Henry Kaiser, "Solo Guitar"

SIDE A
It's a Wonderful Life
SIDE B
Let's Drink 100% Healthy Milk and Study Hard!
The Book of Gold
Ear Trouble

This record is for KLG. Special thank-you's to: Alison Ashman, Stephen Ashman, Lloyd Austin, Nancy Breslau, Peggy Campbell, Evan Cornog, Lisa Davidson, Greg Goodman, John Hanes, Tadahisa Kinoshita, Owen Maercks, Diane Rayor, Ken Richards, Trisha Roberts, Cary Sheldon, Barbara Smith. Donna Sposato, Judith Stadtman, Tracy Strann, Craig Street and Alex Varty.

Equipment employed ror this recording: fender Telecaster with ModuIus Graphite neck and Bartolini LCH pickups. Fender Stratocaster with floyd Rose tremolo. Zeta polyfuzz. Dhx 160X compressor. MXR pitch transposer. Lexicon Super Prime Time and PCM-42 digital delays. Howard Dumble Steel String Singer amplfier. No synthesizer or oscillator sound sources. Epiphone Blackstone acoustic guitar

All selections arc live free improvisations recorded in real time without overdubbing. Let's Drink 100% Healthy Milk and Study Hard! also employs a Linn Drum Computer.

Recorded August and September 1984 by Henry Kaiser and Oliver DiCicco. Mastereel by George Horn, Fantasy Studio.
METALANGUAGE M L - 1 2 4 .
Metalanguage Records, 2639 Russell Street,

Henry Kaiser, "Joaquin (Twenty-Four Eyes) Miller"

From henrykaiser.net

MEET THE FLINTSTONES (continued)

Well, for the next seven or eight weeks my roommate would come back to the barracks after each weekend at his home and tell me the story of all the Flintstones episodes that he had seen. Especially he'd tell me about every dinosaur and all of the dinosaur-powered machines. This sure sounded like my kind of TV show.

Suddenly I had a chance to see The Flintstones myself. My father was feeling a little better and his doctors decided to let him spend one last weekend in the house that I grew up in. And I was allowed to come home from military school be with him. I really loved my father a lot and it was great to see him again! I think it was about the last time that I did see him. He died a few months later. We had a wonderful time that weekend. We did all sorts of things together. After dinner one night I explained to him that I really wanted to watch this new TV program about some cavemen called The Flintstones. I'd heard that it was full of really cool dinosaurs. I realized that it was on at eight o'clock, a half-hour past my bed time, but couldn't we make a special exception and stay up and watch it? He said it was OK! So we got ready to watch The Flintstones. We made some popcorn. My father rolled his wheel chair over in front of the big old RCA television set. I climbed up into his lap. He picked up the remote control and turned on The Flintstones!

The Flintstones came on and The Flintstones was not at all what I had expected. Oh no. To actually see The Flintstones was a terrible, terrible shock. For my roommate had neglected to tell me one essential fact about The Flintstones. He had never told me that The Flintstones... ......WAS A CARTOON.

Dino copyright Hanna-Barbera Studios, 2001.

Henry Kaiser, "The Empty Set"

From henrykaiser.net

MEET THE FLINTSTONES (continued

No television in military school. No movies. Not much fun. My roommate, though, he got to go home on weekends so that his family could pretend that they were a normal "Leave It to Beaver" type American family. He got to watch TV and go to the movies when he went home. He'd always tell me about what he saw.

"Henry! I saw the most incredible movie! The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms! It was about this giant dinosaur. The army had a big fight with it in an amusement park. It smashed a roller coaster! I don't know how they did the special effects. But it looked real! A real dinosaur!"

So he told me the whole story of the movie - as kids do. It sounded great! My kind of movie! You know, a few years later I got a chance to see The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms and it was even better than I had imagined.

After another weekend at home my roommate came back to the military school and said:

"Henry! I saw the first episode of this new TV series called The Flintstones! It's great! It's all about a family of cavemen who live in this town called Bedrock. They live in houses made of boulders and there are dinosaurs all over the place! They drive stone automobiles that are dinosaur powered! Fred Flintstone, he's the hero, works in a construction site where they use a brontosaurus for a crane! The Flintstones even have a dinosaur for a pet. His name is Dino and he's just like a dog!"

Wow... A dinosaur for a pet. No pets in military school. And certainly no dinosaurs.

Henry Kaiser, "What The Dead Men Say"

From henrykaiser.net

MEET THE FLINTSTONES

Fred...

    Wilma.. .

        Barney... 

            Betty... 

                Dino....

FLINTSTONES... meet the Flintstones...

I had kind of a bad experience with The Flintstones when I was very young. Such a terrible experience with The Flintstones that only watched the show once and then I could never stand to watch it again. Let me tell you about it.

The Flintstones premiered on television back in 1960, when I was seven years old. It was kind of an unhappy time in my life. My father was in the hospital, dying of multiple sclerosis. My mother was in a psychiatric ward receiving electroshock therapy. (She was never really the same after that.) I had no other family to speak of beyond my parents. No brothers. No sisters. No friendly adults to watch out for me. But I did have... a wicked uncle. He put me in a military academy. A year-round, military boarding school. No vacations, no going home on weekends. Not a pleasant place. I was there for second, third and fourth grade.

What was life like there? A lot of marching around the parade ground with a toy rifle. Shining your shoes. Getting your room in the barracks ready for inspection. You'd better make your bed really tight. When Captain Dutton came around for inspection he'd bounce his silver dollar off your bed. If it didn't bounce high enough: 25 demerits. No dessert for a week. Major Nichols puts on his white cotton glove. He runs it along the door sill at the top of the door. If you hadn't pulled that little chair over to the door to stand on, and stretched up real tall to dust off that sill - there'd be dirt on Major Nichols' glove. 50 demerits. No dessert for 2 weeks.

Henry Kaiser, "The Invisible Hand"

Recording of a live set featuring covers of 'Paint It Black' and 'Cortez the Killer'

Henry Kaiser, "945"

Copious amounts of Henry Kaiser live recordings are posted at the HK Forum.

Henry Kaiser, "Christmas on Bear Mountain"

Henry Kaiser, "The Shadow Line"

-- Liner Notes --

When I asked Henry about reissuing Outside Pleasure, I knew I was in for trouble: as an LP, it ran maybe forty minutes, a good length considering the guitar terror contained in those grooves, but it's the 90s and Henry likes his CDs long. I suggested adding "The Shadow Line" from Aloha, which was probably the single most alarming piece of guitar music I'd heard up to that point, and it still holds that power fifteen years later. That makes sixty minutes. How much does a CD hold? Red Book specs be damned, Henry managed to fit 78 minutes onto the disc. So, what this disc holds is almost all of Outside Pleasure and pretty much all of the solo material from Aloha: a working title was "Henry Kaiser Solo Guitar 79-80," but...

But, it is true, this disc represents a certain period of Henry's guitar playing that has (very) unfortunately seemed to skitter off to the shadows in light of his endeavors since the mid-80s, which have emphasized interests besides solo guitar. But for me, locked up in my Harwood Heights bedroom, these records changed my life. I was already lucky to have heard Derek Bailey through his "ant music" record (well, that's what I called it) with Dave Holland on ECM (I remember selling my first guitar amp, a Fender Champ, in order to take advantage of the big Warner Bros. cut-out sale of ECM at the Rose Records near school. What was meant to be a big score ended with my being faced by row after row of Epidemic records, the brainstorm of L. Shankar and Steve Vai.) but none of this prepared me for the assault of Outside Pleasure. I was afraid to play the album while my parents were home for fear that they would finally find a reason to have me committed. But the biggest shock was "The Shadow Line," the (then for me) epic-length solo that seems more inspired by Michael Snow's Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder: at an early point in the track, Henry's guitar stops dead and holds static, high up in the stratosphere, and for the next ten or fifteen minutes (at that time it seemed an eternity) slowly descends in pitch beyond hearing until just the speaker is rumbling. Rock and roll! The miniatures, such as "The Empty Set," are so filled (title be damned) with information that you put in a glass of water and that takes on, relatively, gargantuan proportions. "Information Mechanics" is more than just a track title; in some ways it should be the title of this record.

One Christmas I gave Henry the "Jesus Plant." Water it and let it die. Water it again, and it rises from the grave.

Outside Pleasure originally ran 11, "Punctual as Actual" (not included), 12, 4, 1, 3, 8, and 13. It was recorded August 1979 at Woody Woodman's Finger Palace, Berkeley, and Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. The original order of solo material from Aloha was 2, 9, 5, 6, 10, 14 and 7. Recorded by Phil Brown at Warner Brothers Recording Studio, North Hollywood. Cover: Chris Baumgart; additional photos: Craig Denis Street. Notes: JO.

Henry Kaiser, "Homesickness"

For more of Henry Kaiser's music, visit Bert Switzer's site.

Henry Kaiser, "Delerium"

From Table of Elements:

Henry Kaiser, "The Blood at the Back of the Harp"

From Henry Kaiser's blog:

Finally, I just saw the most recent Gamera film. And I really loved it. It's the best Kaiju (Japanese Monster) film ever. I love Gamera so much! It's cool that he's both a sea monster and a space monster. Chris Larsen of www.girlbrand.com, just made me a cool guitar with a reverse glass painting of Gamera on the top. He will post pix of it at that site soon.

Henry Kaiser, "Aquirax Aida"

From henrykaiser.net

SPECIFIC SUGGESTED READING:

It is inspiring and educational to read biographies and critical studies of famous musicians from B.B. King to Eddie Van Halen to Iannis Xenakis. It is certainly useful to study method and theory books. However, in this list I'm trying to point out some fairly obscure books that you might never come across on your own. My reading of these books has helped me to create the ways that I think about music and music making. Many of these books are not directly about music. But if you listen to me play, the music that you will here will have been radically affected by some of the things that I have learned here. Some of these books are fairly expensive and difficult to find. I suggest that you try a large library, particularly a university library. Many of these books are old and valued friends and it is my pleasure to introduce them to you.:

Musics of Many Cultures, edited by Elizabeth May, University of California Press, 1980. Twenty essays on different musics of our planet: China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Polynesia, Australia, Africa, Iran, Alaska, South America, etc. This can turn you on to many new musical sounds, ideas and feelings. Useful discographies and bibliographies are included.

Improvisation - Its Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey, Moorland, 1980. Improvisation is one of the most widely practiced and yet least documented and understood aspects of music. This excellent volume is the only book that I know of that discusses improvisation in any kind of philosophical detail. It includes interviews on this subject with musicians from many different styles: Indian, flamenco, baroque, classical organ, rock (Steve Howe) and jazz. Bailey gives a very good history of the British-European free improvisation movement of the 60's and 70's that inspired me to pick up guitar. Unfortunately this book is now out-of-print. So, try your library for it. You might be able to get it by mail from Derek Bailey, 14 Downs Road, London E5, England.

Sound Structure in Music, by Robert Erickson, University of California Press, 1975. There are countless books on the subjects of melody, harmony and rhythm. This is about the only generally readable book that I know of on the subject of an area of music that is just as important: timbre. This book helped provide a framework for a lot of my thoughts on this subject. What is the exact difference between the guitar sounds of Hubert Sumlin, Otis Rush and Albert Collins? What is the difference between a note, a chord, a sound and a noise? Why does it mean something very different when Albert King and Eric Clapton both bend an A up to a C#? How can I make my solo guitar playing sound like a large orchestra? These are the kind of thoughts that this book encouraged for me. Very inspiring but also a bit academic and orientated towards 20th century classical music.

Mind Tools - The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality, by Rudy Rucker, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, The Mathematical Tourist, by Ivars Peterson, Freeman, 1988 & Silicon Dreams, by Dr. Robert Lucky, St. Martins, 1989. I was one of those kids who enjoyed mathematics a lot in school. If you hated math you might not like these books. They are full of clear explanations for the general reader of what is happening on the far frontiers of mathematics today. The emphasis of Mind Tools and Silicon Dreams is on a fairly new branch of math/science called information theory. The "thought tools" of information theory have proven to be very useful to me for thinking about and making music. To me, all music that I have heard is just one tiny drop from an infinite ocean of music that could be. Reading these books could give you a good handle on how to think about what music might be in the depths or on distant shores of that ocean. There are many books that directly relate math and music. Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, for instance, is a popular book that I do not recommend. I find its ideas to be extremely culture bound and limited.

The Science of Musical Sound, by John R. Pierce, Scientific American Library, 1983. The scientific view of music. The basic physics and mathematics of music are set forth in this well-illustrated volume. The author is a professor at Bell Laboratories who was involved with the first computer-generation of music about 25 years ago. If you are getting into MIDI and synthesizers/samplers, then this would be an excellent book to read to get an overall understanding of the scientific views of what music and sound are.

Grammatical Man - Information, Entropy, Language and Life, by Jeremy Campbell, Touchstone-Simon and Schuster, 1982. An excellent, popularized introduction to information theory as mentioned above. Some sections on the structure of language that relate well to the structure of music. Some interesting discussions of music, too. I suspect that information theory and music will become a very fashionable subject during the 1990's. I was exposed to information theory at the same time that I started to play guitar in the early 70's. I have thought about music from this point of view from the very first day that I picked up a guitar in 1972 and still information theory completely colors the way that I think of music today.

Mind and Nature, by Gregory Bateson, Bantam, 1980. This book is concerned with Bateson's theory that how we think and learn is governed by the same sort of system that governs the evolution of ecology of all life on earth. I like to compare systems and this book provides interesting system models to apply to art and music. Since the human mind produces music, it is interesting to look at how it might work and think about how that affects music. While directed towards a general audience this book is a challenging pleasure to read. It certainly challenged my assumptions about many things.

The Lore of the Chinese Lute, by R.H. Van Gulik, Sophia-Tuttle, 1969. The chin or Chinese lute of this volume has the most sophisticated and varied right hand picking techniques of any instrument that I know. I have applied a lot of this book's information directly to guitar technique.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas C. Schelling, Norton, 1978. I took a course from this guy in College. It was probably worth more than all of the time that I spent in all my other classes combined. He deals with a special area of his own where economics meets human behavior meets unanticipated results. How does behavior in the aggregate become more than the sum of simple individual behavior? How do a group of musicians playing and improvising together create music that transcends their individual contributions? Why are artists who nobody likes so popular? Why does the music industry behave the ways that it does...often in ways that are bad for music? This work, for me, provides an interestingly different starting point for discussing such subjects (while of course the book never mentions music).

The Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky, Simon and Schuster, 1986. Minsky is one of the chief pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence in computer science. In this book he attempts a unified theory of the mind and the nature of thought. It can also be looked at as a new conception of human psychology. Some possible unifying concepts for all that has been discussed above are provided here.

Does God Play Dice? :The Mathematics of Chaos, by Ian Stewart, Blackwell, 1989. Fractal mathematics, something very important to me since the late 70's is suddenly becoming very fashionable. For me this is probably even more relevant to the music of the future than information theory. This is by far the best, and most accessable book that I know of on chaos and fractals.

Henry Kaiser, "An Economy Of Scale"

From henrykaiser.net

SUGGESTED LISTENING/VIEWING/READING

Here are some things that I know about that I'd like to suggest for you to check out. These listings are by no means complete and they are in pretty much of a random order. These are all people/things that I love and have been influenced by. I could talk for a minimum of a half-hour and play you five minutes worth of guitar for every single name, country, style or book listed below.

VARIOUS GUITARISTS:Harvey Mandel, John Fahey, Jerry Garcia, Danny Gatton, Billy Gibbons, Robbie Robertson, Ry Cooder, George Van Eps, Jim Hall, David Torn, Bill Frisell, Gabby Pahinui, Raymand Kane, Amos Garrett, James Burton, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Nolan, Pete Cosey, David Lindley, Bob Weir, Peter Green, Merle Travis, Jimmy Bryant, Clarence White, Dick Dale, John McLaughlin, Hank Garland, Randy California, John Abercrombie, Fred Marshall, Ralph Towner, Jimmie Webster, Terje Rypdal, Richard Thompson, Glenn Phillips, John Cipollina, Sekou Diabete, Brij Bhushan Kabra, Sonny Greenwich, Tisziji Munoz, Carlos Santana, Neil Young, Robbie Basho, Reeves Gabrels, Atta Issaics, Roy Nichols, Chuck Berry, Curtis Mayfield, Steve Cropper, Henry Vestine, Jerry Reed, Bola Sete, Speedy West, Jan Akkerman, J.J. Cale, Bob Adams, Grady Martin, Leo Nocentelli, Ollie Halsall, Allan Holdsworth, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Ray Russell, Phil Baugh, Sandy Bull, Davey Graham, Martin Carthy, Lonnie Mack, Mike Bloomfield, Joseph Spence, James Blackthorne, Pat Martino, Bob Brozman, Greg Ginn, Bruce Anderson, Larry Carlton, Larry Coryell, Les Paul, Scott Colby, Roy Buchanan, Junior Barnard, Albert Lee, Jerry McGhee, Eldon Shamblin, Jerry Donahue, Leo Kottke, Robben Ford, Joe Maphis, Scotty Moore, Don Rich, Elliot Ingber, Bill Harkleroad, Jeff Cotton, Frank Zappa, Shawn Lane, Ramon Montoya, Harold Kelling, Gabor Szabo, Peter Lang, Michael Hedges, Tisziji Munoz, Ernest Ranglin, Steve Kimock, Nels Cline, Chris Muir, etc.

BLUES GUITAR, urban and rural: Lonnie Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, Skip James, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, Albert Collins, Jody Williams, John Lee Hooker, Guitar Slim, Wayne Bennett, Lafayette Thomas, Johnny Heartsman, Johnny Guitar Watson, Robert Pete Williams, Snooks Eaglin, Robert Willkins, Freddie Roulette, Tommy Johnson, Son House, Bukka White, Rev. Utah Smith, Fred McDowell, Blind Willie Johnson, Charlie Patton, Matt Murphey, Willie Brown, Lightnin' Hopkins, Buddy Guy, Tampa Red, Hound Dog Taylor, Brewer Phillips, Luther Tucker, James Ulmer, Robert Ward, Ali Farka Toure, Big Joe Williams, Tommy McClennan, Magic Sam, J.B. Lenoir, Billy Butler, Pat Hare, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Rosetta Tharpe, Cal Green, Clarence Green, Robert Nighthawk, Pee Wee Crayton, Lowell Fulson, James Davis, William Robertson, etc.

WEIRD/EXPERIMENTAL/WILDLY INNOVATIVE GUITARISTS: Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharrock, Hans Reichel, Eliott Sharp, Davey Williams, Fred Frith, Keith Rowe, Eugene Chadbourne, Masayuki Takayanagi, Tomoko Itani, Dudkin Valeriy, Joe Morris, Jim O’Rourke, etc.

MODERN COMPOSERS: Bela Bartok, Duke Ellington, Conlon Nancarrow, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Ives, Harry Partch, Gyorgy Ligeti, Toru Takemitsu, Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, Anthony Braxton, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Henry Brant, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, etc.

FREE IMPROVISATION/FREE JAZZ: Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Stevens, John Oswald, Han Benninck, Paul Lovens, Tony Oxley, Anthony Braxton, Toshinori Kondo, Peter Brotzman, Pharoah Sanders, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Revolutionary Ensemble, Greg Goodman, Rova Sax Quartet, Julius Hemphill, Leo Smith, Derek Bailey, George Lewis, Richard Teitelbaum, Archie Shepp, Mashiko Togashi, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Barre Phillips, John Coltrane, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, Charles K. Noyes, Sang-Won Park, Jin Hi Kim, Barry Guy, Oliver Lake, Hugh Davies, Jaime Muir, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Marilyn Crispell, Milford Graves, Sonny Rollins, etc.

Henry Kaiser, "The Stormy Present"

From 'Henry Kaiser in Antarctica: Journal Five', December 6, 2001

Setting a DAT recorder at the geographic pole, I take out my acoustic guitar (in this case an all-graphite Rain Song guitar that I have used for years as a boat guitar on dive trips; it will remain here as a gift to Pole Station) and I ready myself to attempt to play slide guitar, using the South Pole as my guitar slide. The night before, I sat out by the pole and searched for a slack key tuning that would right for this job. Finding one that I liked, I checked it with many station residents, all of whom approved. Messing around with the pole for an hour, I found that I could produce lots of sound effects and textures, but melody, groove, and harmony seemed quite elusive. I spent another 30 minutes trying to play melodies and licks, kneeling next to the pole, as my hands and knees became colder and colder. Gloves were on and off; finger picking became more and more problematic in the 40°F below zero air. After 90 minutes, I was a little tired, so I stood up, put my gloves on again, inserted some chemical hand warmers and held the guitar's strings up against the pole. I stared off to the distant horizon, across the miles of whiteness, and I idly strummed the guitar with a gloved right hand as I slid the guitar's neck along the pole. After drifting into an empty-minded trance for a while, I returned to the mundane world to find myself strumming a peculiar rhythm pattern with my gloved right hand. What did it sound like? It seemed American Indian in cadence, not something that I had played before. It was quite enjoyable. Suddenly, I realized that the American flag next to me was flapping with exactly the same rhythm! The music had literally came to me OUT OF THE AIR. Next I tried fretting and sliding against the pole to find melody and chords. A riff jumped out at me. It was fun to play. Again, I drifted off into no-mind state for a while, as I continued to play. My thoughts returned to the pole and the Race to the Pole that the heroes of the early age of Antarctic exploration had participated in. Hmmmm? This rhythm fit my idea of a slow race, as was the race to the pole. Suddenly I had a set of musical ideas for a piece about that historic race and I was instantly able to play it! I checked the frozen DAT machine, and it was still operational. I ran off five takes of the tune without many mistakes. This is the kind of inspiration that I had hoped for on the ice, and here it was, like some kind of miracle out of the air, when I least expected it.

Henry Kaiser, "Farmer In Heaven"

Widely recognized as one of the most creative and innovative guitarists, improvisers, and producers in the fields of rock, jazz and experimental music, California-based musician Henry Kaiser is one of the most extensively recorded as well, having appeared on more than 140 different albums. A restless collaborator who constantly seeks the most diverse and personally challenging contexts for his music, Mr. Kaiser not only produces and contributes to a staggering number of recorded projects, he performs frequently throughout the USA, Europe and Japan, with several regular groupings as well as solo guitar concerts and concerts of freely improvised music with a host of diverse instrumentalists. Evidence of his exceptional musical breadth and versatility can be found in a partial list of the extraordinary artists with whom he has recorded and/or performed: Herbie Hancock, Richard Thompson, David Lindley, Bob Weir, The ROVA Sax Quartet, Elliot Sharp, John "Drumbo" French, Raymond Kane, Michael McClure, Bill Laswell, Steve Lacy, Fred Frith, Barbara Higbie, John Abercrombie, Leo Smith, moe., Negativland, Michael Stipe, Terry Riley, Jim O'Rourke, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sergei Kuriokhin, Zero, Critters Buggin', Diamanda Galas, Sonny Sharrock, Hans Reichel, Chris Cutler, Henry Cow, John Zorn, Andy West, David Torn, Bill Frisell, Joey Baron, Davey Williams, Eugene Chadbourne, Evan Parker, Sang-Won Park, Material, The Golden Palominos, Victoria Williams, Jin-Hi Kim, John Oswald, Glenn Phillips, Toshinori Kondo, John Stevens, Tom Constanten, Kiyohiko Senba, Bruce Anderson, Sang-Won Park, Yuji Takahashi, John Medeski, Zoogz Rift, Ngoc Lam, Dama Mahaleo, Merl Saunders, Freddie Roulette, Mari Kimura, Harvey Mandel, Danny Carnahan, Robin Petrie, Rakoto Frah, Rossy, Alan Senauke, John Tchicai, George Lewis, Kazumi Watanabe, Peter Brotzmann, Zero, Bob Bralove, Greg Allman, Billy Kreutzman, Jerry Garcia, Miya Masaoka, Miroslav Tadic, Cecil Taylor, and Amos Garrett.

As one of the "first generation" of American free improvisers, born in Oakland, California, on 19 September, 1952, Mr. Kaiser has helped unfetter the guitar from the conventions of genre-bound techniques, but his instrumental virtuosity and technological breakthroughs are always deployed in the service of deep and immediate personal expression. Likewise, he has developed a highly individual, inimitable style from an uncommonly varied range of influences. Some of his musical sources include traditional blues, East Asian, Classical North Indian and Hawaiian music, free jazz, free improvisation, American steel-string concert guitar, and 20th century classical, but like any probing artist he also draws creatively from other abiding interests, which for Mr. Kaiser include Information Theory, experimental cinema, mathematics, experimental literature and SCUBA diving. (He was employed for the last 15 years as a senior instructor in Underwater Scientific Research at the University of California at Berkeley. Sadly, Berkeley's excellent scientific diving program was terminated in the summer of 1996.)

Since taking up the guitar in 1972, Mr. Kaiser has built an ever-mounting reputation as one of the foremost musicians of his time. The respect of his peers has earned him membership on the advisory board of Guitar Player Magazine, and the appreciation of his creativity by the music, film and television industries has kept him in command as a composer and producer. He scored the weekly television series, Secrets & Mysteries, and has assisted dozens of artists from Ali Akbar Khan to Richard Thompson with their recording projects.

Guitar players and devoted fans can delve deeper into Mr. Kaiser's instrumental and philosophical approaches to music via Eclectic Electric, Exploring New Horizons of Guitar and Improvisation a very unusual 97 minute guitar instructional video released by Silver Eagle/Backstage Pass/Music Video Projects.

Mr. Kaiser returned from the island of Madagascar in 1991, where he and his friend David Lindley recorded 6 CDs for the Shanachie label, in collaboration with various Malagasy musicians. The first of these CDs to be released, A WORLD OUT OF TIME, HENRY KAISER AND DAVID LINDLEY IN MADAGASCAR, is, perhaps, the most successful of all American World Music releases of all time! VOL. 2 of A WORLD OUT OF TIME was nominated for a Grammy award. Two more Madagascar releases have also been recently produced by Mr. Kaiser in Madagascar and Louisiana. Kaiser & Lindley's second project, THE SWEET SUNNY NORTH VOLs. 1 & 2, were recorded in Norway and features collaborations with most of Norway's greatest musical artists, as well as many surprising "discoveries". Henry and David are planning several new series of collaborative recordings that may someday take the duo "on the road" to Korea. Richard Thompson and Henry are presently considering preparation of a similar type of collaborative project for the Islands of Fiji.

Another recent and very successful project is Wadada Leo Smith's and Henry's YO MILES!, a tribute to the mid 70's works of Miles Davis. A live version of this project will debute on Oct. 21, 1999 at the San Fancisco Jazz Festival. -- From www.henrykaiser.net

Henry Kaiser, "Punctual As Usual"

-- Liner Notes --

All selections are free improvisations; heard as played. In addition to guitar, an FM radio was employed on The Stormy Present. Recorded August 1979, at Woody Woodman's Finger Palace, Berkeley and at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. Photography: Craig Denis Street.

Many Thanks to: Larry Ochs, Greg Goodman, Toshinori Kondo, Lee Kaplan, Alex Varty, John Oswald, Al Mattes, Marvin Green, Scott Colby, Tom Mulhern, Ron Armstrong, Hideo Kamimoto, Howard Dumble, Bob Shumaker, Phil Brown, Allen McKinney, Craig Street, Judith Stadtman, Woody Woodman, and Fred Frith.

Metalanguage Records, 2639 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705.

Henry Kaiser, "Outside Pleasure"

HKOP