Allan Holdsworth Dead at 70
By Noah Yoo.
Influential jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth has died, according to MoonJune Records’ Leonardo Pavkovic. He was 70. A musician with a decades-long career that began in the early 1970s, Holdsworth worked with numerous influential acts in the progressive rock and jazz fusion world (Yes, Soft Machine, more) before he was brought to the attention of major label executives by Eddie Van Halen in the early 1980s. He continued to release studio albums through the rest of his life, the most recent one being Tales From the Vault, a compilation of unreleased tracks that was crowdfunded in 2015. Holdsworth was known as one of the most prominent users of the SynthAxe, a rare fretted MIDI controller that he recorded several albums with. A memorial funding page can be found here.
This story originally appeared on Pitchfork.
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