Maybe I should clarify. Music is born from a complex intersection of influences. Drugs can be very influential in what we end up hearing. I am not against drug use in the making of art. Sometimes it can work out well at stages of a musician's development as in the cases of Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, and Syd Barrett. But in all these cases it turned into personal disaster.
However more often than not, what you get is unfulfilled potential and dreary predictability, which contradicts what we think of as 'experimentation'. Coryell is such an example. His early albums show profound technical prowess which gets all revved up and goes nowhere in terms of creative experimentation and improvisation. Maybe if he was sober he could have been great, we will never know. He certainly was not a Coltrane, Parker, Hendrix, or Billie Holliday type figure in that sense. He remained quite average and dwelled in the vast sea mediocrity, IMO.
As I said, I am unfamiliar with his work of the last 15 or so years, and I hope he has matured as a person and a musician. That's all.
However more often than not, what you get is unfulfilled potential and dreary predictability, which contradicts what we think of as 'experimentation'. Coryell is such an example. His early albums show profound technical prowess which gets all revved up and goes nowhere in terms of creative experimentation and improvisation. Maybe if he was sober he could have been great, we will never know. He certainly was not a Coltrane, Parker, Hendrix, or Billie Holliday type figure in that sense. He remained quite average and dwelled in the vast sea mediocrity, IMO.
As I said, I am unfamiliar with his work of the last 15 or so years, and I hope he has matured as a person and a musician. That's all.