Reed & Juber
- Groovemasters at the Fringe of the Solo
Zone
By Todd Ellison
Acoustic Musician Magazine
January 1997
They
slap, they jam, they tap, they flam. Not words commonly used
to describe acoustic guitar players. But out at the fringes
of the solo zone, such words have become accurate&emdash;and
essential&emdash;descriptors. At the fringes of the solo
zone styles and techniques merge and emerge to create
semblances of traditional guitar styles so warped that they
look like a funhouse mirror might sound. Or something like
that.
These fringes are the habitat of
those daring souls willing to ruthlessly plunder from any
and all traditions. And who are capable of adding their own
unique twists. They are also willing to do these things in
public, all by themselves. Preston Reed and Laurence Juber
are two stellar denizens at the fringes of the solo zone. Is
that dramatic or what? Hit the drum roll, Buddy.
Three decades ago originals like
John Renbourn began to enlarge the vistas of the instrument
both as a solo player and in ensemble. His classic Sir
John A Lot album opened a lot of ears to new
possibilities for the acoustic guitar back then.
Although Renbourn himself has
returned to playing more traditional-sounding music, his
progenies have continued to stretch the fabric. Other
pickers from that era like John Fahey, Jorma Kaukonnen and
Leo Kottke also helped bring the solo acoustic guitar out of
the closet and into the public consciousness. That was then.
Fast forward to the verge of the millennium.
Now everybody is an acoustic guitar
player. "Unplugged" rockers are all the rage and the
acoustic guitar is back in the limelight. And out at the
fringes, the solo players are still pioneering new stuff on
this venerable music box.
Actually, the instrument isn't quite
the same as it used to be. Not that it's radically different
in appearance for most part. Lots more acoustic guitar
makers, lots more good-to-great sounding acoustic
instruments. More cutaways. Some high-tech materials. But
the most radical change in the instrument has to be
amplification. Kind of ironic that the vast improvements in
amplifying acoustic guitars - sometimes there is nary a
microphone or magnetic pickup in sight - may have had a lot
to do with wrenching new acoustic possibilities out of the
instrument. But that's a whole other topic for a whole other
day; today, we're here to talk about Juber and Reed.
First, some similarities. Both Reed
and Juber are of the male gender, both have had the good
fortune of surviving as professional guitarists into their
fourth decade of life, both play guitars that generate sound
acoustically, both are prolific, able-bodied and tuneful
composers, both are frequently seen on stage as part of
Muriel Anderson's renowned "All Star Guitar Night" gigs,
both have a need to continually stretch limits, both have a
single bit of jewelry installed in their respective left
earlobes. But that's about it for similarities.
Laurence (don't call him Larry or
spell his name with a "w") Juber is a mild-mannered
Englishman who spends much of his time working sessions in
the Los Angeles megalopolis. In an earlier musical life he
was lead guitarist in Paul McCartney's "Wings" band. In his
high school and college days he formally studied classical
guitar and hung out in jazz clubs where he experienced the
likes of Joe Pass. It's his recent solo playing and
composing, though, that's taking us to new places. Think
words like jazz, rock, lead, improvise, jam, melodic. His
fourth album of (mostly) solo acoustic guitar music,
Winter Guitar, a collection of seasonal favorites,
was recently released on Solid Air Records.
Preston Reed currently spends most
of his time touring as a solo guitarist. Fifteen years ago
he was a blazing, self-taught fingerpicker whose playing
most recalled Kottke. About halfway between then and now,
inspirational lightning struck in the form of fellow
innovators Eddie Van Halen, Stanley Jordan and Michael
Hedges. Reed could no longer see his chosen instrument in
its former light and set off in search of all the possible
sounds hiding in the darker corners of the acoustic guitar.
Think words like rhythm, orchestral, slide, percussive,
driving, funky. Critics raved about Metal, his 1995
solo guitar album, and his latest solo album, Ladies
Night, is just out on Dusty Closet Records.
Strictly
Reed
Towering, lanky and sporting long rivulets of blondish
curls, the square-jawed Reed attacks the entire instrument
in a never ending search for the orchestra he knows is
lurking inside. A not uncommon response to a Preston Reed
live performance is "what is he doing up there?" His two
hands are a blur of unconventional activity as they
simultaneously manage to create a rock/jazz rhythm section,
melody line and chordal accompaniment. This does not look
like guitar playing as we learned to experience it. But it
sounds very cool.
"In the last couple years my playing
has gotten more intensely rhythmic and percussive…and
multi-voiced, multi-textural," says Reed with the fervor and
zeal of a true pioneer. His 1995 album Metal was a
showcase for this continually evolving style. Although Reed
has always been a very rhythmic player, the rhythmic
emphasis is very up front on Metal ; overall it has
more of a "driving" feel than previous recordings, propelled
by such tunes as "Train," "Blasting Cap," "Fat Boy" and the
title track, "Metal," which Playboy reviewer Charles M.
Young said "will drop your jaw." There is the heart and soul
of a rock band in this collection; you have to keep
reminding yourself that there are no overdubs and that the
tunes were all complete takes. No digital cutting and
pasting. In places, you'd swear there was a bass and drums
in there somewhere. Reed manages to coax some very
un-guitar-like sounds from his instruments.
A good example of these sounds can
be found in one of his earliest experiments with percussion:
"Slap Funk." Originally recorded on his 1991 Blue
Vertigo CD (unhappily, long out of print) from Reed's
major label era, "Slap Funk" also appears on Metal.
Among its engaging sonic oddities are some deceptively real
hand-clap sounds that are actually made with the
fingerpick-clad fingers of his right hand striking the side
of the guitar near the juncture of the top and side.
Probably the strangest looking part
of Reed's playing is his left-hand-over-the-neck technique
where instead of fretting in the traditional manner, he uses
this hand to independently create sounds via slapping,
tapping, hammer-ons and pull-offs and sliding, among other
techniques.
"All I did in my first experiments
in playing this way," Reed recalls, "was to just have my
left hand do what would normally be done by the thumb. I
have my left hand doing a simple repeating rhythm vamp and
have my right hand syncopate with that. Left hand drum
beating or left hand hammering or left hand anything."
Easier said than done, although Reed
reports some success in teaching these novel techniques to
his National Guitar Summer Workshop students.
"The first thing I would do is play
'Tribes' [a funky, rhythmic tune that appears both on
Metal and Reed's popular instructional video on
Homespun Tapes] and get them to do the left hand rhythm
voice…to get the left hand doing its part and then get
the right hand doing its part. A lot of them would sort of
giggle and feel uncomfortable and awkward trying
anything."
When Reed's left hand is off doing
odd-appearing moves, his right is often busy making sounds
by tapping on the neck instead of picking over the
soundhole. Or as Reed says more precisely: "I'm doing a lot
of impact-generated sounds on the guitar."
"It's a misnomer to just call this
tapping," he explains. "Tapping is one of the maybe twenty
or thirty things I'm doing. In fact, for all the things I'm
doing, the keyword really is expedient…you're getting
several different qualities and textures out of a single
gesture. You're getting the sound of the string, you're
getting the sound of your finger hitting the guitar neck as
it slams the string down and that impact resonates through
the body of the guitar. The whole effect of it is more
'pianistic' and more percussive."
An essential component of Reed's
orchestral playing techniques are altered tunings. A
long-time veteran of non-standard tunings, Reed emphasizes
the word "altered" as opposed to, say, "open" tunings where
the tuning creates a chord. His tunings are designed to
support the harmonic quality and playability of the
particular song and may bear little sonic resemblance to a
recognizable chord. You won't find anything in standard
tuning on Metal. In fact, the only immediately
familiar-looking tuning is DADGAD, which he uses for the
propulsive "Train." In his new Ladies Night CD, most
of the tunes are played in an odd tuning - CGDGGD - which
Reed calls "double G."
"Rhythm propels me forward," says
Reed with his characteristic intensity. "It puts me on a
train, where I can pick up stuff from the side of the tracks
as the train picks up speed. It's a movement kind of thing.
There are lot's of different ways to write a tune, but what
I've been working in most recently is this kind of
propulsive rhythm thing."
If you haven't heard or seen Preston
Reed, you may wonder whether there might be an excessive
focus on technique, rather than how the resulting music
sounds. Fair question. Fortunately, Reed is a strong
composer with an ability to make the odd and unusual feel
natural to the listener; tuneful but not predictable. Even
when he was known for being a hot fingerpicker, the
tunefulness of his tunes stood out. His second and third
albums from the early 1980s - Pointing Up and
Playing by Ear (available as a two-albums-on-one CD
on Flying Fish) show off his composing talents as much as
his playing skills. Even back then his tunes were carefully
structured, intricately detailed and spiced with harmonic
side trips. Despite his avowed rhythmic emphasis, he can pen
soulful ballads with an unmistakable pictorial quality,
rendered in a range of subtle moods and emotions. His music
is not all strictly propulsive.
Reed's compositional skills have
matured with time and he continues to expand his horizons,
having recently finished his first film score, a work which
he both composed and performed. But more on Reed later.
Let's see where Juber is pushing the envelope of solo
acoustic playing.
Strictly
Juber
Juber is a composer and player of equal skill, but very
different from Reed in both musical background and approach
to the instrument. The compact, dark haired Englishman with
the ready smile and charming-but-not-lordly accent is
revealed as a jammer, an improviser who resents having to
play a song the same way twice. You can tell he's played a
lot of electric rock'n'roll and has a love of jazz and
classical music. You can also tell he has a built-in urge to
keep enlarging his musical horizons: "I've been playing for
33 years and there's still this constant drive to improve,
to find new ways of doing things" he observes with a clear
love of the discovery process.
Surprisingly, Juber is relative
newcomer to solo acoustic playing and a lot of the stuff
that comes with the territory like fingerstyle techniques
and alternate tunings. But Juber's music is clearly
eclectic, clearly sophisticated, clearly Juber.
Although he learned classical
playing techniques during his high school and college years
in England, Juber admits to being unhappy with the customary
classical technique using fingernails and spent much of the
next few decades playing mostly with a flatpick, the basic
plucking tool of rock and jazz. "I always had some facility
with fingerstyle, but I really started working on it as a
full-time gig in the late 80s. My Solo Flight album
was three months of woodshedding saying 'I'm going to make
an album that's all fingerstyle.' That was really the
beginning of this process."
Just the beginning. Having gotten
comfortable with playing fingerstyle using the fleshy part
of his fingers, his next challenge was getting into
alternate tunings. "When I was a teenager I started getting
into alternate tunings, but being that I went into being a
studio musician it just was never really very useful to
me."
Juber credits producer James Jensen
for prodding him to explore altered tunings seriously. "Once
I got it, it was a paradigm shift. I realized there were a
lot of things I had in my head that I was never going to be
able to do in standard tuning. It was a natural thing to
just dive right in."
True to form, Juber is pressing his
own envelope and "starting to develop some improvisational
fluency" in altered tunings. "There's an aspect to what I do
that's never the same twice and that's very important to me;
to be able to do something that couldn't be repeated."
Sounding now like a true aficionado
of altered tunings, he adds: "In Winter Guitar I do a
number of pieces in D tuning. The next album, Mosaic,
will have a number of things CGCGAD which is actually a very
cool tuning to improvise in. LJ had only one standard
tuning piece, which was 'Riff Raff'; just a little jam
piece. Everything else was in DADGAD or Open G or G minor or
C."
"Just a little jam piece," he says.
Although Juber speaks very casually about his considerable
improvisational ability, it's a side of his musical talent
that separates him from many other talented solo players.
Juber's substantial experience as a rock guitarist has had a
marked influence on the development of his tuneful, eclectic
style.
"Just the jamming aspect of it," he
says in his characteristic understated manner, summing up
the impact of his rock'n'roll era. "Years and years of
hanging out with the likes of Tim Bogert and Ainsley Dunbar
every Tuesday night at the old Central in Hollywood, playing
an hour long set just to stretch out, just to explore what
you can do playing long solos on electric guitar." This is
experience most solo acoustic players definitely do not
have.
Nor do most solo players have the
opportunity to get paid to learn and transcribe Jimi Hendrix
tunes, one of Juber's more novel experiences as a musician.
Deep immersion into the music of this pioneering guitar icon
has left a deep mark. When Juber performs his soulful
acoustic rendition of Hendrix's "Little Wing" - always a
show-stopper - there's no mistaking that a little piece of
Hendrix has grafted itself onto Juber's eclectic musical
soul.
"I'm very eclectic and everything
I've done in music has evolved in a very empirical kind of
way. I just take what's out there and I kind of process it
through my own sensibilities, one of the things I learned
from McCartney. He'll just take whatever's around and it
comes out his own way." These words frame Juber's approach
to acquiring new techniques and putting them to work. Like
tapping, for example.
"I don't sit down and think, 'okay,
I'm going to write a tapping tune.' It's much more like 'how
do I get this' and 'how do I make these notes when I'm also
holding these other notes?' Then the tapping thing kind of
comes into it. For example with my arrangement of "Rain"
where the tapping in that evolved because there was a story
to tell - I wanted to give the effect of a rainstorm."
Tapping also found its way into
parts of "Double Espresso" and "Rules of the Road," two of
the many infectious tunes on Juber's LJ album which,
by the way, isn't really a solo album in the literal sense.
Juber plays multiple guitar parts on several cuts, including
a sultry electric lead on the haunting "Diminished Returns."
While Juber's guitar is backed by bass and drums or
percussion on many of the tracks, the record still manages
to maintain a very acoustic, very solo feel.
"It all comes down to a good tune,"
says Juber, bottom-lining. "People don't necessarily
understand some of the inner workings and thought that goes
into working out solo fingerstyle guitar pieces, but they do
recognize a good tune."
Always on a quest for a good tune,
Juber isn't satisfied with where he's been in the past. "My
compositions are starting to be a little more expansive, a
little more developed," he observes. He also credits his
wife Hope with helping him find "emotional threads," getting
him away from what he calls "the abstraction of guitaristic
kinds of fingering things."
Guys and
Their Gear
What'll it be: plastic or wood? When it comes to guitars,
the acoustic guitars Reed and Juber currently play represent
wildly different technological approaches to
guitarmaking.
Reed is currently performing with an
extensively modified Ovation Adamas LongNeck instrument
which has a longer scale length than a conventional guitar
and is tuned a whole step lower. Waxing enthusiastic, Reed
notes that "the extra string length and lower tonal range
gives the guitar a rich, almost piano-like texture. Since I
already use a lot of lowered bass strings in my music, with
this guitar I am getting closer to the range of an acoustic
bass."
The LongNeck also features a thin,
flexible carbon graphite top - actually a
graphite-wood-graphite sandwich - that Reed likens to a
drumskin. This top "really works well for the
percussion-based, rhythm-oriented way that I play," he
enthuses. It also features a fiberglass bowl (the Ovation
term for their molded equivalent of a guitar body), which
Reed feels "has a better percussive resonance than the
conventional Ovation body."
Other factory modifications include
leaving some of the Adamas "swiss cheese holes" in the upper
bout of the guitar uncut, making the decorative epaulet into
a percussion pad for Reed's drumming.
Juber's main touring guitar is
somewhat more traditional: a Taylor model 514 with a
cutaway, mahogany sides and back and a cedar top. For
electrification, the Taylor is fitted with a Fishman Matrix
Natural bridge transducer and a Crown mic; a pickup blended
with a microphone. Juber says this setup gives him "the air
and the body sound" he likes for doing slapping or
tapping."
Reed's LongNeck is also fitted with
a dual pickup system plus on-board electronics adapted from
Ovation's OptiMax blender system. The electronics package
includes a blender for the two pickups, high and low
equalization, a "smile curve" button, and a phase switch. In
addition to the standard Ovation bridge pickup, a Seymour
Duncan SA-2 soundboard transducer has been added. "The main
function of the SA-2," says Reed, "is to register the
percussion I do on the body of the guitar. With its own
preamp and special sensor material, I have found the SA-2 to
have a superior acoustic tone."
Different players, different
machinery, same goal: an instrument well suited to a highly
individual playing style.
Strings also reflect their
individual styles. Juber has "settled on GHS True Medium
where, essentially, the top two and the bottom string are
mediums and the rest are light gauge. They're perfect for
DADGAD," he says, "because you get the extra thousandths of
an inch so that when you tune down on those three strings
you still have the integrity."
Reed is currently working with
D'Addario phosphor bronze strings because of "the way they
work with the Adamas carbon graphite top, which resonates
differently than a wood top. The gauges I use are .058,
.046, .036, .026, .017, and .013. The .058 gives me a big
bottom end to the sound."
Groovemasters
Get Together
And now for something completely different. While both Reed
and Juber have recently added freshly minted solo guitar
albums to their catalogs, their coolest recent recording may
be their collaboration, Groovemasters: Volume One
(available on Solid Air Records). This acoustic guitar duo
concept was spawned when these two denizens of the solo zone
were hanging out together at a photo shoot, which this
humble observer had the singular good fortune to attend.
Their spontaneous jams led to recording sessions, which led
to one of the groovingest acoustic guitar albums in recent
memory. For any readers old enough to remember some of the
John Renbourn/Bert Jansch duos, Groovemasters: Volume
1 might just make you forget them again.