
Connors often works in sweeping, lulling, minimalist waves of sound, but he also attacked the strings, as he is here in this 2017 photo from Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.
Laboring under the radar for 40 years and afflicted by Parkinson's, the improvising guitarist is riding a wave of new and reissue recordings that may finally bring his blues-, jazz-, and Rothko-inspired music to more listeners.
"Working with Loren is, in some ways, not really 'working with Loren.' It's more like you're entering a space that you both occupy—not a place for conversation or exchanging pleasantries," says experimental musician Jim O'Rourke, describing his longtime musical relationship with guitarist Loren Connors. "More so than anyone I have worked with, it is a place with its own logic, its own sense of time, and no road map." Anyone who has witnessed one of Connors' performances can understand what O'Rourke, who has partnered with Connors in duos and as an engineer, is talking about.
Oblique conversation about Connors' music is common because it's so hard to pin down. There are no real genres to refer to, no easy comparisons to be made, and those references that do exist only tell a small part of the story. Connors takes the raw elemental sounds of the guitar, from the most basic fundamentals of technique and harmony, and assembles them as no other player ever has to create his own world of sound.
This challenging approach has led Connors to spend his long and uncompromising career as an unsung, underground hero. Since the late 1970s, he has amassed an extensive discography of releases spread across mostly small boutique labels, though he's had occasional albums on bigger indies such as Drag City and Secretly Canadian. Connors prefers to perform solo, and his discography reflects that, but he's also a frequent collaborator—mostly in duos—with a long list of co-conspirators that includes Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino, and Bill Orcutt.
Connors always has a queue of projects in the works and, despite the pandemic, remains as prolific as ever. His current list of recently or soon-to-be released albums includes collaborations with Kim Gordon, Alan Licht, and Oren Ambarchi. Meanwhile, Feeding Tube Records has begun reissuing a nine-volume series of some of Connors' earliest and rarest releases.
"With Loren it's more that he opened up the feeling of blues guitar to a greater complexity."—Alan Licht
This bounty means there's never been a better time to be a fan of Loren Connors. Each of the new albums is a unique contribution to his body of work. And while the reissues offer an obviously insightful glimpse of his early beginnings as a rootsy and forward-thinking solo improvisor, his duo records are equally essential. Licht is one of Connors' longest-running collaborators, and on At the Top of the Stairs it can be hard to parse each musician's playing. Their guitars so well-acquainted that they seem to intersect into one slow and psychedelic sound source. Leone, meanwhile, offers a look at a first meeting between Ambarchi and Connors, where Ambarchi's computer-effected sounds are a contrast to Connors' more organic reverb and wah-soaked tone. Together, these two albums reveal Connors' focus and flexibility as a player in far-reaching musical situations.
Blues, Miles Davis, and Mark Rothko
While it may be easy to tie his music to the avant-garde, at his core Connors is a blues guitarist. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1949, he began playing as a teenager. "I was about 15 or so. Everyone played guitar back then," Connors explains. His early influences were Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Connors dug deeper and discovered country blues, claiming Robert Johnson as one of his main influences. "All the Mississippi Delta bluesmen from the 1920s and '30s had a big effect on me—Son House and Johnson, even Skip James."
In 1970, Connors found an inspiration that would resonate through his music for the entirety of his career, when an artist friend took him to a museum to see the work of abstract painter Mark Rothko. "It took off from there," he says. "Right away, I felt a similarity between his paintings and my improvisations on guitar."
Around the same time, Connors was listening to Miles Davis' electric music, and the guitarist found another deep inspiration in the minimal psychedelia of "He Loved Him Madly," the opening track to Davis' 1974 Get Up With It. "Miles' two solos on that, they only last for a couple minutes apiece, but they affect me a whole lot," Connors says.
While he surely pulls inspiration from other places, it seems as though these three ingredients—Delta blues, Rothko, and "He Loved Him Madly"—lie at the source of Connors' sound, allowing him to explore the guitar with a unique personal perspective. Avant guitarist Alan Licht has played with Connors in duos and other assemblages for nearly three decades and explains the importance of Connor's sonic amalgam: "He really does for blues guitar what Derek Bailey did for jazz guitar, in a way. Derek opened it up harmonically, but with Loren it's more that he opened up the feeling of blues guitar to a greater complexity, even if it remained mostly tonal and relatively simple harmonically."
In this 2001 concert at New York City's Tonic, Loren Conners improvises with trumpeter/composer Rob Mazurak and drummer Chad Taylor. Conners often uses his thumb to attack the strings.
Photo by Peter Gannushkin
Approaching Blues As Art
The first volume of Feeding Tube's series of Connors reissues, 1979's Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 1, shows early evidence that he was already forging unique ground at this early stage of his career. Writer and longtime Connors supporter Byron Coley coordinated the reissue series, and interprets Connors' early music as approaching the blues from a new direction: "Loren's sound on these records feels to be based in blues tonalities, but is bent way out of shape and approached as art music rather than folk music, as blues is usually approached. He was definitely following his painterly inclinations, trying to pare down the elements he used to create something with a surface that initially appears to be opaque, but becomes more deeply emotional the more you hear it."
Connors, meanwhile, plays down any notion of heady artistic concepts in his early work. "I couldn't't read music. I kind of improvised everything," he says. "Very free and open, I didn't't think about it that much."
"The Daggett LPs put him in the company of artists like John Fahey, Harry Partch, Sun Ra, Eugene Chadbourne, and other avant-gardists who realized their music would only be documented if they did it themselves."—Byron Coley
While his music has many enthusiastic supporters nowadays, it wasn't always the case. "I was kind of on my own back then," he says. The nine volumes that make up the reissue series were originally pressed in extremely small numbers that Connors self-released on his Daggett label, to no avail. "They didn't't sell good at all. I gave 'em all away. I gave them to radio stations and DJs. I sold very few. Maybe like 10 or so. I threw a bunch of them in the dumpster, maybe 50 or 100 even, in the big boxes they came in."
Coley offers this insight: "The fact he scraped his own money together to put out that series of LPs, despite his financial straits and the knowledge he was working in an area of sound creation that had very little audience, is testament to the strength of his creative drive. The Daggett LPs put him in the company of artists like John Fahey, Harry Partch, Sun Ra, Eugene Chadbourne, and other avant-gardists who realized their music would only be documented if they did it themselves."
Loren Conners' Gear
Guitars
• Squier Mini Stratocaster
Amps
• Various Fenders and Voxes
Effects
• Boss AW-2 Auto Wah
• Boss RV-3 Digital Reverb/Delay
• Dunlop Cry Baby Wah
Strings
• Ernie Ball light-gauge sets
The Sound of Near-Silence
Connors' instrumental approach has changed considerably throughout his career, and he's focused on playing his Stratocaster since the mid-1980s, in search of a more subtle sound. "You can get real quiet on electric guitar, which you can't really do on acoustic guitar," he says. That has led him to develop an "extremely light" touch, in his own words. And he feels as though he reached a tipping point in the last 20 or so years, as he's steered his playing toward a more delicate approach to tone and a greater use of space, and discovered what he refers to as his "new style."
"What I did before—a way of playing, a style, and everything—all that stuff went out the window. Now I just kind of, almost, don't play anything anymore," he explains. While that may seem a little cryptic, it's quite fitting. "It's like almost not there, even. Very few notes and very distant sound and very quiet sound."
Connors was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the early 1990s but insists his playing choices have nothing to do with any physical limitations and that he's led purely by artistic decisions. "Parkinson's doesn't have anything to do with the way I sound now. I take pills to cover it all over. I play a little bit quieter now, I guess."
As O'Rourke sees it, Connors' sound is, however, tied to his overall physical approach to the instrument. "I think a big part of Loren's sound, besides, of course, it being him, is the way he holds the guitar, almost like he is cradling it—the way he extends his right hand supporting it with his thumb extended, suspended above the strings. If it could, his guitar would wrap itself into a ball."
Licht observes that Connors "is going to sound the same no matter what gear he's using." In the early days of their collaboration, the two guitarists would perform using the same Fender Princeton, maintaining distinct sounds and demonstrating that tone really is all in the fingers.
Connors takes a very practical approach to his gear. He has a few Stratocasters and these days prefers his Squier Mini Stratocaster, because of its light weight. He is happy to plug into any kind of Fender amp, though he also likes Voxes. While Connors' tone often seems quite effected, he gets all of his sounds using only a few pedals: a Dunlop Cry Baby Wah or Boss Auto Wah along with a Boss Digital Reverb/Delay.
Despite this austere approach, Connors is a playful collaborator whose duo improvisations reveal a lot about his personality. Eclectic guitarist Chris Forsyth shares this story from one of their first gigs together: "We're setting up and I say, 'Loren, what tuning are you using?' He mutters, 'standard.' But I can hear he's pitched way down. So I said, 'Play me an A?' And his A is like an E or something. Way down. But the strings were in standard-tuning relationships. Next time we played, at soundcheck I'm like 'Loren, give me an A?' And he looks over at me and plucks the A string, but out comes a 100 percent wet backwards reverb wash, like mist, 'shhaahhh!' And he smiles. So I'm like, 'Uh, one more time?' And I'm doing my best to tune to it. Then I look over and he's retuning. Trickster!"
These days, Connors is, like most of us, at home and eagerly awaiting the return of live performances. He says he's not picking up the guitar much but is ready to get back out there. When I ask what he plays when he does pick up his guitar, he simply says, "Whatever's twirling around inside me."YouTube It!
At New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, Loren Connors performs a slow and meditative improvisation to create a reverb-soaked sonic reflection of Mark Rothko's Four Darks in Red.
An ode, and historical snapshot, to the tone-bar played, many-stringed thing in the room, and its place in the national musical firmament.
Blues, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, rap.… When it comes to inventing musical genres, the U.S. totally nailed it. But how about inventing instruments?
Googling “American musical instruments” yields three.
• Banjo, which is erroneously listed since Africa is its continent of origin.
• Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica, which was 37 glass bowls mounted horizontally on an iron spindle that was turned by means of a foot pedal. Sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with water-moistened fingers. The instrument’s popularity did not last due to the inability to amplify the volume combined with rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad.
• Calliope, which was patented in 1855 by Joshua Stoddard. Often the size of a truck, it produces sound by sending steam through large locomotive-style whistles. Calliopes have no volume or tone control and can be heard for miles.
But Google left out the pedal steel. While there may not be a historical consensus, I was talking to fellow pedal-steel player Dave Maniscalco, and we share the theory that pedal steel is the most American instrument.
Think about it. The United States started as a DIY, let’s-try-anything country. Our culture encourages the endless pursuit of improvement on what’s come before. Curious, whimsical, impractical, explorative—that’s our DNA. And just as our music is always evolving, so are our instruments. Guitar was not invented in the U.S., but one could argue it’s being perfected here, as players from Les Paul to Van Halen kept tweaking the earlier designs, helping this one-time parlor instrument evolve into the awesome rock machine it is today.
Pedal steel evolved from lap steel, which began in Hawaii when a teenage Joseph Kekuku was walking down a road with his guitar in hand and bent over to pick up a railroad spike. When the spike inadvertently brushed the guitar’s neck and his instrument sang, Kekuku knew he had something. He worked out a tuning and technique, and then took his act to the mainland, where it exploded in popularity. Since the 1930s, artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong and Pink Floyd have been using steel on their records.“The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.”
Immigrants drove new innovations and opportunities for the steel guitar by amplifying the instrument to help it compete for listeners’ ears as part of louder ensembles. Swiss-American Adolph Rickenbacker, along with George Beauchamp, developed the first electric guitar—the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 lap steel, nicknamed the Frying Pan—and a pair of Slovak-American brothers, John and Rudy Dopyera, added aluminum cones in the body of a more traditional acoustic guitar design and created resophonic axes. The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.
As the 20th century progressed and popular music reflected the more advanced harmonies of big-band jazz, the steel guitar’s tuning evolved from open A to a myriad of others, including E7, C6, and B11. Steel guitarists began playing double-, triple-, and even quadruple-necked guitars so they could incorporate different tunings.
In Indianapolis, the Harlan Brothers came up with an elegant solution to multiple tunings when they developed their Multi-Kord steel guitar, which used pedals to change the tuning of the instrument’s open strings to create chords that were previously not possible, earning a U.S. patent on August 21, 1947. In California, equipped with knowledge from building motorcycles, Paul Bigsby revolutionized the instrument with his Bigsby steel guitars. It was on one of these guitars that, in early 1954, Bud Isaacs sustained a chord and then pushed a pedal down to bend his strings up in pitch for the intro of Webb Pierce’s “Slowly.” This I–IV movement became synonymous with the pedal-steel guitar and provided a template for the role of the pedal steel in country music. Across town, church musicians in the congregation of the House of God Keith Dominion were already using the pedal steel guitar in Pentecostal services that transcended the homogeneity of Nashville’s country and Western clichés.
Pedal steels are most commonly tuned in an E9 (low to high: B–D–E–F#–G#–B–E–G#–D#–F#), which can be disorienting, with its own idiosyncratic logic containing both a b7 and major 7. It’s difficult to learn compared to other string instruments tuned to regular intervals, such as fourths and fifths, or an open chord.
Dave Maniscalco puts it like this: “The more time one sits behind it and assimilates its quirks and peculiarities, the more obvious it becomes that much like the country that birthed it, the pedal steel is better because of its contradictions. An amalgamation of wood and metal, doubling as both a musical instrument and mechanical device, the pedal steel is often complicated, confusing, and messy. Despite these contradictions, the pedal-steel guitar is a far more interesting and affecting because of its disparate influences and its complex journey to becoming America’s quintessential musical instrument.”The author dials in one of his 20-watt Sonzera amps, with an extension cabinet.
Knowing how guitar amplifiers were developed and have evolved is important to understanding why they sound the way they do when you’re plugged in.
Let’s talk about guitar amp history. I think it’s important for guitar players to have a general overview of amplifiers, so the sound makes more sense when they plug in. As far as I can figure out, guitar amps originally came from radios—although I’ve never had the opportunity to interview the inventors of the original amps. Early tube amps looked like radio boxes, and once there was an AM signal, it needed to be amplified through a speaker so you could hear it. I’m reasonably certain that other people know more about this than I do.
For me, the story of guitar amps picks up with early Fenders and Marshalls. If you look at the schematics, amplifier input, and tone control layout of an early tweed Fender Bassman, it’s clear that’s where the original Marshall JTM45 amps came from. Also, I’ve heard secondhand that the early Marshall cabinets were 8x12s, and the roadies requested that Marshall cut them in half so they became 4x12s. Similarly, 8x10 SVT cabinets were cut in half to make the now-industry-standard 4x10 bass cabinets. Our amp designer Doug Sewell and I understand that, for the early Fender amps we love, the design directed the guitar signal into half a tube, into a tone stack, into another half a tube, and the reverb would join it with another half a tube, and then there would be a phase splitter and output tubes and a transformer. (All 12AX7 tubes are really two tubes in one, so when I say a half-tube, I’m saying we’re using only the first half.) The tone stack and layout of these amps is an industry standard and have a beautiful, clean way of removing low midrange to clear up the sound of the guitar. I believe all but the first Marshalls came from a high-powered tweed Twin preamp (which was a 80-watt combo amp) and a Bassman power amp. The schematic was a little different. It was one half-tube into a full-tube cathode follower, into a more midrange-y tone stack, into the phase splitter and power tubes and output transformer. Both of these circuits have different kinds of sounds. What’s interesting is Marshall kept modifying their amps for less bass, more high midrange and treble, and more gain. In addition, master volume controls started being added by Fender and Marshall around 1976. The goal was to give more gain at less volume. Understanding these circuits has been a lifelong event for Doug and me.
Then, another designer came along by the name of Alexander Dumble. He modified the tone stack in Fender amps so you could get more bass and a different kind of midrange. Then, after the preamp, he put in a distortion circuit in a switchable in and out “loop.” In this arrangement, the distortion was like putting a distortion pedal in a loop after the tone controls. In a Fender amp, most of the distortion comes from the output section, so turning the tone controls changes the sound of the guitar, not the distortion. In a Marshall, the distortion comes before the tone controls, so when you turn the tone controls, the distortion changes. The way these amps compress and add harmonics as you turn up the gain is the game. All of these designs have real merit and are the basis of our modern tube–and then modeling—amplifiers.
Everything in these amps makes a difference. The circuits, the capacitor values and types, the resistor values and types, the power and output transformers, and the power supplies—including all those capacitor values and capacitor manufacturers.
I give you this truncated, general history to let you know that the amp business is just as complicated as the guitar business. I didn’t even mention the speakers or speaker cabinets and the artform behind those. But what’s most important is: When you plug into the amp, do you like it? And how much do you like it? Most guitar players have not played through a real Dumble or even a real blackface Deluxe Reverb or a 1966 Marshall plexi head. In a way, you’re trusting the amp designers to understand all the highly complex variations from this history, and then make a product that you love playing through. It’s daunting, but I love it. There is a complicated, deep, and rich history that has influenced and shaped how amps are made today.
Lenny Kravitz’s lead-guitar maestro shares how his scorching hit solo came together.
Hold onto your hats—Shred With Shifty is back! This time, Chris Shiflett sits down with fellow west coaster Craig Ross, who calls in from Madrid equipped with a lawsuit-era Ibanez 2393. The two buddies kick things off commiserating over an increasingly common tragedy for guitarists: losing precious gear in natural disasters. The takeaway? Don’t leave your gear in storage! Take it on the road!
Ross started out in the Los Angeles band Broken Homes, influenced by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, but his big break came when he auditioned for Lenny Kravitz. Kravitz phoned him up the next day to tell him to be at rehearsal that evening. In 1993, they cut one of their biggest hits ever, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” Ross explains that it came together from a loose, improvisatory jam in the studio—testament to the magic that can be found off-leash during studio time.
Ross recalls his rig for recording the solo, which consisted of just two items: Kravitz’s goldtop Les Paul and a tiny Gibson combo. (No fuzz or drive pedals, sorry Chris.) As Ross remembers, he was going for a Cream-era Clapton sound with the solo, which jumps between pentatonic and pentatonic major scales.
Tune in to learn how he frets and plays the song’s blistering lead bits, plus learn about what amps Ross is leaning on these days.
If you’re able to help, here are some charities aimed at assisting musicians affected by the fires in L.A:
https://guitarcenterfoundation.org
https://www.cciarts.org/relief.html
https://www.musiciansfoundation.org
https://fireaidla.org
https://www.musicares.org
https://www.sweetrelief.org
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Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editor: Addison Sauvan
Graphic Design: Megan Pralle
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
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