Howdy!

Whoa. Try saying that three times fast.

Anyhoo, I just picked up his disc with John Zorn... A live concert played for Zorn's 50th birthday.

I must say, this stuff is very inspiring! I never thought I would be one for free improvisation... But the stuff Frith coaxes out of his guitar is pretty incredible. It sounds like he has a hell of a bunch of effects.

So anybody else dig this guy? If so, do you have any recommendations for artists that sound similar?

-Dave Nailling

Get as much stuff as you can by the british band he spearheaded called "Henry Cow." Obscure, progish, jazzish, fusiony-awesome.
Hell yeah I'm a Fred Firth fan. The Henry Cow stuff isn't always easy to find. A lot of it is imports, records that never made it to cd etc. But look. Well worth it.

Yeah, I've got a bunch of the Henry Cow stuff, too. They have a wild live album, and the LP's with the socks on them are great, too.

I especially love the stuff Firth did with Henry Kaiser (another really, out there, really inventive guitarist--check out his "Mistakes" album, with Mike Keneally, Andy West and Prairie Prince). They did some wild duet stuff.

For more "accessible" Firth(as in, still quirky but not totally "out"), check out the eponymous first album by the band "Firth French Kaiser Thompson." Firth plays bass (Kaiser and amazing electric folkie Richard Thompson play guitar). It's one of my all-time favorite CD's, but almost totally ignored. They did a second album too, but it didn't quite have the same magic for me.

Ditto on the Henry Cow stuff. A great solo album from the 80's is "Speechless" and also during that period he played on several tracks of the Bill Laswell fronted and produced band - Material. I'm pretty sure he plays on "One Down" and "Memory Serves". Memory Serves is just a great record overall.

i remember at one point he was putting alligator clips on the strings in diff. places. very strange dude with a skewed view of tones. cool indeed.

"memory serves" is a great record (frith AND sonny sharrock!)

i always wished that frith had been the guitarist in zorn's naked city, rather than bill frissell (even tho i do like BF).

Didn't Firth play bass on that album?

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Originally posted by mongoose_eyeball:
Yeah, I've got a bunch of the Henry Cow stuff, too. They have a wild live album, and the LP's with the socks on them are great, too.

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I listened to a lot of Henry Cow back in the day. They made me want to get a Bassoon player in my band. That live album was cool, including the living room type stage props. Fred Frith's leads, a lot of times, were like distorted chunks of tone clusters. And then his use of prepared guitar, with clips and prisms, was pretty inspirational to a young John Cage desciple, like myself.

My band Upsilon Acrux played Fred Frith and Chris Cutler at the La Knitting Factory like 2 years ago, that's 1/2 of Henry Cow..one of my all time favorite bands. Frith was pretty awesome at times but surprisingly gimmicky, dropping rice on a guitar is not that rad, but people who don't like improv thought it was amazing?!? He is an edgy old man, who got nice after we played but was quite stand-offish beforehand.