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 SCOTT HENDERSON - THE INTERVIEW H2YOU: Scott, I love your Guitar playing. It seems very intense & diverse between Blues, Rock, Jazz, how would you describe your sound? Scott Henderson: It's a combination of all those styles, I started off playing blues rock and then got into heavier rock like Hendrix & Zeppelin, and then later fusion started and I started learning jazz and that vocabulary. I also love country guitar, but don't think I have enough country vocabulary to do a whole album of country music, although I really like it. You know, (he laughs) you can only learn so many things. One thing that I'm really happy about is that I've had a choice in my career to either be commercial or not, and I chose not. It's more fun to do a variety of things than to be pigeon-holed as one type of musician, and to get stuck in that one type of music. I love jazz, but I would definitely miss the power of rock 'n roll, and I love rock 'n roll, but I love harmony so much that I would miss playing changes and doing that sort of thing. The blues is something that has been with me since I started playing guitar. The blues are my roots, and listening to blues guitarists is how I learned to play. H2YOU: How do you go about writing your songs? Alone? With the group? Improvising / jamming? Scott Henderson: I write by myself. When I first started composing I wrote a lot of very arranged music because when I was younger that's what appealed to me when I first learned Jazz, and I was trying to be a great composer. I did that for 4 years or so until I finally started touring, It took having a number of records out there before we were able to tour, and what I found out was the more notes you write, the less fun it is! You might as well be playing in a Top 40 band, and if you’re playing the same notes every night it's not really jazz. So we started writing less, and less, and finally we learned how to have a good combination of composition and improv, so that there's enough composition for people recognize the tune, but enough freedom for us to have fun from night to night. It's all about balance. For the trio things are a little more composed than for the 4 piece group TRIBAL TECH, because as a guitar player, I just don't have the ability to come up with different harmony every night within the context of some of the tunes. But we still like to keep it open, as open as possible, and there's still a lot of improvising going on between the three of us, enough to make it different every night. If I write a tune that's too composed, it usually gets dropped from the song list pretty fast. We might play it for one tour and then dump it, and it never comes back. H2YOU: How did you like playing with Chick Corea's band and on the CD "Elektric Band"? Did it change your direction at that time? Scott Henderson: No, actually I didn't really enjoy that gig too much. It was a very controlled environment, and that's not what I like. I like things to be way looser. Chick was into that tight kind of music where everyone's playing their parts and it's more like classical music than jazz. Actually during that time he was writing tunes that were pretty commercial so in a way it was more like pop. I'm into music that's more organic - music that just sort of happens as a result of good musicians playing together, more than one composer dealing out notes to his band. H2YOU: What CD that you've done is most representative of how you'd like to be known? Scott Henderson: That's going to be the most recent one, (he laughs) because you know, I'm a work-in-progress as are most musicians. So, that would be "WELL TO THE BONE", that's the newest of my studio records. H2YOU: Scott, you did two albums with "Vital Tech Tones", a trio collaboration with bassist Victor Wooten and ex - JOURNEY member, Steve Smith on drums. These recordings were a departure from your group TRIBAL TECH lineup. Why did you do these in 1998 and again in 2000? Scott Henderson: Those records were put together by the label TONE CENTER. Steve Smith was talking to Mike Varney, the head of that label, and Varney asked Smith to pick a guitarist and bassist to do a project with. So they called me and Victor up and said we want you to do this record, but there's no music for it yet. So that was the hard part - we needed to compose in the studio and come up with the record in 9 days. I'd never done that before. I'm not really happy with the writing if I compare it to the writing on my records, but given the time we had to come up with it! (he laughs) H2YOU: Was this a venture that you needed to take as a departure from what you had been doing? Scott Henderson: I thought it would be cool to play with those guys, 'cause I really like Victor and Steve's playing. I knew it would be fun, but I knew it would also be really challenging since we had no music. That was the hard part just coming up with the tunes. Basically what we did was write for a couple of hours, then rehearse for a couple hours and then record. H2YOU: What's behind the name of those CD's, VITAL TECH TONES. Scott Henderson: VITAL is from VITAL INFORMATION, that's Steve's Band. TECH if from TRIBAL TECH, my band and TONES from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, which is the band that Victor plays with. H2YOU: How did your band TRIBAL TECH come about, the name and the group? Scott Henderson: TRIBAL TECH is the band that me and bassist Gary Willis started back in the 80's. There was a lot of percussion in the band, so that was the tribal part of it. The tech was because we were using synthesizers and stuff, so it was kinda of like old stuff mixed with new. That band really, really evolved. We started off as a composition band, but by touring we realized we wanted things to be more open, so the songs got looser and looser, until by the later records we were just jamming in the studio. Then we'd overdub over the jams, composing as we overdubbed. It was another new way to make music that I'd never done before, because usually when you're overdubbing, you're re-recording pre-written parts. Now when we were overdubbing, we were actually composing, so it was really fun. I think the band would have continued, but Willis moved to Spain. "Rocket Science" (in 2000) was the last album we did together. We don't want to do the kind of record where we have to send files back and forth using FedEx or e-mail, so if Willis comes back for any length of time I'm sure we'll do another record. H2YOU: Is your core band John Humphrey on Bass, and Kirk Covington on Drums & Vocals? Scott Henderson: Yes, and I also play in the Scott Kinsey group. Scott Kinsey was the keyboard player for TRIBAL TECH. Scott has a new record that's coming out in October. H2YOU: Who are your biggest Musical influences & inspirations? Scott Henderson: In the beginning it was Jimmy Page, cause his solo on Whole Lotta Love inspired me to learn guitar, and then later I heard Richie Blackmore with DEEP PURPLE, JEFF BECK and HENDRIX. I listened to a lot of the white guitarists of the 60's, and learned that they didn't invent that kind of music, that older black musicians I'd never heard of did. I started listening a lot to Albert King, who in my opinion is the best blues guitarist ever. He and Albert Collins were both pretty big influences on me when I was learning to play. I played mostly blues rock until college, then I started getting influenced by bands like TOWER OF POWER. I listened to groups like WEATHER REPORT, CHICK COREA, MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA, and learned that the roots of that music were back with Miles Davis and John Coltrane. I found myself getting really involved in bebop for a long time, just listening and transcribing from those artists. H2YOU: When I listened to you I kept hearing a Modern, Rocking, but Jazzy Hendrix with all his passion... Scott Henderson: Well, if someone said Scott Henderson plays like Hendrix playing though changes, I would be very flattered because he's one of my big heroes. I hope to have some of the passion and soul of Hendrix because I think that he was one of the very best rock guitarists that ever lived. And he was also very influenced by Albert King, and you can hear so much Albert King in Jimi Hendrix's playing. That's the guy that I probably looked up to the most as a kid and still do. I was once called a Modern Blues player by Joe Zawinul, and if I had to pigeon hole what I do, I'd be pretty comfortable with that. You are what you listen to. If you listen to a great variety of musicians like I have, then your palette is going to be wider, and you're going to be doing different styles when you play your own music. I'm just a guy that likes variety. I can safely say that I may be a "Jack of all trades and master of none" but that's Ok with me! (he laughs). I'm sure if I didn't play Rock, or Blues and really studied Jazz, I'm sure I would be a better Jazz guitar player than I am, but it doesn't matter to me. That's not as important to me as being able to do what I love, and what I love is playing a variety of different styles. footnote: In addition, Scott Henderson currently teaches at the Guitar Institute of Technology, which is part of the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, California. for Hollywood2You.TV -- John Reed Scott Henderson Artist site: http://www.scotthenderson.net/ Scott Henderson BOOK & VIDEOS:  Hollywood2You.TV 525 South Francisca Ave. Redondo Beach, CA 90277 (310) 316-4551 Contact@Hollywood2You.TV |
 LIVE  WELL TO THE BONE  TORE DOWN HOUSE  DOG PARTY  ROCKET SCIENCE  THICK  REALITY CHECK  PRIMAL TRACKS  FACE FIRST  ILLICIT  TRIBAL TECH  NOMAD  Dr. Hee  SPEARS  VVT 2  VVT 1 ___________ |
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