Jonny Greenwood

All Music Guide:

Although most people's initial musical exposure to Jonny Greenwood came via his hugely distorted guitar crunches on Radiohead's breakthrough single "Creep," Greenwood (not to be confused with his older brother/bass-playing bandmate Colin Greenwood) could be more appropriately described as Radiohead's jack of all trades -- a multi-instrumentalist who is as comfortable playing xylophone, sampler, or keyboards (to name just a few) as his uniquely angular guitar lines. Along with Thom Yorke's inimitable vocals, Jonny Greenwood's wide array of unconventional sonic textures helped to define Radiohead's distinctive sound and push the boundaries of their music into unusual and decidedly non-rock directions.

Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood was born on November 5, 1971, in Oxford, England. Along with his brother Colin, Greenwood attended Abingdon School near Oxford; it was here that the older Colin first came into contact with schoolmate Thom Yorke. Before long, the two were playing music together in a project dubbed TNT. Guitarist Ed O'Brien and drummer Phil Selway were soon admitted into the fold, and the new band adopted the moniker On a Friday (in reference to the day of the week they would routinely get together and practice). Jonny Greenwood, who was a couple of years younger than the other four, repeatedly asked to play with the group; he was finally invited to play harmonica with On a Friday at a 1987 gig at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. This proved to be his initiation into the band; he later took over keyboard duties for the group before finally switching into the role of lead guitarist.

However, On a Friday were placed on an extended hiatus when the four older members went off to college in the fall of 1987. A couple of years later, Greenwood himself went on to study music at Oxford. By the summer of 1991, though, his bandmates had graduated from college and reunited the group, prompting him to leave school (after only a year) so that he could commit to On a Friday on a full-time basis.

The re-formed quintet quickly got to work, recording and releasing a series of demo tapes and gigging steadily in the area. It wasn't long before the major labels came knocking, and On a Friday soon had a record deal with EMI. Their new label quickly pointed out (not unjustly) that the band's name was somewhat unwieldy; the band concurred, and Radiohead was selected as their new name, taken from the title of a Talking Heads song.

In late 1992, Radiohead exploded in America with their single "Creep"; featuring Greenwood's jarringly percussive, muted guitar bursts (which strangely provided the song's hook), "Creep" was widely embraced by MTV and alternative radio, who put the song into heavy rotation. Although follow-up singles from their album Pablo Honey were released, Radiohead could not escape the one-hit wonder stigma until the release of The Bends in 1995. An amazing artistic leap over their first album, The Bends contained plenty of Jonny Greenwood guitar pyrotechnics ("Just," "My Iron Lung"), but also revealed an assured, mature side of the group that was previously unknown ("Street Spirit," "Fake Plastic Trees").

Around this time, Greenwood's physically aggressive style of playing guitar began to take a toll on his right wrist. To relieve the pain and deter the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome, he was fitted with a wrist brace to provide support to the joint. The brace soon became a trademark of sorts for Greenwood, and he continued to wear it out of routine long after the immediate threat of injury was gone.

After The Bends, Greenwood began to show signs that he was growing uninspired with using the guitar as his primary means of expression. Said the guitarist, "There's only 12 power chords, and I think we've had about 20 years of them, so maybe it's time to move on." Greenwood took this sentiment so far as to (half-jokingly) issue a prompt to online Radiohead fans, asking them to send him any interesting chord progressions that they could devise.

Nevertheless, when Radiohead released the massively successful OK Computer in 1997, the guitar work was taken to new heights. Beginning immediately with the opening atonal "Airbag" riff, Greenwood redefined what a guitar could sound like, whether it was the distant, chiming gull cries of "Subterranean Homesick Alien" (which succeeds admirably in its attempt to re-create Miles Davis' Bitches Brew trumpet tone) or the digital meltdown near the end of "Paranoid Android."

On the ensuing North American tour, however, Greenwood's dissatisfaction with playing strictly guitar-oriented music reached its zenith -- a feeling that was carried over into the recording studio following the tour's completion. The release of Kid A in 2000 and its counterpart, Amnesiac, the following year clearly reflected this; Radiohead's trademark guitars had vanished from all but a handful of their songs, replaced instead with layers of synthesizers, keyboards, and samplers. And although Radiohead's 2003 release, Hail to the Thief, featured more guitars than either of the group's previous two albums, Jonny Greenwood's debut solo album, Bodysong (released later that year), was a mostly guitarless affair, proving once again that Greenwood need not be shackled to the confines of the electric guitar to compose original, evocative music.

He was hired by the BBC as composer in residence the following year, resulting in the publication of a handful of pieces, including "smear," "Piano for Children," and "Popcorn Superhet Receiver." Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller, a compilation of reggae and dub tracks from the vaults of Trojan Records, was released in 2007, as well as his critically acclaimed soundtrack for director Paul Thomas Anderson's Academy Award-winning oil tycoon drama There Will Be Blood. His work in film continued in 2010 with the soundtrack for Tran Anh Hung's big-screen adaptation of Japanese author Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood.

Wikipedia:

Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician and composer best known as a member of the English rock band Radiohead. Beyond his primary roles as the band's lead guitarist and keyboardist, Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and also plays viola, harmonica, glockenspiel, ondes Martenot, banjo and drums, and works with computer-generated sounds and sampling. Greenwood is also a computer programmer and writes music software used by Radiohead.

Beyond his work with Radiohead, Greenwood wrote the soundtracks of the films Bodysong, There Will Be Blood, Norwegian Wood and We Need To Talk About Kevin, as well as serving as composer-in-residence for the BBC Concert Orchestra. He is the younger brother of fellow Radiohead member, Colin Greenwood.

Noted for his aggressive playing style, Greenwood is consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of the modern era. Channel 4 described Greenwood as a "significant creative force within the music industry." He has also ranked #48 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time," while Spin ranked him #29 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Greenwood was also voted the seventh (#7) best guitarist of the last 30 years in a poll conducted by the BBC in 2010.

Career

Radiohead

Greenwood had begun studying music and psychology at Oxford Brookes University when Radiohead predecessor On A Friday signed a recording contract with EMI in 1991. He left the university shortly after. While Greenwood is the only member of Radiohead to have been classically trained on any instrument (he took viola lessons as a child), he is also the only band member without a university degree.

Greenwood's influence on Radiohead's recording and writing can be heard in many songs, as he usually takes the traditional lead-guitarist role. For a while, Greenwood wore an arm brace due to a repetitive strain injury attributed to his "aggressive" way of playing the instrument, often billed as "abusive guitar". He has said that "It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match."

Greenwood is often credited as the second major influence on songwriting in Radiohead, next to Thom Yorke. He wrote the music for the closing tracks of OK Computer ("The Tourist"), Kid A ("Motion Picture Soundtrack"), Amnesiac ("Life in a Glasshouse") and Hail to the Thief ("A Wolf at the Door"). He also wrote the intro, chorus and outro sections of the song "Subterranean Homesick Alien" from the OK Computer album, as well as the "rain down" section of "Paranoid Android". According to Yorke, the track "Just" from The Bends was "a competition by me and Jonny to get as many chords as possible into a song". An example of Greenwood's versatility is his use of the Ondes Martenot, which is featured on songs such as "The National Anthem" and "How to Disappear Completely" from the album Kid A, and "Pyramid Song" from the album Amnesiac. The song "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief, which also features the instrument, was dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Loriod, a pioneer of the Ondes.

Greenwood and Yorke also collaborated on the song "Arpeggi" which is a piece in a classical style centered around arpeggios for voice, Ondes, and orchestra. It was performed with the London Sinfonietta and Arab Orchestra of Nazareth at the Ether Festival in March 2005; the song would later be adapted for the full band to play in 2006, rearranged for guitar. A studio version (closer to the full band version than the orchestral version) appeared on the album In Rainbows as "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi".

Solo work and current projects

In 2003, Greenwood released his first solo album, Bodysong (2003), the soundtrack for the movie of the same title by filmmaker Simon Pummell. Bodysong also features contributions from his brother Colin on bass.

Jonny Greenwood was hired by the BBC as composer in residence to the BBC Concert Orchestra in May 2004, a job which gave him the opportunity to compose several pieces for symphony orchestra, piano and/or Ondes Martenot: smear, Piano for Children and Popcorn Superhet Receiver. smear premiered in 2004, and on 23 April 2005 Greenwood premiered his new work commissioned by BBC Radio 3, with music performed live by the BBC Concert Orchestra in London. The printed music for smear, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, Doghouse, Suite from Norwegian Wood and 48 Responses to Polymorphia (see below) is available from Faber Music Ltd in London. smear has also been recorded by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Martyn Brabbins and was Greenwood's recorded debut in the genre. Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia have also been released commercially.

Greenwood won the Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards for his piece, "Popcorn Superhet Receiver". The piece was inspired by radio static and the elaborate, dissonant tone clusters of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. It can be streamed from a BBC website. Upon winning the award Greenwood received £10,000 from the PRS Foundation towards a commission for a new orchestral work.

A fan of dub reggae, Greenwood released a compilation in collaboration with Trojan Records, entitled Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller in March 2007. This is the latest in Trojan’s Artist Choice Jukebox series, to which DJ Spooky and Don Letts have already contributed. Trojan Records provided Greenwood with its extensive catalog of songs, of which he chose 17. The title is a play on the first track on the collection, entitled "Dread Are The Controller", by Linval Thompson. The album contains tracks by artists such as Derrick Harriott, Gregory Isaacs, The Heptones and many more.

Greenwood composed the score for the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, from director Paul Thomas Anderson. The soundtrack contains excerpts from "Popcorn Superhet Receiver". His work as the composer for this film was highly acclaimed by reviewers and earned him an award at the Critics' Choice Awards. On January 21, 2008, however, the score was declared ineligible for an Academy Award nomination under a rule that prohibited "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music." On 4 February 2008 it was announced that Greenwood had won the trophy for Best Film Score in the Evening Standard British Film Awards for 2007. In its 2009 end-of-decade round-up Rolling Stone magazine named the film the best of the decade and cited Greenwood's score as a major element in its success, "redefining what is possible in film scores".

In 2008, Greenwood wrote the theme music for Adam Buxton's comedy pilot meeBOX, and collaborated with Israeli rock musician Dudu Tasa on Tasa's Hebrew-language single "What a Day".

In February 2010, Greenwood debuted a composition entitled "Doghouse" at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. In an interview following the performance, Greenwood and conductor Robert Ziegler revealed that the composition would be extrapolated into a score for the upcoming film Norwegian Wood directed by Anh Hung Tran, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Haruki Murakami. Greenwood described the writing of the piece to the BBC, "I wrote this piece mostly in hotels and dressing rooms while touring with Radiohead. This was more practical than glamorous — lots of time sitting around indoors, lots of instruments about — and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I can’t think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written." The premiere of the entire score took place on 19 March 2010.

In 2011, Greenwood composed the score for the film adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. He is also set to compose the score for Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming picture The Master. This will be the second collaboration between the two.

On March 13, 2012, Greenwood and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki released an album together on the Nonesuch label. It includes Greenwood's "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" and a new string orchestra work, "48 Responses to Polymorphia" (a homage to Penderecki's "Polymorphia" of 1961).

Musical influences

Greenwood is greatly influenced by jazz and classical music; his favourites include Lee Morgan and Miles Davis. He is a major fan of the Mo' Wax label (onetime home of Blackalicious, DJ Krush, DJ Shadow and Dr. Octagon). Along with other Radiohead band members, he loves Krautrock band Can and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Greenwood has stated that his all time favourite piece of music is Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, a gigantic piece for orchestra that features an Ondes Martenot, an instrument he discovered as a teenager. According to one of his entries on Radiohead's blog Dead Air Space, Greenwood has become a dub reggae aficionado, listening as of late 2005 to little else. Greenwood has also shown considerable interest in little known South African Post Punk band, Atom Band.

Legacy

Greenwood has inspired many with his guitar playing and style. He is also known for his aggressive guitar playing style. Guitarists such as Russell Lissack of the English rock band Bloc Party and many others cite Greenwood as an influence. Greenwood was also ranked number 60 in Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" When Rolling Stone Magazine updated their list in November 2011, Greenwood's rank had jumped to number 48.

Personal life

In 1995 he married Israeli-born Sharona Katan, a visual artist whose work (credited as Shin Katan) appears on the covers of the Bodysong soundtrack as well as the There Will Be Blood soundtrack. Their first son, Tamir, was born in 2002 and the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief was dedicated to him. They also have a daughter named Omri, born in 2005, and a second son, named Zohar, who was born in February 2008.

Interests

He listed his favourite video games on the band's website in 2010, cherishing Ico and spanning from 1984's Elite to 2010's Red Dead Redemption.

Equipment

Electric Guitars

Greenwood currently uses Dean Markley Signature Series 10-46 strings.

Acoustic Guitars

Amplifiers

Early on in Greenwood's career, he used a Fender Twin Reverb for clean tones. Greenwood's Fender Eighty-Five has frequently been misidentified as a Fender Deluxe 85. It has never been confirmed that he has toured, or recorded, with a Deluxe 85.

Effects (guitar)

Keyboards

Other instruments

Collaborations

Scores