covediver
Contributor
Henry Kaiser: The Great Explorer | Premier Guitar
Henry Kaiser bought his first guitar and slide the day he heard Sonny Sharrock, and immediately set off on his 45-year career as an improviser—playing on more than 300 albums, performing and recording around the world, and establishing musical and deep friendships with such fellow lions of creative music as Derek Bailey, Richard Thompson, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, David Lindley, D’Gary, Wadada Leo Smith, Sang Won-Park, and John French.
But the actor Lloyd Bridges cast an equally important spell over Kaiser. Decades before he played drug–addled air traffic controller Steve McCroskey in Airplane!, Bridges was the scuba-diving hero of the TV adventure Sea Hunt. Since it was impossible to film dialog during the weekly show’s underwater sequences, Bridges’ character, Mike Nelson, provided voiceover narration that often explained aspects of diving in detail. Kaiser, who was 6 years old when the show debuted in 1958, was hooked and donned his first scuba suit when he was 11—nine years before scoring his initial guitar.
So, parallel to his adventurous music making, Kaiser has pursued a career as a scientific diver. He spent 17 years teaching research diving at the University of California, Berkeley, and since 2001 he has been deployed repeatedly as a research diver in Antarctica. Which explains why Kaiser can count both Sharrock, the father of free jazz guitar, and the Weddell seal among his musical collaborators. And yes, he has played guitar beneath the ice, where the waters average 28 degrees Fahrenheit....
Henry Kaiser bought his first guitar and slide the day he heard Sonny Sharrock, and immediately set off on his 45-year career as an improviser—playing on more than 300 albums, performing and recording around the world, and establishing musical and deep friendships with such fellow lions of creative music as Derek Bailey, Richard Thompson, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, David Lindley, D’Gary, Wadada Leo Smith, Sang Won-Park, and John French.
But the actor Lloyd Bridges cast an equally important spell over Kaiser. Decades before he played drug–addled air traffic controller Steve McCroskey in Airplane!, Bridges was the scuba-diving hero of the TV adventure Sea Hunt. Since it was impossible to film dialog during the weekly show’s underwater sequences, Bridges’ character, Mike Nelson, provided voiceover narration that often explained aspects of diving in detail. Kaiser, who was 6 years old when the show debuted in 1958, was hooked and donned his first scuba suit when he was 11—nine years before scoring his initial guitar.
So, parallel to his adventurous music making, Kaiser has pursued a career as a scientific diver. He spent 17 years teaching research diving at the University of California, Berkeley, and since 2001 he has been deployed repeatedly as a research diver in Antarctica. Which explains why Kaiser can count both Sharrock, the father of free jazz guitar, and the Weddell seal among his musical collaborators. And yes, he has played guitar beneath the ice, where the waters average 28 degrees Fahrenheit....
