When Ian Anderson, then an itinerant guitar player, decided to focus on the flute, he did it in a largely self-taught way. As a result some unorthodox elements found their way into his style – not that you could initially convince the Jethro Tull frontman of that.
“I was a huge success as a flute player, playing it entirely wrongly,” Anderson tells Ken Bruce, laughing heartily. “I discovered, when my daughter was learning to play flute at school, that she was using different fingering for some of the notes. I told her: ‘This is wrong; it should be like this.’ She said: ‘No, it’s not; look, it says so in the book!'”
Anderson says he was forced into the “unnerving conclusion that she was right, the books were right, and I was most embarrassingly wrong.”
So, he ended up settling into a scholarly pursuit of his signature instrument in the early 1990s – well after Jethro Tull’s initial heyday of Aqualung and Thick as a Brick from some two decades before.
“Being self taught, and never having had a lesson, I was playing a lot of the notes using incorrect fingering,” Anderson adds. “I had to relearn it again, in about ’91, I think. … It taught me to take a little more seriously. In relearning my own repertoire, it was a good lesson in mid life – not quite a crisis, but damned close to it.”
- Angell & Crane, “Himalayan Dial-Up” from ‘Angell & Crane’ (2024): Video Premiere - November 22, 2024
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- Bryn Roberts, “Aloft” from ‘Aloft’ (2024): Video Premiere - September 20, 2024
Ian sounded better playing the “wrong” way. His peak was the solo on the studio version of My God. No contest. Nothing he plays today comes close. He sounds more like James Galway now. Now, James is fine for what he is, but he could never give us the breadth of expression in My God. It’s more like listening to a trained monkey than like Ian’s solos in the early to mid ’70s.
I recall, when taking a course on classical guitar, how I enjoyed learning the fingering but found it unsuitable for rock. (Did you know that, technically, your thumb pad is supposed to remain behind, and not over, the guitar’s neck?) And when I showed my professor standard “tricks” like pull-offs, hammer-ons and bends, he would ask, “How’d you do that?”
Sometimes erudite, academic “learning” is actually unlearning.