Larry Coryell

Larry Coryell “The Godfather of Fusion”

By Brian Tarquin

Larry Coryell, “Godfather of Fusion” is one of the most influential guitar players of the 20th Century and beyond. His invention of jazz-rock electric guitar playing in the 1960s, was revolutionary and spurred an entire fusion movement that came of age in the 1970’s. He has recorded over 100 albums and performed with Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Cobham and gave lessons to Al Di Meola. Larry truly is in the jazz history books for his innovative guitar approach as well as an author of many music books, including an autobiography.

In the big picture I came late to the party concerning Larry and his music, having met him at the end of his life. As a young guitarist in the 70’s I was very influenced by the British Invasion including instrumental music, like Jeff Beck, Jan Hammer and Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun”. In retrospect I wish I had been more exposed to Larry’s music as well. Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House was too sophisticated for a young kid my age. It took some maturity on my part to finally understand and appreciate the complexities of his composing. But of course, now I’m an avid fan of Larry’s music.

In those days Mahavishnu Orchestra was a popular jazz fusion band. Plus, John McLaughlin was coming from his huge success with the 1970 Miles Davis landmark album, Bitches Brew. At the same time, Larry was doing the same kind of music but was overshadowed John’s success. As you read on you will see that Larry and John were good friends who often taught each other guitar riffs in the genre.

As a guitarist myself I was very fortunate to have worked with him in 2016, only months before his passing. Larry came to my recording studio (Jungle Room Studios in Florida) and we worked together all afternoon on songs for my release Brian Tarquin & Company – Orlando In Heaven, a dedication to those who lost there lives at the Pulse night club shooting. We hit it off right away and had a one of kind experience recording.

BTQ: What are your first memoires of music?

Larry: I’m told by my parents that I started playing the piano at the age of four. But first let me preface that by saying I was born, and my name was Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III. My biological father was a guy named Lorenzo Albert Van DeLinder or Larry Alberts for short. He was a jazz pianist, and my mother was interested in him partially because she was hoping that he would teach her how to play piano like he did. After I was born six weeks later, we were in Peoria Illinois. He already had another girlfriend that he had made pregnant, and my mother never saw him again. Consequently, I never was able to garner any information about him at all. I would have liked to see what he looked like number one and number two I would have loved to have been able to hear him play his music. In 1948 my mother married a guy named Jean Coryell who was a great guy and had adopted me, that’s how I became Larry Van Delender Coryell.

Galveston Texas is where I was born in 1943. Then we moved to southeastern Washington at the end of the summer of 1950 to Richland Washington, which was a government company town where the A.D.C. (The Atomic Energy Commission) was employing Jean Coryell to make plutonium for atomic bombs. Fast forward to 1988 when I was in Oshima (Japan) and I’m looking and seeing what happened. I said to myself you better make sure that this stuff never happens again.

I had my eyes on the guitar because it was sexy it was more contemporary. I was just attracted to it, and I didn’t have to do any reading. But my hands were too small. I had to wait until I was about fifteen for my hands to get big enough to play. And when they did, I was off to the races! I took lessons from a wonderful jazz guitar teacher in our little town. He gave me enough information so that when I went to the University of Washington in the fall of 1961, I was ready to try to get some gigs to help pay for my college.

BTQ: Larry being in the forefront of Fusion, I was anxious to see what guitarists influenced him as a young musician.

Larry: When I was growing up and changed my approach to the guitar, I initially listened to Barney Kessel, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry and then Johnny Smith, but then I heard Wes Montgomery all bets were off! All the other guys I mentioned are great players, but Wes had brilliant ideas that helped him play his unusual approaches to technique. It was the big thumb that really did it for everybody in my environment including myself. We would just go into rapture when Wes would do the octaves and we just couldn’t fathom how he could do it.

Wes came to Seattle around 1963 as the Montgomery brother’s band. I wasn’t twenty-one yet, so somebody lent me their ID. I went to a very good jazz club in downtown Seattle. I got in there and I think the first tune they played was something called Black Orchid, kind of a Latin thing. It was incredible and then they did Green Dolphin Street. His thumb was shining! I thought he had or maybe he did, I’ll never know, nail polish on. You see that beautiful black hand and then the thumb. This was a good time in his life as he was becoming very popular. And they played Green Dog, I don’t remember anything after that. I was so blown away! This was really my first time that I was seeing a consummate jazz performance by a genius. The other time was when I saw Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie, a great moment! Dizzy and bird created the vocabulary for bebop that was in the late thirties, early forties. Barney Kessel told me during WWII all the existing musicians were in Europe or Asia fighting the war and the younger musicians who didn’t go to war stayed in the USA playing. They started this music, Barney said, when we came back, they were playing different stuff.

BTQ: Larry grew up in a unique time for guitar music, probably the best time in our history. During the late 50’s and early 60’s there was such a profound growth in guitar music. He explains how he left college in the mid 60’s in Seattle and migrated to New York.

Larry: Oh, I dropped out and by the time I got to the end of 1964 I wanted to go to New York. I went to the University of the Streets in New York City. The first night I was there I heard the Charles Lloyd Band; I had no idea what they were playing. I had like nothing in my record collection like it. Nothing I had ever heard on the radio or at somebody’s house or in a jam session. In New York it was cutting, and I said I think I’ll stay here.

When I first got to New York I was really doing poverty gigs. We couldn’t even afford a bass player, just vibes, drums and me at the airport, Crossways Idlewild Inn (before it was renamed JFK). The current hits of the day were “The In Crowd” by Ramsey Lewis that was the number one song in the country and the “Shadow Of Your Smile” by Johnny Mandel. The great Johnny Mandel was just keeping in the tradition of the Great American Songbook. Because there was no bass player, I would have freedom to play whatever I wanted. I started playing some Beatles lines in the middle of a song and then I would play “Can’t Buy Me Love” then to “Straight No Chaser” by Thelonius Monk. It worked. I knew it would work. I wanted to start a movement where we could open our musicality to all kinds of music as long as the ideas that we borrowed from pop music, or other forms were good ideas.

The Beatles were not just a band they were a force. They were like Mother Theresa because they transcended everything. Of course, they were popular with the young people and drew big crowds and sold a lot of records, made a lot of money. However, they also evolved musically to a point that I think was the peak of pop music and pop music has never been the same. I mean look at all the people in jazz or rock from Wes Montgomery to Grant Green to Jeff Beck they all want to play “A Day In The Life”. At the time New York City was a huge melting pot for musicians and new ideas!

BTQ: Larry explains how he played with John McLaughlin and studied Indian style music and its timings and how he became friends and jammed with Jimi Hendrix.

Larry: We were all in New York and wanted to do innovative stuff! We didn’t want to get away from the jazz, so much as to augment it occasionally. I would teach John McLaughlin something that I knew, but then he would come back and teach me a ‘Raag’ (the rules were you can only play notes in the scale). I mean if I went out of the scale, John would say stop it’s not in the scale, it took me a while. I liked the discipline of Indian music, and I could play it, but not as well as John. We jammed with a lot of Indian musicians. It’s a great body of music they have. What we do have in common with Indian musicians (whether Hindustani or jazz musicians) is improvisation. Also, with the sweat and the labor of learning the other guy’s concept, we wanted to still keep the jazz foundation. If you listen to John in the early records the jazz foundation is there. It was so funny when he was playing with Miles, an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine said that John was a rock n roller. Miles said John was no more a rock n roll musician than he was. Miles saw that he wanted to change to go into another direction where he could open and he became a huge star because of that.

But the great thing about the era in which I moved to New York in ‘65 is that the quality of rock n roll playing went way up. Listen to Jimi Hendrix playing tonic scales plus he could write great songs! Jimi’s tunes were deep, you know I miss him we were close. I mean we were both from Seattle, we never met each other in Seattle. Though I would make suggestions to him before he would go into the studio, and he took my suggestion. We jammed. But it was nothing to speak of, he was playing right-handed bass left-handed, playing blues and of course everybody was stoned!

By the way, I have a funny memory of marching down Fifth Avenue against the Vietnam war with Barry the drug dealer. On the sidewalk there was a little old lady, and she was yelling, “sex, sex, sex, that’s all you people are interested in is sex!” Then about five minutes later Barry the drug dealer got hit right in the forehead with a brick

BTQ: I sat in the studio for a long time with the “Godfather of Fusion”, so I had to ask Larry, hey man how did you come up with fusion and how did you form the Eleventh House and become so well known for this style of music?

Larry: I added rock to jazz; it was like very organic. Well first I had a really good band with a drummer named Harry Wilkinson who was recommended by Randy Brecker. We’re talking about the end of the sixties, and we realized that it wouldn’t hurt to bring in electric bass, but the kind of electric bass player that was sensitive to the jazz sensibility. The bass added pickups right around the time I got to New York. It was a good sound, almost like an organ. Actually, the original Eleven House bass player was a guy named Danny Trifan, with Alphonse Mouzon on drums, Mike Mandel on keyboards and the great Randy Brecker on trumpet.

BTQ: Larry also enjoys composing operas, sonatas and classical music as well as orchestrating for big bands.
Larry: I enjoy orchestrating very much. I just heard the Sixth Symphony by Tchaikovsky on our way over here and I was blown away by how simple yet effective the string writing was. I’ve got to study it because as I told you earlier, I write operas, symphonies and have written a lot of classical stuff. I’ve written a lot of stuff that is unplayable; they’re just duets with piano and guitar. I can’t even play the guitar part. I believe we should go beyond our capacity in order to increase our capacity. Preferably we do it in the privacy of our own home, so the cacophony is not distributed among the unbelieving masses.

But my new record, which is a Larry Coryell record, is called Barefoot Man Sanpaku. You know what that is? OK when I got to New York the very first thing I saw in a hippie’s library on a five-floor walkup apt building was a book called ‘You Are all Sanpaku’ written by a George Ohsawa. He was trying to advocate for macrobiotics by just eating brown rice. This is based on the Chinese believe that states, when the white part of the eye, known as the sclera, is visible beneath the iris, it represents physical imbalance in the body, supposedly present in various alcohol and drug addicts. Also, if the upper sclera is visible this is an indication of mental imbalance or stress. I tried macrobiotic. I lasted three days! I mean I was twenty-two years old living on the Lower East Side. We had a rehearsal out on Long Island so we’re doing the rehearsal, we take a break, we go into town and there’s a bakery. I see a chocolate éclair and I said I want that! Ha, Ha, Ha!

We do something from my new opera, but we jazz it up. We do something based on Stravinsky and we do a ballad I wrote in Lebanon called “Penultimate”. We also do a blues song I wrote called “Blue Coal In Your Mind” and the one tune that I did not write was my favorite song by Dizzy Gillespie “Manteca”. I had Lynne Arielle on piano and I brought down Chris Botti’s drummer from Las Vegas his name is Lee Pearson fantastic. John Lee from the Eleventh House of the Dizzy Gillespie ghost band was the bassist and a guy in Orlando reed player named Dan Jordan, tenor, soprano and flute.
But let’s get stoned on this music now, we don’t need any substances we just get stoned on this beautiful music; what I’ve heard so far is great. I would like to also take a vow that nothing that occurred at the Pulse nightclub ever happens again. I feel so bad, and I was just telling you earlier I was in the hospital recovering from complications from a sinus surgery. I thought the nurses were joking when they came in the morning when they brought me the world’s worst breakfast and told me the whole thing. I was in a state because I was literally located on the eighth floor of the hospital where the victims of the shooting were brought into the emergency room. I was right there when it happened.
Conclusion:
That was a great afternoon talking to Larry. He was a free spirit with a great sense of humor and candor. He shared stories as if we were old friends. He held nothing back. He was wise and enthusiastic about music and proud of all the accomplishments and musicians he had the opportunity to collaborate with throughout his career. I was immediately touched by his compassion for people, his contributions to jazz fusion and his extraordinary experiences during an important time in the development of guitar music. It was a wonderful experience that I will never forget. So, you can imagine how honored I was when he gave me such a wonderful compliment about my music, saying:

“By the way you’re a very good guitar player man, are those your compositions as well, since Di Meola pasted the decal on my back of the “Godfather of Fusion”, the “Godfather of Fusion” gives you an A plus and your musicians too.”

“The lives of the people in that nightclub ‘The Pulse’ were just as human as John Lennon. We artists have to do everything we can to educate, enlighten and inspire the world in which we live. We can do it as artists like this music, this beautiful thing, the first thing I played, it was in D minor, a beautiful piece of music.”