GP Hall
Encyclopedia
GP Hall (born July 15, 1943, Hampton Hill, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, UK)
is an English guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...

ist, composer and improviser fusing and mixing both traditional and avant-garde styles. He is also known for having invented the musical genre known as 'Industrial Sound Sculptures'.

Musical style and techniques

Hall's music draws on classical
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...

, rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, flamenco
Flamenco
Flamenco is a genre of music and dance which has its foundation in Andalusian music and dance and in whose evolution Andalusian Gypsies played an important part....

, folk
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 and blues styles as well as free music, electronic noise and "found" instrumentation. He uses slide
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...

 and fingerpicking techniques but also plays (or prepares) his guitars with various found implements such as crocodile clip
Crocodile clip
thumb|Standard clipthumb|Pair of standard clipsA crocodile clip is a simple mechanical device for creating a temporary electrical connector, and is named for its resemblance to an alligator's or crocodile's jaws...

s, palette knives, velcro
Velcro
Velcro is the brand name of the first commercially marketed fabric hook-and-loop fastener, invented in 1948 by the Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral...

 strips, an antique psaltery
Psaltery
A psaltery is a stringed musical instrument of the harp or the zither family. The psaltery of Ancient Greece dates from at least 2800 BC, when it was a harp-like instrument...

 bow, wind-up toy cars and others in order to create a variety of different sounds and attacks. Hall uses a variety of treatments and electronic effects pedals to further process his guitar output, and sometimes incorporates radio broadcasts into his ensemble sound.

Some of Hall's techniques resemble those of avant-garde guitarist Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the hugely influential AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums...

 (who also plays guitar with found implements and incorporates radio broadcasts into his work). However, Hall's approach is less orientated towards free jazz and tends to be more melodic, serving a tune or the background setting of a melody. Unlike Rowe (who generally plays - or manipulates - his guitar with the instrument lying flat on a table) Hall performs using the standard playing position, although he has been known to lay his guitar down flat when using the wind-up toy cars.

Hall refers to one of his main playing approaches as "Industrial Sound-Sculpture". This involves creating a highly detailed and layered impressionistic
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

 sound piece by layering and/or looping
Music loop
In electroacoustic music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections of material can be repeated to create ostinato patterns...

 guitar sounds and signals created by a variety of standard and non-standard methods. The sound-sculptures can be melodic, amelodic or both.

Although his electric and electronic playing gains the most attention at concerts, Hall is also known for his particular virtuosity as an acoustic guitarist (on both steel-strung and gut/nylon strung instruments). He is an expert flamenco
Flamenco
Flamenco is a genre of music and dance which has its foundation in Andalusian music and dance and in whose evolution Andalusian Gypsies played an important part....

 guitarist, and an accomplished classical
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...

-style player. He also plays a customised Shergold
Shergold
Shergold Guitars, or Shergold Woodcrafts Limited, was established in October 1967 by former Burns London employees Jack Golder and Norman Houlder...

 six-string bass guitar
Bass guitar
The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a pick....

 featuring a half-fretted, half-fretless fretboard (and has been known to play it using flamenco techniques). Hall has been known to dabble in playing other instruments such as double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...

, piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...

, soprano saxophone
Soprano saxophone
The soprano saxophone is a variety of the saxophone, a woodwind instrument, invented in 1840. The soprano is the third smallest member of the saxophone family, which consists of the soprillo, sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass, contrabass and tubax.A transposing instrument pitched in...

 and varied percussion, mostly for the sake of their timbral qualities. More recently, he has taken up singing (in order to perform his own original folk songs).

1960s and early 1970s - blues etc.

Raised in the East End of London, Hall was schooled in classical, flamenco and jazz playing and went on to develop his skills as a guitarist in the British blues boom of the late 1960s (he would also be inspired by the developing hard rock
Hard rock
Hard rock is a loosely defined genre of rock music which has its earliest roots in mid-1960s garage rock, blues rock and psychedelic rock...

 scene). As a teenager, he played in the Odd Lot Band and set up the Odd Lot Club as a venue for their music, which in turn attracted more established bands and players for concerts.

As he became better known, Hall went on to play at more celebrated London venues including The Roundhouse
The Roundhouse
The Roundhouse is a Grade II* listed former railway engine shed in Chalk Farm, London, England, which has been converted into a performing arts and concert venue. It was originally built in 1847 as a roundhouse , a circular building containing a railway turntable, but was only used for railway...

, the Middle Earth club and the 100 Club (where he was a resident player). He supported the likes of Deep Purple
Deep Purple
Deep Purple are an English rock band formed in Hertford in 1968. Along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, they are considered to be among the pioneers of heavy metal and modern hard rock, although some band members believe that their music cannot be categorised as belonging to any one genre...

, The Hollies
The Hollies
The Hollies are an English pop and rock group, formed in Manchester in the early 1960s, though most of the band members are from throughout East Lancashire. Known for their distinctive vocal harmony style, they became one of the leading British groups of the 1960s and 1970s...

, and Chris Farlowe
Chris Farlowe
Chris Farlowe is an English rock, blues and soul singer. He is best known for his hit single "Out of Time", which rose to #1 in the UK Singles Chart in 1966, and his association with Colosseum and the Thunderbirds.Outside his music career, Farlowe collects war memorabilia.-Career:Inspired by Lonnie...

 and played on stage with original American blues heroes John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker was an American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist.Hooker began his life as the son of a sharecropper, William Hooker, and rose to prominence performing his own unique style of what was originally closest to Delta blues. He developed a 'talking blues' style that was his trademark...

 and Sonny Boy Williamson
Sonny Boy Williamson II
Willie "Sonny Boy" Williamson was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, from Mississippi. He is acknowledged as one of the most charismatic and influential blues musicians, with considerable prowess on the harmonica and highly creative songwriting skills...

. In the early 1970s Hall toured Europe as guitarist for Casey Jones & The Governors (a blues-pop band previously known as Casey Jones & The Engineers, in which both Tom McGuiness and Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...

 had played briefly before moving onto Manfred Mann
Manfred Mann
Manfred Mann was a British beat, rhythm and blues and pop band of the 1960s, named after their South African keyboardist, Manfred Mann, who later led the successful 1970s group Manfred Mann's Earth Band...

 and The Yardbirds
The Yardbirds
- Current :* Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals * Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals * Ben King - lead guitar * David Smale - bass, backing vocals...

 respectively).

1970s - into the avant-garde

Hall's musical approaches began to broaden in the early 1970s. He spent some time living with Romani musicians (studying with renowned flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata
Manitas de Plata
Manitas de Plata . is a French Gitano flamenco guitarist.-Life:He was born in a Gypsy caravan in Sète in southern France...

) and subsequently became involved in more avant-garde work, writing, producing and performing regularly at the British East/West Centre in London. He also became the musical director for the multi-media performance art group Welfare State International
Welfare State International
Welfare State International were an influential performance group based in the UK and founded in 1968 by John Fox and Sue Gill. Fox was, and remains, a vociferous proponent of 'celebratory theatre' and an anarchic, energetic and imaginative approach to creating theatre. In 2006 they felt the...

.

In 1972, Hall was commissioned by the South Hill Park
South Hill Park
South Hill Park is a site that lies in the Birch Hill estate to the south of Bracknell town centre, in Berkshire, England.-History:The original South Hill Park mansion was built in 1760 for William Watts for his retirement from service as a senior official of the Bengal Government...

 Arts Centre in Bracknell
Bracknell
Bracknell is a town and civil parish in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It lies to the south-east of Reading, southwest of Windsor and west of central London...

 to write The Estates - a "large and complex" musical piece intended to depict the breakdown of established communities to make way for the New Town of Bracknell
Bracknell
Bracknell is a town and civil parish in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It lies to the south-east of Reading, southwest of Windsor and west of central London...

. The piece was scored for a large ensemble centred around guitar, bass, clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

, glockenspiel
Glockenspiel
A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...

, hammer dulcimer, assorted percussions and two specially prepared piano frames. The Estates was recorded and released on album by Prototype Records in 1972. Originally an hour long, the recording was subsequently edited down to twenty-five minutes, and a version was released twenty-five years later on the Mar Del Plata album in 1997. Video footage also exists but has not been commercially released.

In 1975, Prototype Records released Manifestations, another album of Hall's work.

Mid-1970s to mid-1980s - wilderness years

At around this time, Hall's promising career was cut short by personal trauma. He describes it as having been "traumatised by a situation of events beyond my control... I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the experience left me mentally, physically and spiritually bankrupt. As the trauma took hold, it took my confidence and self worth." He was driven to alcohol and to what he describes as "other escape mechanisms that took me to places I didn't want to go." Hall spent a fifteen-year period in personal and material decline. He suffered from depression and became homeless and destitute on several occasions until joining a recovery programme. During the 1980s he began to "communicate back into the real world via my music... at first it was a real hard slog. But as if to compensate, I had extraordinary insights. I am sober today and lead a relatively ordinary life and I really value that. I could not perform my music in any other way other than with a clear head, because it requires so much concentration. It was an isolated and lonely road, but I do appreciate the people who helped me in financial and supportive ways and gave me encouragement when I had many setbacks."

In 1986, Hall released a new album - the twenty-nine track Colors (Movements) - as part of the Colors series of instrumental albums on the Kenwest label (some of his pieces were also included on the compilation album for the range, Colors: The Collection). During this period he also composed library music (which suited his individual and colouristic style with its multi-instrumental and gadgetry-filled approach).

1990s - renaissance

Hall's next solo album, Imaginary Seasons, arrived on his own Imaginary Music label in 1995 and was a surprise nominee for the Mercury Music Prize. Having signed to the Future Music Recordings label, Hall delivered a further follow-up in 1996 - Figments Of Imagination, which compiled both new pieces and old 1970s and 1980s recordings with various avant-garde musicians. In the same year, Hall appeared on the Unknown Public compilation CD Eclectic Guitars (alongside Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...

, Bill Frisell
Bill Frisell
William Richard "Bill" Frisell is an American guitarist and composer.One of the leading guitarists in jazz since the late 1980s, Frisell's eclectic music touches on progressive folk, classical music, country music, noise and more...

, John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...

 and Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique...

) and performed a well-received live solo set at the Unknown Public Holiday event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Queen Elizabeth Hall is a music venue on the South Bank in London, United Kingdom that hosts daily classical, jazz, and avant-garde music and dance performances. The QEH forms part of Southbank Centre arts complex and stands alongside the Royal Festival Hall, which was built for the Festival...

, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 (September 26, 1996).

1997 saw the release of two GP Hall albums - Mar Del Plata (a similar album to Figments Of Imagination, compiling both old and new tracks) and the live recording Marks On The Air taken from the accompanying small tour. (The second of these was released on the tiny Esoteric Binaural Label, and featured label owner and sound engineer Mike Skeet's individual take on binaural recording
Binaural recording
Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments. This effect is often created using a technique known as "Dummy head...

 techniques). Hall also played concerts in the Scottish isles of Lewis and Harris, having been commissioned to write the commemorative piece Sea Sorrow. The latter appeared on the 1998 double album Steel Storms And Tender Spirits, which featured one disc of hard-textured, mainly electric material and one disc of softer, more acoustic-orientated pieces.

Having parted company with Future Music Recordings, Hall released the Each A Glimpse And Gone Forever album in 1999 on Esoteric Binaural Label. This was a part-live, part studio recording documenting activities and ideas generated by the 1998/1999 tours and featured collaborations with Justin Ash (ethnic instruments and percussion).

2000s - the maverick

Without a steady recording contract, Hall's work in the subsequent decade became more sporadic. During 2000, he performed at Reading Jazz Club and at The Outsiders Festival in Oxford with John Ellis). He returned to Oxford in 2001 for a solo concert at The Jacqueline du Pré Music Building. In 2002, Hall performed a solo tour called “Moving The Mountain” which took in Didcot, London, Southend, Bristol, Reading, Oxford, Liverpool and a return to the Isle Of Lewis. He also performed at the Burning Shed Event in Norwich (in support of Industrial Blue, a compilation of his more industrially-inclined work released on the Burning Shed
Burning Shed
Burning Shed is an independent record label established in April 2001 by musicians Tim Bowness and Peter Chilvers, in association with duplication company manager and former Noisebox Records boss, Pete Morgan....

 record label).

During 2003 and 2004 Hall recorded two as-yet-unreleased song albums - Songs from the House Within and Precious Love. His next actual release, however, was Gothic Flamenco which was released on the Bronze Records label in 2005 and continued his eclectic instrumental approach. Hall performed live at the 2005 London Guitar Festival. In 2006, he produced a couple of self-released DVD recordings - the acoustic-based Guitarist and the more avant-garde Electric, both filmed by Peter Remke at the Hope & Anchor venue in North London.

Since then, Hall has toured and played intermittently, now interspersing his instrumental pieces with original self-written folk songs. His latest release is the 2010 album Pyroclastic Flow, a fifteen-track guitar-only CD which explores most styles of guitar work. Five years in the making, the album was a collaboration with Hall's close friend Alistair Michie, the Scottish abstract painter. Hall commissioned Michie to paint the covers of the CD - although Michie died just before he could finish the paintings, they are still being used as album artwork as a posthumous tribute. Various other future GP Hall albums have been promised but not yet released - these include the all-acoustic Pure and a Delta blues
Delta blues
The Delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region of the United States that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee in the north to Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, Helena, Arkansas in the west to the Yazoo River on the east. The...

 record. Recently, he has been gaining attention from a new audience by showcasing video clips of his playing on YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

.

Collaborations

Hall has worked with (among others) Lol Coxhill
Lol Coxhill
Lowen Coxhill, generally known as Lol Coxhill is a free improvising saxophonist and raconteur...

, Paul Rutherford
Paul Rutherford (trombone player)
Paul William Rutherford was an English free improvising trombonist.-Biography:Born in Greenwich, South East London, Rutherford initially played saxophone but switched to trombone...

, Jeff Clyne
Jeff Clyne
Jeffrey Ovid 'Jeff' Clyne was a British jazz bassist .-Biography:...

, John Ellis and Lyn Dobson
Lyn Dobson
Lyn Dobson is a British musician, noted as a jazz-rock flautist and saxophonist. He appeared with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and Manfred Mann in the mid 1960s and then with Soft Machine and Keef Hartley as well as playing on albums by Nick Drake and John Martyn.After the 1970s he worked in...

.

Albums

  • The Estates (1972 Prototype Records)
  • Manifestations (1975 Prototype Records)
  • Colors (Movements) (1986, Kenwest)
  • Imaginary Seasons (1995, River Flow Productions)
  • Figments Of Imagination (1996, Future Music Records)
  • Mar Del Plata (1997, Future Music Records)
  • Marks On The Air(1997, Esoteric Binaural Label) - live album
  • Steel Storms (And Tender Spirits) (1998, Future Music Records)double CD
  • Each A Glimpse (And Gone Forever (1999, Esoteric Binaural Label) - mixture of studio and live tracks
  • Industrial Blue (2002, Burning Shed)
  • Gothic Flamenco (2005, Bronze Records)
  • Pyroclastic Flow (2010 Imaginary Music)


(Note that the majority of GP Hall's catalogue has consisted of short-run release albums which have been deleted fairly quickly, meaning that many recordings of individual pieces have been re-released on subsequent recordings.)

appearance on various artist compilations

  • Colors (The Collection) (1986, Kenwest)
  • Eclectic Guitars UP6 (Unknown Public)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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