|
-------------------------------------------------------
JULY 16, 1998
-------------------------------------------------------
Source: Birmingham Post
Contributed by Tom O'Toole
Crimson pirate of the drums rocks on
By Jack Bell
The drummer’s drummer Bill Bruford talks to Simon Evans about projects and
Projekcts
Robert Fripp once described Bill Bruford as a drummer who possessed the
temperament of a classical player and the technique of a jazz musician but
who had somehow ended up playing rock music.
Most famously in the Yes line-up of the early 70s, that recorded the albums
Fragile and Close To the Edge, and on and off for the past 25 years with
King Crimson, Bruford has become the drummer’s drummer, the ideal towards
which many young players gravitate.
With the latest Crimson incarnation on semi-permanent hold Bruford has
returned to his first love, jazz, and revived his Earthworks project that
between 1987 and 1994 acted as a training ground for such front-line young
British jazz players as Django Bates, Iain Bellamy and Tim Harries.
Bruford reactivated the band last year when it became clear that the
current Crimson had run its course. Earthworks are playing a series of
gigs over the summer, recording an album in the autumn and then touring the
states during January and February. “There’s a busy immediate future for
the band,” the always affable Bruford told me. “New music has to be worked
up and worked into and once you get into a roll with these things it’s very
hard to stop because the planning is so far ahead.
“I’m now booking February and March which means I’d be reluctant to
interrupt that flow. I believe you should either start it and see it
through or not start it at all. So I guess there won’t be a Crimson for a
while.”
The merest hint of irritation creeps into Bruford’s voice when he discusses
the current Crimson hiatus. He’s been here before of course. Having left
the lucrative drummer’s seat in Yes for the altogether less predictable
King Crimson in 1973, Bruford was disappointed, to put it mildly, when
Fripp called the whole thing to a halt two years later, just as the band
was on the verge of breaking through in the American market.
There was a strong sense of deja-vu when Fripp pulled the plug on the 1980s
Crimson line-up, a band whose power can at last be fully appreciated on the
recently-released double live set Absent Lovers (Discipline).
Now history seems to have repeated itself for a third time, although Fripp
insists the current spate of Projeckts involving members of Crimson are
keeping the band’s spirit alive.
Bruford is more cautious however. “Robert seems to find it very hard to
put Crimson together,” he says. “He seems incapable of it until a kind of
grand master plan appears in his head. That master plan needn’t be told to
anybody else and certainly doesn’t have to be understood by anybody else,
it’s just a kind of thing which enables him to get it going. The last band
had six people and was very expensive to run, so I think he feels he has to
do something ‘different’ every time. I think the Projeckts are partly to
move a block in Robert’s own mind about the whole thing.”
Although Bruford was involved in Projeckt Ine, which “only briefly
flourished” last December, playing four nights at London’s Jazz Café, he is
less than complimentary about Projeckt Two, which played at Ronnie’s
earlier this year.
“I found the music a little flat,” Bruford says, “because it’s controlled
by the dynamics of these digital drums which I find a little
unsurprising. I’m moving back to the much broader dynamic range of jazz
rather than the digital dynamic range which governs something like Projeckt
Two.”
His attitude regarding Crimson seems to be a mixture of resignation and
slight frustration. “Because I’ve been through dozens of these Crimson
plots, the incline to 1981 and what have you I just get on with life. It
feels like I’ve been involved with a lot of Crimsons, it must be about 14
or 15 album’s worth of stuff since 1973, and I don’t regret a minute of it,
but I don’t sit around waiting for it.
“Since Robert now is the only man who can say if we are ever going to play
again I would really rather progress with something that I’m making rapid
inroads into, which is the European jazz festivals and jazz in general,
which is a great place for a thinking drummer. Rock is very limiting.
“I like to write a lot and the stuff I like to write wouldn’t be used by
Crimson. Nobody writes for Crimson, it sort of appears. Earthworks for me
is very much a writing group. Hearing the young whizz kids play fresh
stuff is lovely.”
The new Earthworks features pianist Steve Hamilton, bassist Geoff Gascoyne
and hot young sax player Patrick Clahar. Their music is largely
improvised, which was also true of King Crimson, especially the early 70s
Larks Tongues in Aspic line-up. “I would always have liked more in
Crimson,” Bruford says, “and there’s no doubt that when it comes to
improvising jazz players are going to be hotter on the scales and harmonics
whereas rock guys are more limited in that area but perhaps better with
timbre and instrumental sound, which requires huge racks of equipment, and
therefore heavy overheads.
“Crimson always had a foot in that tradition, which is why it was the only
rock band I was ever interested in and it still has an ability to do that,
albeit with six people.”
The prolific Bruford has also just released an album B.L.U.E. recorded with
Crimson colleague Tony Levin, guitarist David Torn and first call New York
session trumpeter Chris Botti. Although made around the same time as last
year’s If Summer Had Its Ghosts, an exquisite collaboration with Ralph
Towner and Eddie Gomez, B.L.U.E. could not be more different.
“I think it’s a lovely record, it’s much darker, much more metal, much
noisier with a lead trumpet as opposed to guitar,” he says. Given the
experimental nature of much of Bruford’s music in the 90s it’s hard to
imagine he was once part of the stentorian prog rockers Yes.
“It was certainly very different to what I’m doing now,” Bruford
says. “It’s a quarter of a century ago and I’ve more or less forgotten all
about it, but it was a good place to start. I was learning my craft,
learning how to get on with other musicians, learning how to co-operate
with a group, which is all very important especially when you’re a
prima-donna young drummer, who thinks he’s played everything when in fact
he’s played nothing.”
Despite his apparent desire to wipe the Yes experience from his memory
Bruford has returned to the band on two occasions, as part of the late 80s
Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe aggregate and the overblown 1991 Union
tour. He clearly has no desire to repeat either experience.
“The Union tour was like an overpaid holiday really, it was just a
nostalgia trip. It was fun for two or three months, tops, but it’s nothing
you want to give up your day job for.”
Bill Bruford’s Earthworks play Ronnie Scott’s on Sunday. Box office: 0121
643 4525. B.L.U.E. and Absent Lovers are released through Discipline.
Close Window
YesInThePress.com
For site comments, inquiries, corrections, or additions, contact
yitp@yesservices.com
|
|