mastering harmonics and clusters of chords. When I put a Lenny Breau record on today I get the same feeling I had the first time I ever heard him on the radio as a teenager: One guy alone canât be playing all those parts.
Lenny moved to Toronto and became a great jazz player, the greatest ever. From time to time Iâd run into him. Iâd be telling him about our success in the Guess Who, and heâd reply in that hipster whisper of his, âYeah, man, thatâs cool, but are you playing any jazz? You gotta do a jazz thing, man.â Lenny wenton to become a true guitar genius. Guitar players would travel thousands of miles to see him play and beg for a lesson. All Iâd had to do was knock on his door.
After Lennyâs tragic death in 1984 I began thinking about the debt I owed him for what he did for me and my career. I remembered his words, âYou gotta do a jazz thing, man.â But while rock ânâ roll was always way easier for me, jazz was frightening. It had all these weird notes in it. I could play all those rock ânâ roll songs with one hand tied behind my back, but I had fenced myself in. Jazz was like jumping over that fence and going out into the world and finding out what itâs like to do something different. It was a huge, gigantic step for me to make a jazz album, but by the new millennium I was ready to take that leap. There was an element of danger for me, an artistic danger. I was a rock ânâ roll guy. I could fall on my face. But it was good for me to be challenged, and attempting to play jazz was certainly a challenge for me.
For years, fans, friends, and other guitar players had been telling me to do an entire album like âUndunâ or âLooking Out for #1,â but I never felt confident enough. Once I made up my mind to do it, though, I took some jazz guitar lessons and practised for several years to be able to tackle that style of playing and its musical language. I wanted to be conversant in that language, and so I immersed myself in it. I didnât have the jazz vocabulary and had to learn it. I would use one lick from Tal Farlow one night and another from Barney Kessel the next night and Lenny Breau the next and integrate these into my own playing style.
I didnât want to do a lot of instrumentals because thatâs what people would be expecting from me. I did an instrumental album, Axe, back in 1970 and it sold maybe twelve copies. Now I wanted to write jazz songs. I wanted to write a new jazz standard. I think âOur Leaves Are Green Againâ is that kind of a song. I wrote it with Stephan Moccio, whoâs written songs for Celine Dion and Josh Groban. I worked real hard for three years in betweenGuess Who reunion tours, getting jazz musicians together and writing these songs with some of the best songwriters. I think my instincts were right.
I also tackled reinterpreting some songs on the album. One in particular came from my earliest experiences on guitar. The first three chords I ever learned were the chords to Johnny Cashâs âI Walk the Lineâ on my cousinsâ big Gibson guitar. The song is really a love song, but he never says âI love youâ anywhere in the lyrics. Itâs got no chorus, no bridge; every verse just ends with âBecause youâre mine, I walk the line,â saying that to his woman. Itâs very moving. I wanted to arrange it in a jazz style. I was fooling around with that song one day, and when I tried it in minor chords it sounded even more haunting and beautiful. I really like the way it came out on the album.
One
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