First appeared on Soundpage in Guitar Player magazine, November 1987.
Article by Joe Woodward. Photos in original article by Johnnie Miles.

The Experimental Artistry of David Torn

Some say that fusion guitar - the riff heard 'round the world 10 years ago - has outworn its usefulness in the evolution of jazz, that the genre is in its twilight phase. If so, David Torn is a twilight crusader. His bold, highly personal, and decidely weird style - displayed on his two solo ECM solo albums and on his recordings with the Everyman Band and saxophonist Jan Garbarek - place him in the pack of post-fusion thinkers bridging the seminal jazz-rockers to a bright future in expansive guitar concepts. Torn finds the resonant connection between ambient twilight serenades and the twilight zone of crunching solos, tilted sideways and at risk of derailing at any second.

Torn does combine a rockish edge with the tonal sensitivity of a jazz player, but is he a fusion guitarist as we've come to know one? David further complicated the question when he played one of his occasional solo concerts at McCabe's in Los Angles this spring. In his largely improvisational show, Torn's pet phrase, "option anxiety," rings true. Armed with his array of electronic regalia, he is a one-man band, setting up swirling delay loops while inventing and layering ideas on the spot.

Few have ventured into the realm of non-traditional solo guitar, and even fewer have succeeded, but Torn seems to have a real gift. "I go in mostly unprepared, and hope for the best - hoping that nobody, including myself, gets bored too easily," he says. "It's a hard thing to do, but everything is so constricted these days. As musicians, we tend to lock ourselves into formats - either a style, an idiom, or some kind of vague goal of sounding like something. That's often really narrow. I play in my living room. I never practice, but I try things. I have electronic stuff; I make loops. It's become one of my favourite things to do., playing-wise, in my house. I get really involved in it. I'm already in trouble [laughs], so why shouldn't I take a chance on ruining my reputation completely and go out there? I'm not going out like some of the free-jazz stuff in the '60s. Many people associate free jazz with musicians who go out and scream. I'm not going out to scream; I'm going to find what comes out of me musically."

For Torn, the "Living Room Theory" is not simply a handy metaphor. The living room - literal or figurative - is a valuable space where the real musician self can be scared up and taught to do tricks: "A musician friend told me in 1980, 'You know, you sound a lot like Allan Holdsworth. I never understand why people don't persue sounding like they do when they're playing at home in their living room.' That went in like little needles excising something. I thought, 'Yeah, I do sound like Holdsworth. I am copying that, and I have all this other stuff.'"

That other stuff - choice of notes, over-the-top angularity of phrasing, strange manipulation techniques, and effects-derived textures - is fast becoming one of the more distinctive styles on the modern guitar scene. It's at once furious and humorous, both embracing the guitar as a flexible tool and violating its very principles. Torn is a player who questions authority, especially when it comes to the baggage of guitar catch phrases and derivative stylistic attitudes. It's that soaring, diving, and crashing approach to the instrument that has set Torn apart.

"In truth," David admits, "I don't consider myself much of a guitar player anymore. Not to separate myself from the mass, but just because I've gotten so involved in music. I can make music on the guitar, but I think it's become a bit of a dinosaur, regardless of Eddie Van Halen and the wave-metal mania or tachnique mania from L.A. That'a not to say I don't appreciate guitar players. I know great guitar players who move me when I hear them, like Bill Frisell, who's also a bit weird, Henry Kaiser, who's very weird, and John Abercrombie. And I still listen to Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery."

Cloud About Mercery, Torn's latest solo album, is a potent set of pieces running from the atmospheric to the antic, the strength of which hinges on his celebrated quartet, which includes drummer Bill Bruford, bassist/Chapman Stick player Tony Levin, and keyboardist/trumpeter Mark Isham. Torn's initial concept of the project was to incorporate electronics to a high degree - using a versatile rhythm section - while encouraging the tight interplay of a jazz setting. He had originally planned a trio with Bruford and ex-Japan bassist Mick Karn, but Karn was injured in an auto accident on his way to the first rehearsal. Sohe sought Levin.

"I knew Tony because he was originally going to be on my first ECM solo album, Best Laid Plans," says Torn. "That didn't happen, but it set things up for it to happen on the second album. We got the trio thing going, but then it felt somewhat out of balance. There was too much heavy guitar and too much emphasis on me as a soloist. There wasn't any comping, really. I felt that I needed a warmer voice to balance the sound. My speaking voice on my instrument is quite strange and is even irritating to me at times. I know it's hard for other people to listen to sometimes; it's the same for me. That's why I needed a warmer, softer voice."

The natural choice proved to be Isham, whose lyrical, modern approach and taste for elastic structures made him a good foil for Torn. "Even if Mark plays hard and wild, he plays with incredible warmth," says David. "That is prevalent in his sound, even if he's playing through three Harmonizers and he's looping. That loop is there for balance, I guess it's an amazing fortuitous set of circumstances that would allow such a weird group to come together."

After the album was finished , the guitarist took the show on the road to Europe. Because Levin had other committments, Karn returned to handle bass chores. "We didn't get much of a chance to work on the music, but I think it's the happiest I've ever been playing," Torn says. "I was just having fun, not being too much Mr. Artworld. The pretension of art was still there, but I also was able to just have fun doing it. I used to play rock and roll like a crazy person, and I know a lot of things I do seem kind of over-serious and maybe a little sour."

Considering ECM's reputation as a jazz label with a leaning towards introspective music, Torn's record jumps out from the catalog with its often post-art, rock-like ideas. "I think it took [ECM head] Manfred Eicher by surprise, but maybe not," David speculates. "He knew that I really wanted to kick a little bit harder. In fact, I still want to play a little harder. Maybe the next project will be a bit different. I have a good feeling for the European side of jazz, but I'm an American. I came up with the blues and rocking. There's room for that at ECM. People in the United States have an incomplete view of the label. There are a lot of records on ECM that haven't seen the light of day here yet that are really different from their image. I really love blues, rhythm and blues, most rock music, and music from other parts of the world, and I wanted to get that feeling of droneness happening, regardless of what I was doing."

The album's first tune, "Sayafhy Skins - Snapping the Hollow Reed," radiates outward from an odd-metered ostinato, building toa frenzy under Torn's legato guitar weepings. "That's the most structured tune on the album," he says. "I was going to call it 'When Bamboo Breaks Inside My Head', but everybody decided it was too psychedelic and '60s [laughs]. There were five or six little signposts and then, 'Okay, let's go from here to there somehow.' And as it goes with improvisers, nobody said, 'Well, what do I do?' These are great, important players, totally solid and creative people. So you give them all this space, and they just go. It takes a lot of taste. A group like, say, Oregon has played together for so long that they've developed what they're doing, and they know what their spaces are."

"3 Minutes of Pure Entertainment" is one of the more openly raucous tunes, featuring a guitar solo with a swollen tone. "There's a lot of weird effects on it, and then there's also a backwards reverb in the center section. I let the tape roll through the Lexicon 200 onto its own tracks backwards. I kept changing the pre-delay, pre-echos and length of the reverb tails while listening to it backwards. It was really fun. One of my small goals in life was to have backwards reverb on an ECM record, and now I've done it."

Born in Amityville, New York, in 1953, Torn didn't enjoy an auspicious musical beginning. "I started to play piano, but couldn't really pay attention to it," he recalls. "When I was 11 or 12, my mom saved up some S&H Green Stamps and got me an acoustic guitar for my birthday. I went completely nuts. Folks being what they are, they had me take flamenco lessons, which was really intense. They liked the idea of structured learning on an instrument, but I think flamenco is one of the most intense disciplines in music. It was too much."

His parents got wise and sent Torn to a friend who taught jazz guitar. The budding musician, however, was beginning to heed the call of adolesence and, by extension, the electric guitar and rock music. The seed of jazz, though, was planted. "My mother would play a lot of cocktail-type jazz - Andre Previn arrangements of Duke Ellington or Gershwin music. She was really into show music, so I had a lot of that stuff in my head. This was around the beginning of the massive rock outbreak, when it started to become really popular and big business. I went out and bought some records - not knowing what they were at all. I got the first Led Zeppelin [Led Zeppelin, Atlantic, 8216], After Bathing at Baxter's [by Jefferson Airplane, RCA, LSO 1511], Axis: Bold As Love [Jimi Hendrix, Reprise, RS 6261], Strange Days [Doors, Electra, 74014], and Wes Montgomery's A Day In The Life [A&M, 3001] - all in one day."

Those records led him to others, in particular more works by Montgomery, which in turn led further into jazz and blues. Early heroes included organist Jimmy Smith and guitarists Shuggie Otis, Michael Bloomfield, and Johnny Winter. "That time was strange, musically, because things were miving fast," says Torn. "There was all this new stuff, and once your interest was piqued, there was all this other stuff. Music seemed immensely important at the time to the culture in general. It's more of an entertainment industry now. People are more interested in [U2 vocalist] Bono's home life or his lyrics, and not so much the music."

Jimi Hendrix had a large impact on Torn's fomative years - as a sonic force, and avowed eclectic, and a traveler of musical outer limits. "Jeff Beck was the other guy for me at that time," David recalls. "He had a lot of restraint, taste, and control, whereas Hendrix really let it go. He let it out, and it got unchained, which looked like it was to his detriment. Letting it out and not controlling it like that extends something in you personality out into the world that makes the sensitive person extremely vunerable on an emotional level. It's a cliche, right? 'This guy's out there baring his soul every night,' but how many musicians really bare their souls when they play? I really think Jimi did. You could sense that he'd be out on some emotional limb somewhere and that his soul was just directed through the haze."

After Torn played in an assortment of rock and fusion contexts in the '70s, his ambitions drove him into action. "I got real frustrated at the end of the '70s," he says. "I really wanted to be in a rock band. For example, at the time Adrian Belew left the Talking Heads, David Byrne was my neighbor eight houses down the street. I was constantly dropping letters, saying 'I'm available. I'm a little agressive, but I'm available.' It's kind of obnoxious to be sending people tapes of yourself; it's like blowing your own horn. But I was really frustrated. I was about to be pegged as either an avant-garde guy or a jazz guy. And I was also extremely out of work in that period."

But Torn was determined - for sanity's sake - not to persue menial musical work only for the money: "I made a choice. When my first child was born, after playing a couple of gigs that I really hated, I made a decision that I would rather have a day job and love music that to play music that made me hate music. I took a day job that allowed me to still think about music and enjoy it."

His first big break came about circuitously: Torn was hired into the Everyman Band - a New York group that had backed up Lou Reed - filling in for an absentee synth player on a tour of Europe with trumpeter Don Cherry. It was a significant 10 weels for all, and Torn especially. Carry on as an integrated unit, the band attracted ECM's attention in '81 and has since released two LPs. Where the first record, Everyman Band, has a jittery energy, the second, Without Warning, defines the groups esthetic - progressive and etheral - with a more bracing clarity and confidence.

For Cloud About Mercury, Torn knew the importance of letting the players work their own way into the material, placing as few restrictions as possible and establishing a creative empathy. This attitude hasn't always been so prevalent in this other band. "Everyman Band is strange because it functions, to a large degree, on conflict," he states. "I have learned so much about my own playing in that band. I didn't really start to learn where I was going at all until I played with Don [Cherry] and those guys. I don't think I would have found my way towards a voice without them. That was a pretty distinct turning point in my direction. Before that, I was looking at techniques. I was thinking of something, but I didn't know what, so I would work on things. That was a time when, sort of as an angry reaction, I would do things just because it wasn't expected. Of course, now all that stuff has become part of my vocabulary that does not relate to that initial feeling of agression. Now it's just part of my vocabulary - those high-note things, the whammy-bar technique where you bend the chords like crazy."

Torn often summons up searing harmonic notes in the midst of a heated solo. he specializes in imposed harmonics stopped by the right-hand index finger and those phantom, hard-to-get tones between the nut and the 4th fret. "I love being able to pick up the natural series of harmonics off a note or a string," David explains. "I leearned where all the harmonics are from the 4th fret down to between the 2nd and 1st. They're really high, but they're extensions of the natural series." He pick out some low-end harmonics on his Steinberger guitar, but without an amp the result in almost inaudible. "That requires distortion - a sequre wave," he explains. "It also requires using the bridge pickup and hitting the string really hard right up against the bridge, or else there's not enough tension in the string to get the harmonics really singing. There was a time when I was really looking for techniques. A lot of it had to do with being a technology freak and not having the bread to buy the gear. I decided to find some stuff on my own."

One of the aspects he dealt with early in his development was a right-handed tapping, that rage of the '80s guitar. Torn recalls talking to a well-known heavy metal tapper at a trade show and feeling his years. "He started on a crusade to me about different things you can do tapping with your right hand. It was a real humorous situation because I was standing there taking in everything he said and looking back at 15 years of tapping techniques on my own. I felt like an oldster, you know?"

It's not that Torn claims authorship of the two-hand technique. He reveals, "I stole it from Harvey Mandel, who had a great record called Shangrenade [Janus, 3047] around 1973. Henreix did some of that, too - a bunch of things with his right hand."

Along with his other deviations from guitar orthodoxy, Torn migh well be called the Twang Bar Prince. He uses the whammy bar in its most subversive form - rendering tonality loose and floating on what is essentially a fixed-tuning instrument. Torn never leaves home without it: "I can't play without it. I just don't sound like me. I sound like a guitar player. That's why I hesitate about the acoustic guitar. In fact, when I play the acoustic, I generally tune the guitar down one-and-a-half or two steps at least, to where the first and sixth strings are down to Db or C. I need to be able to move pitch around, because I can't play in tune," he laughs. He recalls a time in the studio when, expressing concern over his intonation on a part, Manfred Eicher noted, "You are not known for your tuning, David." By Torn's code, it was a left-handed compliment. "It can be so out of control and yet just barely out of control," he continues. "I miss that from rock these days. That's why someone like Adrian Belew is so interesting to me; he's in control but barely. He'll just let it fly."

The bar has become particularly indispensible since he encountered - and consulted on the design of - the Steinberger Transtrem system, in which all strings can be modulated at an even rate: the equivalent of a synthesiser pitch wheel. "I'm not really interested in playing a lot of instrument where the pitch is so fixed and hard. The Steinberger bar was a major breakthrough for me. Previous to that, I had worked out the ability to bend more than one note at the same time on different guitars and knew what the relation was going to be."

But Torn's intrigue with guitars of floating pitch extends further than just the twang bar. "Pedal steel was my second instrument for five or six years. Solo, I play lap steel. I just scooped some $80.00 job that that's beautiful. Mark [Isham] talks a lot about systems; I've given myself a system with the lap steel - a tuning. It's set up E B F# B C D [low to high]. If you look at it from the B, which is what I do these days, it's a really beautiful minor 9th chord. Right now, I'm leaving it that way because I still don't understand it at all, and that's okay. It gives me a limit of things I know it will do."

As handy as Torn is at wreaking a certain anarchic beauty from his instrument or at building ambient clouds of sound, he confesses a weakness in the rhythmic dimension. "I'm not terrible at playing rhythmic things, but I'm not real good at it. It's not one of my string points to be a normal rhythmic guitar player. Because of the influence of Holdsworth and Abercrombie, I fell into the school that has a lot of left-hand stuff and not that much right-hand stuff."

Ever the seeker of new guitar wisdom, Torn sought out Abercrombie for a few sparodic lessons, which helped him ground his own musical concept. "He kicked in a lot of ideas for things to work on," David recalls. "Basically, he taught me about the modes, which I didn't really know. [Ed. Note: See Abercrombie's Modal Management, page 24.] From that I derived a way to approach the neck in which I'm usually not lost," he laughs. "I know the modes, I know the key centres, and my left hand doesn't get lost. I may play wrong notes, but it's not from blindly searching - like when I was a kid and didn't know if I was in the right key. It really helped a lot on the most basic level that a guitar player needs, to slay the difference between you and your instrument, because you have to do that."

Concerned wit the flow of timbral ideas, as well as the melodic horizontal roadmap, Torn constructs solos via various methods - from playing with sounds to more traditional linear development. "Sometimes I'll just go in blind and see what strikes me at the moment," he explains. "Loop this, process it like this, hit some feedback - sometimes things just go by themselves. A note starts feeding back, and it triggers things to do with it, like making it go up or down. Sometimes I give myself little systems, like the solo in 'Sayafu Skin." I knew pretty much where I wanted to go with it, but I went in pretty raw and blank."

Along with Bill Frisell, Steve Tibbetts, and Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, Torn is one of the youngblood guitarists who have marked ECM's shift in the '80s, eroding the label's stigma - however justified - as a haven for cavernously recorded, moody chamber jazz. "ECM has the wave of weirdo guitar players, or at least a large piece of it, and they want to make a stink about it," says David. "Frisell predated me. He's a lot more flexible than I am, so he was able to do more projects. I think he probably appeals to Manfred more than I do, purely on a musical scale."

Torn understates his own case: "At this point I feel incredibly fortunate to be working at all, considering the way I play and what's been driven into my brain about how I'm strange. On a personal level, I'm concerned that it continues. There has been a picture of me painte as a young guitarist. I'm not young. I've been playing for 20 years. Maybe I didn't step out as a guitarist until I was near 30, but I want to spend my life doing this. I can see myself getting better and more focused as time goes on."

In Torn's framework, artistic upward mobility is possible only by the creative combustion of a healthy curiosity. Anthing but a smug virtuoso, Torn is more the terminal upstart with something urgent to say and a desire to absorb whatever he can in the musical universe, on his own terms. He's out to wage a small revolution from his living room and his continued growth seems assured when he says, "There doesn't seem to be an end to my wanting to expand my personal vocabularly."


Printed in Guitar Player, November 1987.
Sourced and supplied by Scott Hansen, May 2003.
Transcribed by John McCullagh, August 2003.