HOWARD ROBERTS

[jayp51]

Any H.R. disciples out there?

[shawn]

I haven't heard of him yet....
Have any links?

[jayp51]

You bet!
Mike Evans has the best site on the internet on HR.
I don't remember the url,but if you do a search on Howard Roberts, the website should come up.

[Robert G. Denman]

The late Howard Roberts was a tremendous jazz
player from the old school of jazz guitar. He also
composed and played the background music for an old
TV show called "Twilight Zone". Anybody remember
that show?

Howard Roberts was recorded a lot and the last I
knew he was working for Concord Jazz in California
before his death.

www.concordjazz.com

Also, go to classic jazz guitar for a biography on him
as well as all the other great jazz guitarists from
his time.

www.classicjazzguitar.com and click on
"guitar players" at the top of their start page.
Howard Roberts is listed along with HR links.

He was great.

Keep on pickin',
Robert

[shawn]

Sweet!!! He did the Twilight Zone Music? ;D
That's on every night at 11:00p.m. during the week, I watch it before I go to bed! Cool.
Was it the music soundtracks on there or were there also guitar tracks as well? I don't think that I've heard any guitar tracks, but definently some cool soundtracks.
Glad to know this stuff.

[Bernardo Pires]

Awesome jazz player.
Thanks Robert for the link
Bernardo

[BobMc]

One of his disciples is Wollf Marshall the author. He actually owns HR's "black" guitar which was a heavily modified Gibson that Roberts used all the time. If I understand it right, Roberts did all the work himself.

[dkaplowitz]

I hear Gibson's re-releasing the Howard Roberts model archtop. That should be interesting.

I studied at GIT while he was still alive and he was a nice guy, extremely clever and he had a good sense of humor. He was a real monster. He was known to grab piles of random sheet music and just sight read through it and look for ideas from it.

Part of the GIT course was his book "Super Chops" (now out of print) - a boot camp for playing over jazz changes. Basically the 90 day course gives you a tune with a ton of changes (a' la Cherokee or Giant Steps) each week. You record yourself playing the changes over and over for a solid hour every day. Then you play over those changes in constant 8th notes every day (later in the course it graduates to triplets) for the complete hour. You start slow and build from there. I never got past week one or two without driving myself nuts with my horrible playing.

It's a great idea though -- to train yourself not to rely solely on phrasing to make good lines in your playing. You're basically forced to make interesting lines with just constant 8th notes. Maybe I'll try it again at the end of the Summer if I'm feeling up to it. (BTW, the chord voicing he recommends are sick too).


P.S. I bought a couple of his CDs this week from Amazon. I'm waiting for them to ship, but I'm excited about them. Apparently they're selling his original albums 2 per CD, which is a nice value.

[epi]

Hi All,

An interesting note on Howard Roberts: He recorded about a dozen albums in the '60's and he arranged them to run less than the magic '3 minutes', which virtually guaranteed him MOR Radio play.

Amazingly,.... the songs were bona fide Jazz. He also was a co-founder of GIT (now Musicians Institute..). He backs Julie London on "Julie is Her Name Vol II", Barney Kessel backed her on "Julie is her Name Vol I"

Check this site: wwwutstat.utoronto.ca/mikevans/hroberts/guitars/guitars.html-29k

[epi]

epi here: I shudda putta dot after......
www.utstat.utoronto.ca/mikevans/hroberts/guitars/guitars.html-29k

[bigd]

HR was a heavy cat- I have heard that the folks at Roberts Music Institute (.com) in Seattle are gearing up to bring back the Legendary HOWARD ROBERTS SEMINAR- this will be cool. I'll go for sure!!! Big D