Roland VS-2000CD

Lale Larson

interviewed by Simon Badham and Laurie Monk January 2005

According to your biography you've been playing keys since you were 4
years old. I also understand that both your parents were musicians and
in the entertainment business. Was your inspiration to succeed partly
through their support or was it something else that has driven you to
become such a superb musician?
 

I think I owe everything to my parents, especially my mother. She has really supported me from day one. It's hard to say when I actually started to play, but I composed my first own piece when I was four. It was a Cmaj7 chord going to a Dm7 (laughs). There was always a lot of music around the home and music has always been a big part of my life. My mother is classically trained and worked professionally as a singer and actress, I use to listen to her sing Mozart coloratura and Bach pieces to piano when I was little. When I was really young she used to sit with me by the piano and teach me how to sing canon. I think that I got a lot of my musicality from her. My father was a well known actor, choreographer and director in Sweden. He starred in a lot of old black and white movies. In the 50's he was one of the leading entertainers in the Swedish theatres and according to the dictionaries he is a theatre legend . The press called him a Swedish Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. He was 25 years older than my mother so he was already 60 years old when I was born. Later he suffered from prostate cancer and he died when I was 14 years old. I have two older sisters from my father's side who are also in the theater and movie business.

My father was also an amateur pianist and he used to play songs from the American songbook, and the musicals. He loved Sinatra, Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irwing Berlin, Cole Porter. My mother listened to all the European classical composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin etc. which later led me into more modern composers. That's the music I grew up with. I was fortunate to get the best of two worlds and since my father was so much older I also got to hear the popular music from a different generation; Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis JR etc. It was just really natural for me to play the piano. I never thought about becoming a professional musician or anything. Music was just a natural part of my life. When I was a kid I played all the time. I was just fortunate that my mother wasn't disturbed by all the playing day in and day out. I have old practice tapes where I'm going crazy on the piano and in the background you can hear my mother vacuum cleaning and singing arias (laughs) We also had this bird, a parakeet named Mozart who could whistle "River Of Kwai" and "Koenigen der Nacht" (Queen of the Night) from Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte"("The Magic Flute") (laughs), so as you can understand there was a lot of noise around the house. :-)
 

You didn't start off you career playing keyboards. So what made you
decide that your musical career would be based on keyboards?
 

I guess you are referring to my teenage years as a rock drummer, right?

My very first band was a rock band called Ryper and I was playing the drums and singing. I was also writing all the songs. We were rehearsing in a small basement in the house where I lived. The guitarist couldn't afford a guitar amp so he built one from an old transistor radio. You can imagine what that sounded like :-) I played with double bass drums and we played really loud. All the neighbours probably wanted to kill us. It was a very nice neighborhood though so no one ever complained. They were really good to us. There was even this nice old drunk who came down with his accordion and wanted to jam with us. I still don't know if he ever could play though because every time we would start playing we would look at him and he would have fallen asleep...(laughs)
We played a few gigs, without the accordion, recorded two demos and that was it. I did the last demo with them when I was 14. While recording drums in the studio I also played some keyboards and I met some older guys with whom I started to play. We played stuff like Europe songs and Yngwie's "I See the Light Tonight".

At this time I was still composing and expressing myself on the piano at home but since I didn't think that piano was a cool rock instrument I switched to drums. As a teenager it felt so much cooler to walk around twirling a pair of drum sticks, hitting things.

I was pretty serious with the drums though, I practiced a lot and I studied with a teacher for about three years. I even joined the drum corps at one point. But there was never any question about whether my main instrument was the piano or not. The piano has stuck with me ever since.
 

You've been playing professionally in cover and R&B bands since the
age of 15. I get the feeling your talent was easily spotted. What did
gigging professionally at such an early age teach you?
 

It really made all the difference. It's one thing to sit at home playing by yourself but it's a completely different thing to play in a band in front of an audience. It was inspiring to play with musicians who were between 25-30 years old and they played me music that I had never heard before. We played music from James Brown, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Robben Ford; people like that.

We had no charts so we all had to pick out the music by ear. It was a good experience. It was also good for me to have something to focus on after my father's death. When I was 16 we toured around Sweden and Denmark and played about 70 gigs in one year. I got to see all the pubs and clubs that normal 16 year olds weren't allowed to go to. That was a big part of growing up. We were drinking beer and the guys in the band took care of me like older brothers. It was a great time for me.
 

It's really interesting that your musical influences contain a number
of guitarists (Malmsteen, Holdsworth, Zappa). How did this come about
and is this still the case?
 

When I was about 11 years old I was really getting into hard rock and heavy metal. This was in the 80´s, so bands like Iron Maiden, Dio and Judas Priest really got me into the guitar. A few years later I heard Yngwie Malmsteen and that just changed everything. That was the first time I heard a real virtuoso in a metal context. All of a sudden I felt that what I was playing at home on the piano could actually work in a band, in a rock context.

I became inspired by Yngwie's early recordings. Alcatrazz, Rising Force, "Marching Out" and "Trilogy". Before that I had never really practised seriously on the piano. At the time I just improvised and picked out classical pieces and tunes that I liked. By the time I was 15 I had learned all of Yngwie's songs from those three LPs, and a lot of Yngwie's guitar solos on the keyboard. It really got me into practicing hard. That kind of instrumental music later led me to people like Allan Holdsworth and other guitarists. The following years I would just go crazy and play from the time that I woke up until I went to bed. I quit school when I was 16 so I had the time to do that, and during the weekends I played with bands and earned a little bit of money for myself.
 

I still listen to guitarists though, but not so much for the guitar, more for the music they play. The last CD I bought was actually Ted Greene's wonderful "Solo Guitar" from 1978. This LP was originally released on PMP Records and it took 27 years before this groundbreaking guitar release was reissued on CD. All thanks to art of life records www.artofliferecords.com. Ted is playing these old standard tunes that I grew up with but he is doing it with the most beautiful chords on a tuned down telecaster through a leslie cabinet. He sounds like two guitarists playing at once, beautiful stuff. Highly recommended!

Other guitarists I enjoy listening to is John McLaughlin. His latest orchestral piece "Thieves & Poets" is just wonderful and I bought Belo Horisonte and "Music Spoken Here" on CD the other day. Great stuff! I also enjoy listening to Joe Diorio who is doing some creative things with the guitar. I wonder what he's up to these days. The last thing I heard from Narayani, his wife, was that he was recovering from heart surgery, but that was a while ago. I hope he's OK and that he is still making music.
 

When you studied at the American Institute of Music in Vienna [AIM], you gravitated towards the Rock Guitar faculty (Milan Polak, Todd Duane and Rich Kern). Did you find the Guitar instructors to be more conductive to the direction you wanted to develop musically?
 

When I got to AIM I was just looking for musicians who were open to doing something different. People who were pushing music forward. It just happened that the guitarists you mentioned were the most inspiring and technically advanced musicians there.

I played with a lot of different people in school though. I also had a funk/fusion band called "The Groove" and we played a lot of gigs around Vienna. I became good friends with Milan and when I didn't have anywhere to live he had a spare room in his apartment. So I moved in there and we did a lot of jamming, played several hours a day. We also played together in a cover band called Freak Show with drummer Daniel Zimmermann who is now in the band Gamma Ray and Freedom Call. When Todd started teaching there he was doing some pretty wacked-out stuff. So I started collaborating with him. It was just really about trying to do some different things, push the boundaries. I never got the chance to meet Rich Kern though. I had already left when he got the job.
 

I heard that you often transcribed difficult guitar parts for your friends and that you have perfect pitch?
 

Where did you hear that? [laughs]

Well, I have transcribed a lot of music ever since I was a kid. I still transcribe things for my students everyday. I have a good ear but I can't say that I have perfect pitch, although a lot of people seem to think so. I have relative pitch in the sense that I can hear intervals and the relationship between the notes, chords etc., like most professional musicians can. Sometimes I can hear what key a tune is in but I can't really trust it 100 percent so I wouldn't say that I have perfect pitch. It's not something that I have practised either. Relative pitch is important though, so that you can play what you sing in your head.
 

How did the guitar students react when hearing an 18 year old keyboard player perfectly executing there beloved shred licks and did they try and get lessons from you?
 

Hopefully I inspired some of them to practice and dig deeper into their instruments, I can't remember.

One should not forget that some of the more scalar three note per string guitar lines are really not that hard to play on the keyboard, in any tempo. It's the wide intervallic lines and melodies that are technically difficult to play at faster tempos. On guitar it's almost impossible at certain tempos unless you have an outstanding technique like, for instance, Allan Holdsworth.

One should not forget that the guitar is still a relatively new instrument, especially the electric guitar. It is still under development and it's fun to hear how guitar playing has evolved over the years. There are still very few electric guitar players who have the technique of a concert violinist or a pianist or saxophone player. All the instruments I mentioned have a long history of a virtuoso repertoire. It is still very difficult to play totally clean and effortless in any tempo on guitar. Especially in patterns of four, since the instrument is more suited for three note per string patterns. Just an easy pattern like 1235, 2346 and so on. Up the major scale becomes really awkward to play. John McLaughlin is really outstanding at playing that sort of thing on the acoustic in difficult tempos.

The guitar has other strengths though, things that other instruments can be jealous about. Different timbres with distortion, bends, vibrato, double-stops, harmonics, dive-bombs, you name it. In the right hands the guitar is a very powerful and emotional tool.
 

Did the time away from home studying at AIM have much of an impact on you?

Yes definitely. It's a big change for a 17 year old to move to a different country and study in a different language.

It was also the first time I was away from home for so long. I spoke English for two years, I was even dreaming in English instead of Swedish. It's amazing how quickly the brain can transfer from one language to another. I am very grateful that my mother had enough trust in me to let me go like that at such a young age. Another great thing about studying in a foreign school is all the great people and musicians you get to meet. It would be fun to know what happened to all the students at AIM between 92-93, I'm sure a lot of them are working in the music business in their part of the world. I'm only in contact with the guys that I've been working with over the years. We have been friends for over ten years now. Time goes by quickly. I have so many great memories from AIM; it was a very special time in my life and a big part of my growing up.
 

In 1991 you contributed to the "The Cosmic Monstrositors" MVP project,
featuring Todd Duane, Dave Kilminster, Milan Polak and Mario Parga .
How do you reflect on this CD over a decade on?
 

I'm just really really surprised that anyone has even heard of this recording?? [laughs]

It's a home demo, a four track recording that was never released. Let me tell you how this came about.

When I first arrived at The American Institute Of Music in 1991 one of the first guys I started to talk to was a guitar player called Philippe Ansari (aka Phi Yaan Zek) who later became one of my best friends. We used to run around with a walkman making these silly interviews and weird recordings. It was a great way to document the time in school. He also had this four-track recorder. So one day we were fooling around with the drum machine, we recorded some backings and I played some improvised solos and that was it. Next thing I knew Phi had all these guitarists playing on there (laughs)!! French guitar student Regis Munerel did some backings too. When Phi was back in England he got Mario and Dave to play something, and I guess that Milan and Todd did their stuff in between the lessons in school. Phi probably ran into the room with the recorder, plugged them in, told them to play, said thanks and ran out again. :-)

To me it's a fun document in time. I was only 17-18 at the time and it brings back a lot of memories. It's like reading a diary or looking at old pictures. This demo was never official. It was just a funny thing for us involved, like a school year book. I would be very surprised if there's anyone out there who actually listens to it though. I guess it has become some sort of a collector's item.
 

Would you be interested in reprising your efforts now that most of the
participants are recognized players playing with international
artists?
 

I don't believe in reprise. The past is the past. We have all moved on,
plus the guys probably have better things to do :-)
 

After graduating from AIM, you have received much acclaim for your
incredible musicality, diversity and well... chops.

These factorsbrought you to the attention of Mark Varney and Dream Theater. What made you decline the offer from Dream Theater to join them, and
contribute a few songs [with Todd Duane] for Varney?
 

After my studies in Vienna in 1993 I moved back to Sweden. When I got back I started to practice and digest the material I had studied for two years. I was listening to Coltrane, Miles, Parker, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Holdsworth, that sort of thing. And I started to go heavily into studying more jazz oriented music. Around that time I also put together my first fusion band Ominox.

In 94 (or thereabouts) I received a call from Milan Polak who, as I remember it, was in contact with the manager of Dream Theater. He told me that DT were auditioning keyboard players since their keyboard player Kevin Moore was about to leave the band. Milan was very nice and put in a good word for me. Apparently they had heard a track I did with Todd Duane for Mark Varney's CD Guitar On The Edge. A tune called Schizoid which had a lot of guitar and keyboard unisons. I guess that I caught their attention. They were auditioning a lot of keyboard players all over the world at that time. Anyway, they were interested in hearing some more and they gave me Kevin Moore's home address to send them a tape, and that was it. But I never did. I really put a lot of thought into it and I asked myself if this was what I really wanted. I was so young as well, only 20 years old. I felt that I had so much more to learn and develop in jazz and classical music. Joining a band would mean being dedicated to that and focusing on their music. I just felt at the time that that would limit me as a musician in other areas of my playing. It's not true that they offered me to join the band or anything - they were just interested in an audition as I understood it. Anyway they obviously wouldn't want someone to just join the band to get some spotlight and then leave for a solo-career. That wouldn't be fair. They deserved someone who had the same passion and love for their music as they have. I think they found the perfect guy in Jordan. I have all the respect for what they are doing and they seem to be great guys as well as musicians. It's just not really my kind of music. Great band though! I wish them all the best.
By the way, I just heard that Jordan and Mike Portnoy really enjoy the Electrocution 250 CD. It's a small world. :-)

The thing with Varney was a completely different story. In 1992-93 myself and Todd Duane recorded some demos together. One of the tunes, Schizoid, ended up on Mark Varney's Guitar On the Edge CD, which was supposed to have been a taster from an upcoming Shrapnel release. But nothing ever happened with that. Instead Mark (Mike's brother) started calling me and told me that Todd really wanted to do a CD, but Varney was only interested if we were both on there. I guess he wanted to get me while I was still a teenager. If you are over 20 then you're too old to shred!! (laughs) He asked me how much I would charge for the recording and I think that I mentioned a really ridiculous amount of money (laughs)!!!! At the time I was so into jazz and I didn't really want to get associated too much with that Shrapnel/Varney guitar scene. I was very young and it was probably a very stupid choice because we had some good music going. Those old demos that we did were pretty groundbreaking from a guitar/keyboard perspective, but I just didn't understand that at the time. A lot of unison lines in odd groupings at ridiculous tempos, things I haven't heard anywhere else before or since. I just wasn't into that kind of thing at the time. It could have probably been a groundbreaking CD, but it never happened. It was hard to say no because at the same time I really didn't want to mess things up for Todd. But everything worked out for the best in the end. Todd got a solo deal with Shrapnel and ten years later we got to finally record a CD together, Electrocution 250, with Peter Wildoer on drums, and I arranged that deal so I guess that I made up for that lost CD (laughs)!
 

Were you offered a full blown deal with Varney?

I don't know the whole story about Mike's Shrapnel deal, you will have to ask Todd about that, but in 1994 I got an offer to release my own Ominox CD on Mark Varney's Legato Records.

Mark really wanted to work with me and he called me several times in Sweden. This time I really wanted to do this as well.
All the material was already recorded with my trio so all we needed was to find a guitar player for the project.

Mark gave me a lot of different names and played me a lot of guitarists from all over the world. We even had auditions where a guitarist would record a solo on a song to see how well they would suite the music. There was some good stuff for sure. I had some suggestions of some well known names but Mark really wanted to find someone new and exciting. I just wanted someone really good who would add something to the music. At one point Varney called and said that he just got off the phone with Frank Gambale. Mark had played him some of my stuff and Frank had said that he would do it. Then I didn't hear from Mark in a while and the next thing I hear is that Legato Records went bust. So unfortunately nothing happened with that either. I just wanted to get this recording done anyway, even though I didn't have a record deal. So in the end I had a couple of great Swedish guitar players play on there instead.
Ten years later Matt Williams decided to release these old Ominox recordings on Liquid Note Records. If it hadn't been for Matt this recording would be gathering dust in my closet or something. I had no plans of releasing it myself.
 

You released another eclectic work "Seven Deadly Pieces". Were you
fully happy with this recording?
 

I have to correct you on that one Si. ;-)

I have never released "Seven Deadly Pieces". We did a demo version called "The Seven Deadly Sins" a couple of years ago which later became the "Deadly Pieces" but that's it. Maybe that's what you are referring to. SDP is a live concert for chamber orchestra and thrash metal band. We are working on a live DVD that will be finished and released in 2005.

I started writing "The Seven Deadly Pieces" in 1996 and the idea was to write something over a theme. I chose the seven different emotions: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth, also known as the seven deadly sins. I decided to write a concert in seven movements with different instrumentations for the different "sins". When I started writing I wasn't sure what instruments to use but I knew that it wouldn't be a traditional setting. The piece evolved around piano and percussion at first but the more I composed the more things started to take form. In the end I ended up writing the whole piece for a chamber orchestra and thrash metal band.

In 1997 I did a recording of this piece which I paid for myself. Peter Wildoer and Christofer Malmström of Darkane played all the metal parts. The orchestral parts were recorded and overdubbed by local musicians from the different orchestras. Due to financial limitations I had to compromise and unfortunately leave out a lot of the arrangements that I had originally planned. The recording became a huge disappointment and I had invested a lot of money into something that I wouldn't want to release. But it was an OK pre-production of the music if I ever needed to present the idea for a concert arranger. For several years I worked on other things and "The Seven Deadly Pieces" was put on hold, and I didn't have the energy to go into all that again.

Five years later music producer Per Nyren got hold of the recording via guitarist Christofer Malmström and he became interested in the music. Per called me and asked if it would be possible to perform all this live. I said yes without knowing how much work it would be on my part. When Per Nyren and the Henry Dunker Culture Center asked me in 2002 if I wanted to premier and perform the piece in their concert hall I decided once and for all to rearrange and finish what I had started. I added certain things in the score and for instance utilized the string quartet a lot more. I ended up with over 200 pages of music and about 50 minutes of music.

I learned that putting together rehearsals for 14 people and making sure that everyone got their parts in the score is not an easy task. I think I ended up with 500 pages of copies that I had to send out to everyone. It was also a bit brave from my part to decide to play all the piano parts myself as well as conducting, organizing and making sure all the parts and tempos were OK. We only had one concert booked since it was too expensive to get this circus on the road. I also decided to record the whole thing and video the concert in four different camera angles. The idea was to do a DVD of the concert in the future. We only had one chance to get this right. The concert date got closer and closer and I didn't eat or sleep much during this time. I lost a lot of weight and I got a bad back ache. During an interview I couldn't even get out of the chair because my back hurt so much. In the end the concert went well and about 300 people showed up that evening. Never before had the Culture Centre seen such a mixed audience, young and old, classical and metal, cheering and giving us a standing ovation. The concert was recorded and videoed and is being edited for a DVD together with a documentary about me and my music made by Johan Larsson and Per Christoffersson.
 

I understand that you prepared a live DVD of the Seven Deadly Pieces.
Is this available yet?
 

The DVD will hopefully be finished and released sometime next year (2005). It is being edited as we speak. I'm very excited about this :-) The concert was filmed with four different cameras and it is cut like seven separate videos. There will be an audio commentary in both Swedish and English, a picture gallery, shots from the rehearsals and a booklet with texts accompanying every piece written by the French poet Nicolas Moulard. Apart from the actual concert, the DVD will also feature a documentary about me and my music. It will feature interviews with me, Matt Williams of Liquid Note Records, Rich Hallebeek, Bas Cornelissen, Peter Wildoer and a lot of other great musicians whom I have worked with. We have live clips from when I was 16 years old, and a lot of new clips from gigs in Europe. Marimba Flesheaters, Ominox etc. All this with English subtitles.

I feel that this is the deepest and most personal project that I have done so far. And I think that this music is the closest to me.

This piece, maybe more than any other I've written, shows my eclectic musical background. My early influences from classical music, European avant garde, heavy metal and jazz is very evident in this music.

The twelve tone influence from Schönberg and the polyrhythmic influence from Conlon Nancarrow and Zappa. The angular sound of Eric Dolphy and the dark melancholy of Gorecki. I also hear the influence of Miles Davis and the metal rhythms of Meshuggah and Darkane in the piece.
 

You released your first solo piano CD [State of Mind] in 2002. "State
of Mind" sounds like a very personal album. How do you approach
writing, and how does your change when you are working collaboratively.
 

Good question. When I write material for my own CD´s I just let the music flow out of me - no thought of any particular genre or style. That can come to me in many ways. Some music comes over a long period of time. I might have this melody that really expresses something but I might not really know what at the time. Then something happens in my life and the next time I sit down by the piano I continue that melody. Most of my own tunes on "State Of Mind", tunes like Time Will Tell and Clouds were all conceived improvising by the piano in a more or less fragile state of mind.
You know, when you come home in the middle of the night after a night out. You see this lonely apartment, you sit down by the grand and this is what comes out. Emotions are a powerful thing. Hopefully we artists can use it as therapeutic fuel for our art instead of letting it kill our spirit. The tune Clouds was actually improvised on the spot in the studio. I had recorded all these fast, difficult pieces and I was so tired and drained out so I just told the engineer to keep the tape rolling. I took a deep breath and I played Clouds from beginning to end. At first it wasn't supposed to be on the album, but after a few listens I changed my mind. Now a lot of people have told me that Clouds is their favorite tune on there. To me it's a very personal album.

Collaboration is a totally different thing. In my experience when you work together with someone else, what sometimes can stand in the way a little bit, is the style, the genre. If I'm collaborating with someone I really want to make sure that we have a strong concept, a unique sound together. I don't really believe that you can just throw together a bunch of great players and then expect the result to be expressive art. You can have fun, yes, but the actual result will not be lasting.You need a strong frame, an idea. A recording should work as a whole and therefore the overall concept and the sound is very important. Again I understand that sometimes it's about money and business from the record companies point of view. I see so many CDs, especially in the jazz/fusion genre where they put together the hottest musicians around and they trust that these worldclass players can throw together something interesting. There can be good chemistry for sure, but there should be a vision in there somewhere. It's such a big difference if you have one guy with a vision who hires all these great musicians to play his compositions, then the concept is there from the beginning. Then it's up to the leader to show and try to convey his vision to the musicians.

For instance, when I work and write for Electrocution 250 together with Todd Duane there are certain rules in all the chaos. I have to be in a certain frame of mind when I write for E-250 because the concept is so clear. The concept of schizofrenic parts, cartoon themes, faster tempos - basically positive entertainment in major keys! Three guys having fun over a case of Red Bull, that's what it's all about. (laughs) A serious heavy metal riff or a beautiful piano solo would just ruin the whole thing. The ideas has to stay true to the E-250 sound.

Same thing when I wrote a couple of tunes for the Richard Hallebeek Project.The compositions had to be very much in the electric jazz/fusion style to fit with the rest of the concept. So that's the biggest difference I think between writing in a specific genre or just writing from the top of my head. In the end it's all about just getting into the music and playing what you think is best for the song. I feel that I compose music on three different levels sometimes. Sometimes with my body, sometimes with my mind (intellect) and sometimes with my spirit. In a lot of virtuostic music it's easy to use a lot of body - just let the fingers be the creators. In more intellectual music you see symbols and your mind is working hard when you play or write. In spiritual music you let the intuitive side of you come out, you trust your own creativity to come up with something, more of a stream of consciousness type thing.
I try not to evaluate any of these three ways of making music - it can all be cool. But I believe in a combination of all three, when all three work in harmony that's when the good stuff comes out. All body and no spirit gets easily boring and if it's all intellect it's only interesting to listen to from a student's perspective. But if you combine all that with spirit then you will communicate on a much deeper and emotional level.
 

I loved your take on "Somewhere over the Rainbow". Does this tune have
any significance, or do you just dig it?
 

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. This is just one of those tunes that seems to have been around forever. I grew up hearing it and I like the melody. I don't really have any connection to "The Wizard Of Oz" but I like the idea of there being something beyond this world.

I am a die hard romantic so I guess that also means I'm a dreamer. You need to dream to keep your sanity in such a cold and unromantic world. I guess music is my place over the rainbow, my free zone when the madness gets too close.
I think that's what the song is about; that there's something better beyond this. I can relate to that.
 

You seem to have a wide and humorous variety of tastes in music for
instance you like the composer Carl Stalling, famous for the music
behind Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies. More recently you recorded
Electrocution 250 [E250] with Todd Duane and Peter Wildoer. Is this a
tribute to Carl?
 

Yeah, Electrocution [laughs] ! E-250 is a mixture of everything that is over the top and silly I guess. :-)

Sure, maybe I brought the influences of Carl Stalling and Conlon Nancarrow to the album, but most of all this CD was actually based on Todd's old demos from the early 90's. We more or less based the style around one tune called Finale which is just crazy. Todd's old demos have these really busy, tasteless drum machine programmings that are just insane. That is a big part of that sound and energy. Peter Wildoer tried to emulate that kind of over the top playing on the CD. I think he got pretty close (laughs). I think that Fletcher The Mouse got closest to Finale in intensity. Also if you listen to my tune Dr Fluffels, you can hear that the theme is very influenced by Finale with the ascending descending add 9 (add 2) arpeggios. Obviously my piano solo Looney Tune is influenced by Stalling and the old cartoons, and I hear elements of Nancarrow's intense player piano music in there also. E-250 is just a great forum to try every insane idea you can come up with. Some people like it and some people don't. I have played a lot of traditional swing music in the past and I had this idea of playing John Coltrane's Countdown but with a thrash metal drummer going insane on the double bass in the background, in Electrocution we had a great opportunity to try that and it ended up as the outro solo in Fletcher. To me E-250 is happy music, entertainment. Positive energy. If you think about it almost all the solos are in major keys. :-)
 

How long did it take you to get those crazy speed passages down on
E250 ? Were your solos improvised, or composed?
 

Oh man! (laughs) Recording with Electrocution takes a lot of patience, time and effort. I transcribed all the parts down to paper before I started to practice. Most of the keys and guitars were recorded in Todd's apartment in Minneapolis over a period of three weeks. In these three weeks we had to compose and learn how to play all the stuff for the CD.
Before I went to the States Todd sent me some rough ideas on CD for me to practice. He didn't really write anything down on paper for me so I had to pick out most of it by ear, in real time! For instance, the whole unison interlude in Ridiculosous was improvised on the guitar so he didn't remember what he played. So I was rewinding the tape back and forth concentrating on transcribing every note. A terrible amount of work. I should get myself one of those half speed programs, where you can listen back to it on half speed but with the same pitch.
When I arrived to Todd's apartment I asked him where the studio was and he said that we had to buy one and learn how to use it (laughs). The record label War Music, who originally were supposed to have released the album, paid us upfront so that Todd could buy his studio. The only problem was that the money didn't reach us because the Swedish bank messed up the transfer. And we felt like we were running out of time. A lot of stress for a difficult album like this. In the end we did manage to get the money and the studio and we could start the recording process.

Todd was teaching in a music store every day and he didn't have an extra key to his apartment so I was basically locked in his apartment every day practising. In the morning he would give me some of the guitar lines and then I would practise for five hours to a metronome at various speeds until I got it up to tempo. When he got back from work I would be ready to record. And that went on for three weeks; a lot of hard work and I was pretty burnt out from all the stress when I got back to Sweden.

Recording the solos were the easy part since I always improvise my solos. In Todd's music the improvisations are a bit different though. In jazz it's more about singing every note in your head when you play and trying to get rid of all the licks; the melody is always in focus. In E-250 my solos are not so much about melody but more about rhythm and contour. The improv is more lick-based I suppose. I might have a few ascending lines and a few descending lines that I play really quick. Those are the colours I'm using when I'm improvising. Inside of that concept I'm trying to hear contours and polyrhythms. I might come up with a strong intro-lick to a solo but the rest is really more of a stream of conciousness type thing. In this kind of music it's not enough to just play the solos fast and clean, you have to execute them with a certain type of energy as well. It's a nightmare!!! After this CD I only played ballads for a couple of months [laughs].
 

On E250 the keyboards are mixed up front and in your face [love that]!
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a bad mix? This seems to
follow keyboard players around.
 

No, I haven't really had that problem as a keyboard player. I think that I have been very fortunate over the years to have done CD's where I have been able to be a part of the mixing process. It also depends on what kind of music you're playing I guess. If I'm playing in a trio then finding the space for my instrument is not such a problem. In more guitar oriented rock music I don't really think that the keyboard should be that up front anyway, to tell you the truth.

Obviously it's more difficult to become satisfied with the end result if you are doing studio sessions via internet where you don't really know how your track will turn out in the final mix. That's what happened with the JAM recording. The rhythm keys are OK but some of my solos on there are just mixed a bit too low. The guitar is up there, and I'm down there. Well, there's not much to do about that now. A good mix should really just bring out the music so that the listener get the emotional impact and doesn't think about the sound. I hate to hear a CD and when the soloist appears you want to turn up the volume. It could really make all the difference for a solo. It is really difficult to mix though. You need to listen to the music through many different speakers. What sounds in your face and clear in one studio might sound different in another. It's not easy.

E250 was a shock for me. Having heard your demo tapes with Todd from
the AIM days, I was expecting something more like a modern version of
UK. Do you have plans to do a more straight ahead fusion thing with
Todd in the future?
 

I see Todd more as an experimental avant garde rock guitarist and not a jazz or a fusion player.

When I first heard his demos in the early nineties I was really blown away by his more experimental stuff.

A lot of creativity in there. The music was unique. With the drum programmings and everything it sounded like you listened to a tape on double speed but flipped backwards. Songs like Finale, Deja Blue and Slap Crackle & Pop. I had never heard music, or guitar playing, like that before. Such a unique sound and energy. It reflects his personality. He is very hyper and he talks really fast and is full of energy. When I listen to those early demos his personality really shines through. Now I hear all these experimental technical guitar players coming up and people are flipping out about it. People like Todd and Ron Thal did that sort of thing ten years ago though. In that style of playing I think that Todd is really underrated. He has influenced a lot of underground guitar players through his demos over the years. He just doesn't seem to get the credit he deserves among those guitarists. The strength in mine and Todd's collaboration is the mixture of influences. My own music is so different from Todd's. I mean State Of Mind and Seven Deadly Pieces are based around acoustic piano and the music is a lot more mellow. So I like the combination of Todd's out-of-control experimental rock guitar together with my piano/keyboard playing in this genre. I guess E-250 falls under the category "experimental/avant garde". Next year we will write and record the second E-250 album for LNR, and we promise that this will be a lot crazier and more out there than the first one. (laughs)
 

It's been a busy year; you've also contributed three songs to Richard
Hallebeek's first debut album. I particularly like Enigma, did you
write these songs specifically for Rich's fusion project?
 

Yeah, a lot of releases this year. I'm glad you like Enigma. I think it turned out well on the CD. No, most of the tunes for Rich's album were actually written years ago. After we did Seasons (from the double CD, The Alchemists) together Rich asked me if I wanted to contribute a couple of songs to his project album.
He told me that there would be a lot of different soloists on there, like Shawn and Brett, so the tunes had to have some space for solos. I looked through my map of songs that I had written over the years (I have about 50 tunes that are not recorded) and I found Free and Enigma that would suite the project. I just added a few solo rounds and that was it. The only tune that I actually wrote for this project was Good Food. I thought it might be cool to have a more arranged tune on there. Old style fusion with a lot of unison interludes and stuff. Mainly besause we didn't have anything like that on the CD. It just came to me over a couple of days. I wrote it down and mailed the charts to Holland. That was pretty much it.
 

At one point I didn't think it would get released, because of the
death of Shawn Lane. How difficult was it working with Rich and
playing tracks with Shawn Lane and Brett Garsed?
 

Yeah, the death of Shawn was really tragic. A terrible loss - he had so much more music to give to this world.

I never got to meet Shawn unfortunately because he did his solos at Rich's place after I had recorded the rhythm tracks.

Rich burned me a CD of an orchestral piece, inspired by film music, that Shawn was working on before he died. It was in the style of Powers Of Ten. Unfortunately he never finished it. Beautiful romantic music influenced by the European classical composers and people like Ennio Morricone.
Brett recorded his solos with a portable studio when he was on tour with John Farnham so I never got to meet him either.

I recorded all my tunes and Sebastiaan's tunes live in the studio together with Bas and Udo. We never played with any of the guitarists. Rich did all his melodies and solos at home, worked on the sounds etc. The trio had all the charts and we rehearsed a little in Sebastiaan's studio then we did a few takes. We recorded all the tunes in only a few days. The session went pretty easy and there was a good energy, so I can't really remember any difficulties.
 

You've also played on "JAM", another brilliant collaborative fusion
album featuring your old chum Milan Polak, plus Alessandro Benvenuti
and Joel Rivard. This album was more of an international recording
effort with tapes, demo's and charts bouncing back and forth across
the Atlantic. How did you find this method of working?
 

Yeah, I was asked to do the keys for a couple of tunes, mostly Milan's, and a couple of guest solos for this CD.

When you're working together with people from Italy, Austria and the USA it's difficult to get everyone together in a studio. And it would obviously be too expensive for a small label like LNR to pay all the expenses, trips etc. The only way to do an album like this was to do it with overdubs. I recorded all my keyboard parts here in Sweden. They sent me the charts and I recorded my stuff in only a few hours. It is what it is. The music has to be pretty static for it to work though since there will be no response in the rhythm section when you play, so you have to do your best to react to the backings. You have to listen to the drums etc, but it works if it's more arranged music. There can be problems though if the musicians are recording at different times to a click. The soloist might be feeling the tune as moving forward when he is playing to the drum machine. Then when the drummer lays down his track, without the solos, he might feel the groove behind the beat or more laid back. Later when you put it all together it will sound as if they are playing in two different tempos, or that someone is really rushing. Then again this technology of sending files back and forth has really opened up for a lot of opportunities, and it can work out quite well.
 

Your latest release is "Ominox", a compilation of the best material
from your early fusion band. When you reflect on these songs, what
comes to mind?
 

Well, Ominox brings back a lot of memories. I wrote most of the material over ten years ago so obviously it feels a bit old to me.

It's like looking at old pictures. But I do especially like the first demo we did in 1993. I was really excited about doing my own thing for the first time. Unfortunately some of the material from that session couldn't be used on the LNR release since there was a lot of drop outs and audio faults on those recordings. I will probably post them on my site anyway as mp3's for people to listen to. It has a certain warmth and charm.

That demo was recorded in a really small room onto an 8-track recorder and we played everything live as a trio and then the bassplayer Fredrik Möller added the guitar melodies afterwards. Somehow we managed to get this really vintage sound that I like. Like one of my friends said: - "it doesn't sound cold as some fusion music does, it sounds more like lemonade and cinnemon buns", (laughs). That's a good review I think. Unfortunately the quality of the Ominox CD is very varied. Some of the tunes, like "In Time" & "Yes", are actually taken from a cassette. The master tapes are lost so I asked my good friend and producer Andreas Ejnarsson if he could clean up a cassette recording. I think he did an amazing job, but obviously it doesn't sound like a great production. I'm just really happy that LNR wanted to release this stuff and that I managed to save some material from my old recordings. When I listen back to it today I can still smile and think that some of the compositions are not that bad for a 19 year old. Some of the later 1995 recordings I don't really care much about and there are better versions of those tunes that we couldn't use. There are some moments on there like Clockwork and parts of Android though, and I do think that some of those early recordings features some of my best electric solos caught on tape. We were so young when we recorded it and we paid for everything ourselves. We didn't really have any money so we had to record all the tunes in one or two days, and that was it. That was all we could afford. They're difficult tunes to play so obviously we could have done better if we had the time to do several takes, or fix the old ones. But I think that's the way to do it, live in the studio, as a band. I'm overwhelmed by the good reviews we got for this CD. I really didn't know what people would think, if it was good or not, but I think that people react to the strong melodies and the overall positive vibe.
 

It's written that Holdsworth developed his legato technique to emulate
his preferred instrument; the Sax. Do you occasionally feel like a
guitarist stuck in a Pianist's body or is there another instrument
that your draw influences from?
 

No, not really. I used to be really influenced by the guitar and when I played electric keys with a pitchbend I tried to emulate the bends and vibrato of the guitar, kinda like what Jan Hammer did. But no, I don't really think I play any guitar lines on the keyboard anymore. For a while I was heavily into saxophone players as well. I am a bit of a collector of CD's with Eric Dolphy, who played alto sax, bassclarinet and flute, and I have about 35 CD's with John Coltrane. If someone is a great musician it really doesn't matter what instrument they play, it's the music that counts. I'm influenced by everything I hear. There are so many great musicians and composers to get inspired by. I enjoy a lot of keyboard players, people like Keith Jarrett, Joey Defrancesco, Jan Johansson, classical players like Dinu Lipatti, Ivo Pogorelich... Katia Labeque with John Mclaughlin is just wonderful, the list goes on and on. Drummers, I love drummers, I'm heavily inspired by the drums. I see all the drum videos and I'm downloading clinics and stuff from the internet. And there's music from so many different cultures that I like. I also get inspired by art, films and books. I think that you can hear a lot of different influences in my playing if you listen carefully.

Guitarists often use other instruments to write on, do you play or
write on any other instruments?
 

I play the guitar a lot. I have this nice Epiphone Joe Pass model that I like. I also have an Ibanez and a nylon string acoustic. Sometimes when I improvise on the guitar I might come up with something but mostly I'm composing at the piano. When I compose more notated music I compose in Sibelius (a software note program) without an instrument.

You've been on a short European tour with the Swedish band Karmakanic
which features Jonas Reingold and Göran Edman. Can you tell us some
more about this project, and are their any plans for a record of this
project?
 

Yeah, Karmakanic is the project of bass player Jonas Reingold (Flower Kings). He has released two albums under that name with a lot of different musicians. Jonas is a very talented bassist and composer. He writes these very clever arrangements and great vocal melodies in a progressive rock concept. He is a jazz musician as well so he has a deep understanding of improvisation and his music is open for that kind of thing. The band is great too. I met the guitarist Krister Jonsson ten years ago when he did some solos for the Ominox recordings. A great guitarist, one of the finest Sweden has to offer. Over the years I kept bumping into the drummer Zoltan (Flower Kings) and we always talked about doing something but it never happened. Then Jonas called me about this tour and we finally got to play together. We had a lot of fun on the road. I was familiar with Göran Edman from his work with Yngwie and when I was a kid I used to sing along to Eclipse and Fire & Ice (laughs), so it was quite surreal the first time I was singing harmonies on stage with Göran. He has this particular way of phrasing which is really nice. Great guy as well. We were on the road for one week so I got to hear all the funny Yngwie stories (laughs). We worked very well together live so Jonas is planning to record a third Karmakanic album for this band. He is very busy with Flower Kings and his other side projects but he is working on it. There's also talk about some more Karmakanic gigs next year, 2005.

I see that your working with Sebastiaan Cornelissen and Gary Willis on
"The Timeline" CD. Can you give us some more details about this?
 

Yeah, this is a dream trio for me. It's great to be able to do an album with two of my favourite musicians on their instruments. I first got in touch with Bas when we were doing Seasons with Richard Hallebeek, then short after, I did a guest solo on his debut CD "Aggressive Attack". For a long time we talked about doing a trio CD together with some new electric jazz music.
We had some suggestions for bass players and Willis was our first choice. Bas got in touch with Gary and he played him some of our stuff. He liked what we did so he agreed to do the album. I wrote half of the tunes and Bas wrote half. I play Fender Rhodes, synth and grand piano on there. It has a great vintage sound, I'm really happy with the result. The production is great and Gary's and Bas's playing is really scary. Since it's a trio CD we all have a lot of space to stretch out over many chord changes. There are lots of great solos from everyone. Willis plays some pretty long and fantastic fretless solos on there. He added so much to our compositions with his powerful sound and grooves. Apart from his amazing drumming and composing, Sebastiaan also did a fantastic job mixing the CD. A man with many talents. Timeline is released by Munich Records and should also be available through some of the biggest internet stores in January.
 

Just to prove you are busy, you are working with bassist Frans
Vollink, Sebastiaan Cornelissen, Rob Van Bavel, Jeff Beal, Randy Brecker
and Richard Hallebeek again on another album. Is this a Jazz or rock fusion project?
 

I guess it's more of an electric jazz CD. I haven't heard all of it yet to tell you the truth, since I'm only playing on two tracks. The project is called One Spirit and it's been put together by drummer Sebastiaan Cornelissen and bassist Frans Vollink, who are also the two main composers. I did one tune live in the studio when I was over in Holland to do the Timeline session, and one here in Sweden. I'm only playing on two tracks on the CD, but there's some cool stuff happening on there for sure. Great guests like Jeff Beal and Randy Brecker. I think this album will appeal to a lot of jazz fans out there.
 

There seem to be a distinct number of keyboard genres around at this time for a guitar point of view. There's Richard Anderson, Vitali Kuprij and Mistheria holding up the neo-classical fusion guitar players. Then there is Derek Sherinian, Jordan Rudess and Jens Johansen backing up the rock fusion players. Do you think you see yourself being categorised in this way?
 

I think that as soon as you put something into a certain category you limit yourself to one thing. I don't like to categorize things. It's all music. I just see myself as a piano player and I'm trying to play and express myself the best I can.This year I just happened to be on a lot of guitar oriented CD's, playing electric keys, but I'm doing a lot of other stuff too.
 

Finally, What's next for Lale Larson?

In January I'm starting to prepare for a small tour of Holland with The Richard Hallebeek Project. The first two weeks of February we will play in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Emmen, Groningen & Haarlem. I will also do a clinic over there. You can check the dates on www.richardhallebeek.com.

In January I will launch my new website www.lalelarson.com and I will begin rehearsing for a recording that I'm doing with Marimba player Thomas Widlund. It will be a CD of all my pieces for percussion & piano. This is all notated music in a more contemporary classical style. Some of these pieces we have already rehearsed for years but we want them to be perfect on this recording. I will also continue cutting and editing the Seven Deadly Pieces DVD together with Johan Larsson & Per Christoffersson. It's a never ending project, but hopefully we can finish it next year.

2004 was a really busy year with a lot of studio work, so I will appear on a bunch of CD's in 2005. "Timeline" will be out on Munich Records in January. "One Spirit" will be released soon after. I am also playing on Sir Millard Mulch triple CD "How To Become The World's Greatest Salesman". The tracks I'm playing on feature Virgil Donati and Morgan Ågren on the drums. The CD also features Nick D'Virgilio (Tears For Fears, Mike Keneally Band), Dave Meros (Spock's Beard), Devin Townsend (Strapping Young Lad), Paul Mazurkiewicz (Cannibal Corpse), Mark Critchley (Itch) It's really a crazy album!

I'm also composing and arranging some romantic music for piano, string quintet and flute. The compositions are mostly done already. This will be for a future solo album under my own name. That's about it I think. Oh yeah, and there will probably be a gig or two with Karmakanic as well. Ah! And then we will of course start recording the second Electrocution 250 album, I almost forgot (Laughs) Phew....
 

www.lalelarson.com

Interview provided by essentialguitarist.com