John Abercrombie
In August 2017, John Abercrombie died in Cortland, New York, bringing to a close the life of an American jazz guitarist, composer, and mandolinist who had worked within the jazz fusion genre.
Born on December 16, 1944, in Port Chester, New York, Abercrombie studied at Berklee College of Music and was later educated at the University of North Texas College of Music. Those years of formal training supported his work across multiple instruments and roles — guitarist, mandolinist, and composer — within the broader field of jazz fusion. As a recording artist, he committed that work to record, contributing to the literature of the genre as a citizen and practitioner of American jazz.
Abercrombie's career drew on the instrumental range he developed across guitar and mandolin, alongside his work as a composer, all of it situated within jazz fusion. He died on August 22, 2017, in Cortland — a life that had begun in Port Chester and moved through the training grounds of Berklee College of Music and the University of North Texas College of Music before finding its expression in the studios and performances where he worked as a jazz musician and recording artist.
Quotes by John Abercrombie
The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.
I don't think anybody really super-consciously tries to develop a style to play.
Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.
The music is fun. The big difference performing it live is that we might get a little more heated, not as subdued, we'll stretch things out more. It's how you stay fresh after such a long time in the business.
I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
I think once I started writing my own music and having my own bands, that's when I got more of a focus on what I wanted to do, personally.
When we improvise freely - that is, without a structure - it tends to sound more like 20th century classical music, more like a classical ensemble improvising, as opposed to a free-jazz group, where you're more used to hearing saxophones honking.
I grew up listening to Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, guys with blues backgrounds.
In the studio, if things go wrong, you stop things and fix them. I have never been in a recording studio, really, where the people in the booth were not interested in making a very good album. It's often a light-hearted atmosphere but serious at the same time.
Every time I listen back to solos of mine I’ll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can’t stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don’t think so much like that.