In progressive rock circles Bill Bruford needs no introduction. A legend in the field with an enduring musical legacy, Bill has had a hand in creating several seminal works that practically define the genre.
It was our pleasure to have the opportunity to "chat" with him recently. Questions were culled from several submitted by our readers here at Progressive Ears, and a few were added by PE's founder Sean as well.
Sean Tonar - Progressive Ears: First, please tell us about
your endeavors since retiring and your goals for Summerfold / Winterfold records
and more...
Bill Bruford: This year, 2009, I've
published and promoted a book, and this is the forty-sixth interview in that
regard. I've produced and marketed two albums on Summerfold - The Summerfold
Collection and Skin and Wire: Pianocircus featuring Bill Bruford plays
the music of Colin Riley. I've produced and marketed two albums on
Winterfold - The Winterfold Collection and In Tokyo: Moraz-Bruford.
I've attended the Grozjian Summer Percussion Camp as a non-combatant observer
and as we speak I'm doing half a dozen lecture engagements at UK academic
institutions. Enough already! No time yet to think of 2010, I'm too exhausted
from being retired.
PE: Of all the albums you've played on, which do you hold in highest regard? Which rise to the top in your memory, and why?
BB: I remember them all. They all rise to the top of the memory, either as the occasional moments where nice things happened and God smiled, or the much more frequent opposite, which God didn't think funny at all. Given that I'm not much in love with anything I've done, I'll grudgingly admit that a couple of albums a decade, irrespective of my particular contribution, seem to have "legs", and some sort of coherency in their vision which enables them to stand apart from their contemporaries.
Close to the Edge from Yes,and King Crimson's Red in the 70s, and Discipline and Absent Lovers in the 80s, are perhaps some such. Also One of a Kind by Bruford, and Earthworks' first CD and A Part, and yet Apart were milestones upon a particular path for me. Listening back to old efforts is a bit like looking back through the family photo album; you're mostly just embarrassed not only by the terrible jeans you wore, but by the fact that you didn't appear to know they were terrible!
Any reasonable player would refer you to his most recent efforts, because we live in the hope that things get better. If I were still recording and performing, I'd do more things like Colin Riley's Skin and Wire.
PE: How do you feel about the future of music in this digital file sharing age? Hopes? Fears?
BB: When China's first Premier Zhou Enlai was asked in the mid-20th century for his opinion on the historical significance of the 1789 French Revolution, he is said to have replied: "It's too soon to tell".
In that spirit, it's too soon to tell. I hope commercial music isn't going to get any worse than it already is. Languishing just below the surface, however, are musicians who remain as brilliant and inventive as ever. I suspect they are mainly in Brooklyn NY. Now that the net allows everyone to talk at once, you have to shout that much louder just to be heard. Its deafening out there!
PE: What are your thoughts on the '70s fusion scene? Would you have felt at home in such environments?
BB: My band Bruford became known as a fusion band, although we thought we were an instrumental rock group with fancy harmony. So, yes, I felt at home because they were the early days of trying to write some useful music and I had some terrific players to write it for. Fusion then became a derogatory term, as did progressive rock, ambient, minimalism, and every other genre when the pioneers have moved on.
PE: What are your thoughts on free improvisation? What were the most natural environments for you as an improvising musician? Do rock musicians even have the vocabulary to do it well or was this terrain best left to the jazz artists?
BB:
It's better left to almost anyone other than rock musicians. As I understand it,
it's about sublimating the self in favor of the music, pretty much exactly the
opposite to the rock philosophy as far as I can make out. Crimson's Thrakattack
was entirely improvised, and required a great deal of editing to make sense of
it. The more people you have on stage, the harder and more dense the musical
conversation is going to be, which is why I usually improvise in a duo -
Moraz-Bruford, Bruford-Borstlap, for example. Rock music, broadly, is not about
improvisation - it is about the sale of a standardized product and admits no
inconsistencies.PE: Is there any credence to the usual stereotypes about musicians and the instruments they play? I'm sure you've heard the one about drummers being the "animal" of the group, though I think that one actually suits bassists better, as a rule...
BB: All musician jokes have an element of truth, I think. In my experience, and contrary to stereotype, it's the drummer who actually knows what's going on, where the gig is, what time they are on stage, etc. In other words, the reliable, dependable one. Some say that's because he needs the band more then the band need him. There are lots of drummers - an excess of supply focuses the mind.
PE: Can you share a short overview of how you feel your technique developed over the years? What ideals did you hold in the highest regard, and how did they change as you aged and grew as a player?
BB: I started with a light jazz technique, wholly unsuited to early Yes. I had to start playing rim-shots just to be heard. But I got bigger and stonger, although I never quite managed to iron out of my playing the feeling that something was about to happen, whether it did or not. I was trying to bring new ideas to drum kit playing - post Jamie Muir European percussion improv, odd meters (from Joe Morello), electronics, a lot of drama - and some were more successful than others. Electronic drums began to ruin any modest touch that I had, because I had to hit hard with the butt end of the stick to get the sound out, and by the time I came back to jazz I had to woodshed hard to re-locate any stick control, dynamics and touch, without which that music means nothing. Eventually I ended up as many do, trying to burn as quietly as possible on a drum kit while still having the control to get the ideas across - again, the art of the jazz drummer. So my technique has sort of gone full circle. I started and ended with jazz, but I loved all that stuff in the middle too.
I tend to avoid acquiring technique for technique's sake, or put another way, I use everything I've got. I've never had the luxury of excess! When I want to hear something and I can't play it, I find a way to play it. When we started, bass drums were quieter in the mix, and the foot was down on the pedal-board. As things got louder a whole new different technique was necessary to get speed and volume, involving having the heel up off the pedal-board. Now the feet alone are like a ballet dance. Drum technique has changed consistently as new demands are placed upon it, which is why we have to keep practicing.
Your technique is a function of what you want to say. Think speech. If you want to say anything remotely intricate to the back of 10,000 seats, you need to speak slowly with clarity of diction, and you need to articulate the idea well. The great thing about jazz in a small environment is that you can play on its harmonic and rhythmic ambiguity. The music works in a different way, and requires a different technique.
BB: Very little lasting effect. The build quality was poor and the instruments hard to handle, so I kind of had the field to myself. I was always into tunes anyway, being bit of a writer, so tunes on the drum sounded good to me. Most drummers got pissed off pretty fast with the cost and logistics, but I was hearing a way they could be used creatively despite the obvious drawbacks. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it, so I sort of volunteered.
The use of electronics now as an add on to the acoustic kit, and I mean live-sampling, looping, sequencing, playing along with bits and pieces of all of the above, can be very creative. I think the clever little Roland kits are best left for function bands or practicing though'.
PE: What non-musical pursuits occupy your time? We are all familiar with you as a musician, of course, but what can you share about the man behind the music? Can you share a few things we probably have not read in previous interviews?
BB: The 'man behind the music' is leaving music precisely because it encourages self-obsession and I'm tired with myself. Honestly, me, me, me ! Can't wait to do something - anything - else, so long as I don't have to sit at a computer all day. Raising a family of three and failing to keep the deer out of my garden has occupied most of my downtime.
PE: Do you feel there's a difference between improvisation which is done in a recording studio versus live performance? Does the relatively clinical atmosphere of a studio make it harder to get into the "vibe", or does each setting bring about something different in the end result?
BB: Good question. It implies that the presence of an audience may change the improvisation - and it probably does.
Almost all my recorded improv with Borstlap and small bits of Crim has been live on stage. My last few albums have all been live. Honorable exceptions are studio recordings like "No Warning" from Three of a Perfect Pair which I like a lot. A dark, moody undercurrent where the drums thrash about in their lair breathing fire like demented dragons. Also much of Torn's Cloud About Mercury which was so under-rehearsed as to be practically improvised from my part. There's a live electronic drum solo from that band up on YouTube that I really like, where I'm grappling with pitches and chords, and beginning to find things which would emerge more clearly in Earthworks a year later.
All good improv, and jazz, happens live, in the moment, even though the term 'live' may also mean 'live in the studio'. What I'm after in any music is the sense that there is real time co-operation between the participants such that the end result is effectively unrepeatable. In my preferred world, Monday night in Cleveland is not the same as Tuesday night in Cincinnati. It was the repetition that killed rock music for me. The invention in the studio or rehearsal room was the meat and potatoes - everything else was just pulling the same rabbit out of the same hat at 8 o'clock every night having spent all day in airports
Increasingly, I find music that doesn't vibrate with the uncertain, that doesn't smell of edge-of-the-pants performance, to be effectively unlistenable. So that's most of western rock and pop.
PE: In your book you point out that it was American audiences you owed the most to, but at the same time seem a bit dismissive of them as "earnest, pleasant, balding, upright middle-aged men who have flown in from Kansas City or El Paso because I once played on Fragile" How do you reconcile the two?
BB: I didn't intend to be dismissive, and anyway don't agree that they are incompatible. I owe earnest pleasant balding middle-aged men plenty. You can't choose your audience, and I'm eternally grateful and slightly surprised that I have any at all, upright and pleasant or not. Anyone is free to derive any meaning they can out of any music in whatever way they can, and I'm not dismissive of that.
Audiences can be uncannily reflective of the artist on stage - lots of Cindy Laupers at a Cindy Lauper gig, lots of Stings at a Police gig, and lots of earnest, pleasant and upright middle-aged men at my gigs, because that's what I am. The only bit in dispute, then, is the balding!
PE: What contemporary musician had you always wanted to play or record with but never got the chance?
BB: If I was a different player and a bit younger I would have liked to have played with Joe Zawinul, but he needed serious cats like Nathaniel Townsley or Paco Serry, way above my league.
PE: Any thoughts on Dylan Howe's interpretations of your original parts with the Steve Howe trio? Would you consider a similar collaboration with your son Alex sometime in the future?
BB: No, I don't know Dylan's work with Steve. My son Alex in Infadels has a wholly different attitude to music from me, so I think collaboration unlikely.
PE: How long did it take
you to compile your bio? Was writing it any sort of catharsis?BB: I assume you mean writing my autobiography. Catharsis? Damn right. I've done millions of interviews which, in the interest of sales, have occupied thousands of column inches and said practically nothing. Confer chapter 7 - "Do you like doing interviews?" . I had to wait till I'd retired before I wrote the book. That's why it's based around the top 20 most common questions I've repeatedly been asked but seldom answered - 'What do you do in the daytime?" " Why did you leave Yes?" "What's it like working with…" (complete as required). In the book, they are answered, and it's not always pretty.
PE: What's next for you, Bill?
BB: The deer are eating the new acre I've just planted. It needs protection...
I'm also looking forward to hooking up with assorted cross-generational King Crimson personnel in a London studio to hear Steve (Porcupine Tree) Wilson 's 5.1 remixes of several classic Crim albums, including Red. Apparently they are stunning. It's Crimson's 40th birthday year, so there will be some of that going on. Dinner last night with Phil Manzanera who was recommending Placebo as an appropriate business-model for my son's band Infadels. So after the next full stop, I'll call Alex Bruford!
Photo Credits:
David Sokol
Paul Pugliese
Fred van Diem
James Cumpsty
Victor Franko
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