ATTN SHREDDERS, PLEASE BOW DOWN TO ALLAN HOLDSWORTH

This morning I was reading an interview with Binary Code guitarist Jesse Zuretti, in which the artful shredder mentioned jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth as a major influence on his playing. Curious, I hit YouTube up for an Allan Holdsworth history lesson.

Check out this video of Holdsworth playing live; he doesn’t really get going until around the 2 minute mark, at which points he lets loose with a flurry of seemingly atonal out-of-key shred passages that just somehow work. Then around the 5 minute mark he goes bonkers, and here’s where I see the Zuretti influence; the quick, almost-sweep-like jazzy shred passages recall the solos in The Binary Code songs “Ghost Planet” and “The Story” (the latter of which is streaming on The Binary Code’s MySpace) in their almost Vernon Reid-esque insanity. Like Reid’s solos, it’s constantly as if the train’s about to run right off the rails but you know there’s a method to the madness underneath it all.

-VN