Artist Interview by: Michael Bettine
Mention the name Bill Bruford to most musicians, especially drummers, and what you get is a response that is usually filled with awe. After helping form the group “Yes” in 1968, Bruford went on to work with a who’s-who of progressive rock groups, including Genesis, Gong, his own band Bruford, and three different stints with Robert Fripp’s King Crimson.
With a knack for making intricate rhythms sound easy, Bruford’s drumming set the standard for others to follow. In the early eighties, he formed a duo with former Yes/Moody Blue’s keyboardist, Patrick Moraz. Over the course of two albums, Bruford showed a more jazz-oriented side to his playing. It was a side that he always had, but it was often hidden in the orchestrations of Yes and the dark improvisations of King Crimson.
Since 1987, Bruford has led his own band, Earthworks. It has been a vehicle for growing his compositional talents and ever-expanding drumming. The first version of the band was highly electric and featured the talents of the young, rising English musicians, saxophonist, Iain Ballamy, and keyboardist/tenor horn player, Django Bates. The music was energetic, with Bill playing a hybrid drum kit of half acoustic drums and half Simmons’ electric drums. He often triggered keyboard parts from his pads and called his style chordal drumming.
In 1999, Bruford retooled the band, doing away with the electronics and changing personnel. He brought acoustic bassist, Mark Hodgson, on board, along with pianist, Steve Hamilton, and saxophonist, Patrick Clahar. The new sound was leaner and even more jazz-like. Gone were the synths and drum pads. Bruford’s drumming opened up, propelling the music with a greater sense of freedom. Where the music once seemed to be hemmed-in by the electronics, it now was able to breathe. There was more space for Bruford to dance on the drums. His compositional talents also showed maturity and a growing confidence.
I caught up with Bill at the second-to-last gig in an American tour, supporting the recent release of a double live CD recorded in London, Footloose and Fancy Free, and a concert DVD, Footloose in NYC. Since those recordings, Bruford has added new saxophonist, Tim Garland, who more recently played with Chick Corea’s Origins.
Like most drummers, Bruford speaks rhythmically, punctuating sentences with words used like cymbal accents. He is articulate and well read, but often prefers to let his music do much of the talking for him. At 53, after a remarkable 34 years of gigs around the world, he still has a youthful air about him. This youthful energy comes through in both his words and music.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Bill Bruford:
JazzReview: Why, after all these years of lugging your drums around the world, are you still a musician?
Bill Bruford: Because I can’t play it right yet. When I get to be a little better, I’ll stop. It’s a work in practice. Everyday gets better. What’s the best record I’ve made? It’s the last record I’ve made. What’s the best gig we did? Well, probably the last one.
Actually, this is a little treat this band. It’s a lot like having a superb sports car or something. It’s fantastic having guys of this skill and quality playing original music.
You know how hard that is in America right now? You know, original music. That’s not designed necessarily for any public acclaim. It’s designed for musicians who like to play it, and I wanted to write it.
Aside from that, it’s a functioning, working jazz group that can play
profitably in the United States, and globally without support. You know,
we’re somewhere along there with the Dave Holland Quintet, and he’s further
up the pike. But even Scofield’s [new CD,] Uberjam is laying down
dance beats.
We’ve done a lot since we last saw you. We’ve done a double live CD
(Footloose and Fancy Free) from London, and that is the band’s eighth
CD, incredibly. We have a DVD as well, filmed in New York Footloose
n NYC. We’re well documented. We are in business and well documented.
You’re looking at a happy guy. There’s not much more I could want.
JazzReview: You’ve had a change in the band’s line up since last year.
Bill Bruford: We have a new guy, Tim Garland. He’s pretty well known in the States now from Chick Corea’s group, but he was well thought of in England before that.
He also writes for the band as well.
We’ll play two or three of his things tonight. So that means I don’t have to do everything, which I’m happy to do, but there’s just not enough hours in the day. It’s crazy if you’re working internationally and doing the whole damn thing. So, Tim comes as a huge relief.
JazzReview: He’s played with a lot of great players and brings a lot of experience to the band.
Bill Bruford: He’s in his mid-thirties now and runs his own big band in
England called The Dean Street Underground Orchestra. He plays in a
great trio with Geoff Keezer and Joe Locke, on piano and vibes respectively
and, a more art-based music group called Acoustic Triangle. He’s a
commissioned composer and had a small concerto premier in the Royal
Northern College of Music. So, this is a guy who knows his stuff. He doesn’t
care if I played on Close To The Edge or not, which is great. [Laughs]
And nobody knows about that, we’re trying to keep it a secret.
He also plays bass clarinet. Lovely sound…sort of a non-political sound.
In other words, when you play a bass clarinet you don’t know quite what’s
going to come out of it. The audience wonders, “Is this going to be classical
music now, or is this jazz?” Anyway, it doesn’t have a huge jazz vocabulary.
JazzReview: There are also not a lot of preconceptions, like a tenor sax, where you immediately think of Coltrane.
Bill Bruford: Absolutely. When you set up a drum set, people have heard everything you are about to play, yeah. Unless you set it up a little differently.
JazzReview: I think people get to questioning that when they see your set up, with the toms on the sides instead of in front.
Bill Bruford: Yeah, They do. But also, people can see you. Because you know how the audience listens with its eyes.
JazzReview: You gig a lot. In looking at your web site schedule, Earthworks is
definitely a working band.
Bill Bruford: Yeah....but I don’t know why you say that. The website is a little misleading. In fact, you might be surprised when I tell you that one of my difficulties are that I don’t play enough. Now the reason I say that is that most jazz guys are in three groups. Somebody like Tim is in three bands. You cooperate with the other bandleaders, and good guys get used a lot. They’re working all hours, but the bandleader works one third of the time. So if you actually look at those dates, there’s seventy a year or something that means there’s 290 days left. Jazz is a language that has a very sophisticated type of nuance to it. The more you use the language, the better you get. So, I really ought to play with other people a little more too. It’s terrifically educational. Playing with other guys on the stand is how you learn everything. I’m an eternal student of course.
Now Tim grew up on all that Bruford stuff that you so happily transcribed for the book [When In Doubt, Roll!]. So we’re going to do some of the older tunes. We’re playing Beelzebub tonight. I think we’re going to look at One of A Kind when we get home. There was the thought that it won’t work, that you can’t do it with out power electric. Not true. The band has it’s own sort of velocity and own dynamic that works quite well with it. So that’s a nice sort of backwards look at things.
JazzReview: You’re not much for looking backwards.
Bill Bruford: Not much, not much, no. Not unless we can refresh it. I’m not into redoing it. Some guys make a career out of that. Sort of, “What was the hit and let’s keep playing it.” Even if they’ve got a completely different band, they’ll play it. I don’t subscribe to that. Jazz isn’t like that, and I get bored really quickly. Having Tim in the band has given us a huge jolt upwards. You’ll hear that tonight. You know, serious critics have been coming out to say nice things about us. So it’s very encouraging. I think we’re almost thought of as a bonafide American band now. It takes a long time to change attitudes.
Now if you persuaded Americans that you’re a good rock drummer, it’s going to take another lifetime to persuade them that you’re actually a jazz drummer. You know what I mean? And people find their corners. The jazz guys are very suspicious right away, but we’re [Earthworks] fourteen years old now and have eight CDs in. So, I think people now are probably getting the hang of it.
JazzReview: You’re not a rock drummer doing this as just a vanity thing.
Bill Bruford: Sure. A lot of people aren’t familiar with the fact that I grew up with jazz. Britain had this jazz TV show on Saturday when I was a kid, Jazz 625 on prime time TV, recorded by the BBC. It looked great. And I saw all the great, mostly black American jazz artists on British TV by the time I was sixteen. So I’d seen Art Blakey in concert, you know. They were great shows. So I started with jazz and then like all the guys, just sort of fell into this fantastic rock thing (Yes) in the late sixties, where it was all very exciting. There was a lot of openness. Like if you wanted to be (drummer) Mitch Mitchell and play with Hendrix - playing like Elvin Jones with Hendrix - you could do that. Whereas now, there’s not much of a place for someone like me.
JazzReview: You once said something to the effect that you thought you’d always be known as the drummer who quit Yes.
Bill Bruford: [Laughs] Famous for having quit something rather than having done something. Hey, I'm not quibbling with what I'm famous for. That's hip. But a spectacular irony of musicians is that they're often known for the moment they die or quit something.
JazzReview: It’s been thirty years since you quit Yes and you were only in the band for four years.
Bill Bruford: Absolutely. Great times, but we can move on. And on a whole, club owners like it, because a lot of the more adventurous progressive rock guys come over to jazz and the club owners say, “Well, there are a lot of faces I haven’t seen in here before.” So that’s nice. I’ve pulled some of those guys with me, they’re making the same journey I am. I’ve an audience out there, but I’ve got to say, it doesn’t get any easier.
JazzReview: It was interesting when you were here a year ago that many of the
people who came to the show hadn’t heard Earthworks at all. They came based
on your work with Yes and King Crimson. They came not knowing exactly what it
would be and ended up really enjoying it.
Bill Bruford: Yeah, we get that a lot. That’s right. If they’re remotely open-minded at all - as you walk out of the building you hear a lot of things like, “Well, I didn’t know I liked jazz. Or, “If that’s jazz, I kind of liked it.” Or, “Where does he find these guys, these musicians from?” And they’re happy and open minded, and that’s the best way with my shows, to try and not deal with preconceptions. Everybody in the band is so young. I mean, who knows or cares anymore what rock or jazz really is? What we care about is improvising, individual musicians listening to other individual musicians and making some sort of music that can go somewhere. I still have one or two ideas from the Crimson thing that I say to the younger guys, so there’s a little bit of cross-fertilizing in some ways. It’s a big mess. Of course, you and I know it’s a jazz group.
JazzReview: The record companies and the press do like to have labels to pin on things though.
Bill Bruford: Sure, they have to be there and I accept that. Hopefully you soldier your way until the word Bruford comes to mean something. And if it means anything at all, I hope it means you’ll get value for your ticket money. That you’ll hear something you didn’t expect to hear, that you’d hear musicians playing at their best, as honestly as they can. No one will be asleep, no one’s going through the motions. And right there, that’s a ticket buy. That’s fairly unusual. That’s not the sound of guys earning a living.
JazzReview: There’s a passion there.
Bill Bruford: Yeah, absolutely. And I’d stop the minute there wasn’t, because this is rough work you know. You have to be ready for your six hours on a bus.
JazzReview: You’re part of a growing number of drummers who write music and lead their own groups.
Bill Bruford: I compare notes with Steve [Smith] and the other drummer leaders, Vinnie [Calaiuta], Dave Weckl and stuff. And we’re always looking for a different way to skin this particular cat. Leading from the drums is difficult anyway. I’ve never sold myself on technical ability. So most people know that even though it’s a drummer lead band, we’re about the music. And if that requires very little from the drummer, that’s great. So I’m not happily trapped into that “it’s got to be a Buddy Rich thing, the fastest sticks in the West.” I’ve always been careful that should not develop.
JazzReview: How do you find being a bandleader as opposed to being a sideman?
Bill Bruford: Well, it’s exhausting. I’ve got to say you need to be working a lot to do it. I kind of manage the thing as well. But I do know everybody there is to know in the industry. It’s going to take all hours. It’s going to take a couple of months to set up a month’s work. But I’ve no complaints. It’s not all about doing the music, but it’s actually about bringing the music to 300 people at Shank Hall, and that can be tricky. So band leading is time consuming. There’s an old adage where the best kind of band leading is when you invite some interesting people together and let them get on with it. Musically that’s true. And musically, that’s what I do now that we’ve established a sort of blueprint for this second version of Earthworks - what it is I want to hear and what it is I don’t.
Another old adage says to put them together in a room and then just get out of the way. Except the logistics of it mean you’re going to be working all hours. So musically, these guys will take care of themselves. We’re playing a couple of pieces tonight from Garland and Hamilton, and I’m encouraging people to write in the style of the band. Again, a little like Dave Holland’s thing. You can listen to a tune and you don’t know whether Dave wrote it or it’s from Eubanks or something. But it comes with the flavor of the band, which is lovely. And that you can do only with a working band. People understand the rules of the road. So band leading’s OK, but it’s some stuff.
I tend to stay out of the drum clinic thing. There is a tendency for drummers to have kind of over-developed themselves to where they’re almost unemployable. Fortunately, I don’t have that kind of type of dexterity where you can play 9,000 bass drum notes a minute. And anyway, I was never interested in that. That whole drum clinic/Modern Drummer [magazine] thing tends to exaggerate and encourage that. So many of the great guys are playing to other drummers you know. And I think my function is to try and play to other human beings. You know, it’s when I get a smile from the check out girl at the super market that I think I’m connecting. I like that. I don’t think it should be an exclusive for either jazz snobs, or drumheads. They’re all welcome, but I’m not tailoring it for the drum world.
JazzReview: Sometimes there’s way too much emphasis on the technical aspect and the music gets lost. Technique is great, and it’s amazing to see what some of
these guys are playing today.
Bill Bruford: Yes, it’s uncanny, isn’t it. But how does that fit into the other things? I think young guys get very confused maybe. There’s a kind of terror that if you don’t have 25 instructional videos, and you’ve worked your way through both [of Gavin] Harrison’s books - you know, every drum note known to mankind - that you can’t function. And I don’t think it has to be quite as gloomy as that. You can start with simple things and make them work. As we often do in Earthworks. Sometimes tragically simple things - and that’s great.
JazzReview: In any music, the song should be what is served.
Bill Bruford: I think so too. At times it will require action, sometimes not - space.
JazzReview: Space allows the other notes to stand out and be heard…one well placed rim shot or cymbal.
Bill Bruford: Doesn’t it just? I just saw [Peter] Erskine do a lovely show in London. It was all his music. And for probably the first five or six minutes it was medium-slow to slow, simple ride cymbal. Beautifully played of course, but we would not call this drum action. But, when something did stir, of course relatively, it seemed a huge event. And indeed it was. So everything is relative. We often start music quite quietly and we can definitely get going. We often start quietly, specifically to give us someplace to go from. So these are all staging tricks that work in rock or jazz. It’s pacing and how to deliver a live show.
So even though I may not have a degree in composition, I’ve got that sort of degree from the school of hard knocks. That old thing - and the great exchange in a band like Earthworks is that I get young guys with technical dexterity and ideas, enthusiasm, and red blood for one. And in return they get an actual platform and a guy who has a sense of drama and pacing for how things might want to go over a two-hour evening. And that works really well. I think encouraging young guys is really great, and offering them a platform - and they’re thrilled to do it. So it’s not easy to find too many other groups, particularly British jazz groups – we’re probably the only one that tours regularly in the U.S. You can argue, well that’s because it’s a mistake, it’s on a progressive rock ticket or something, but I would argue differently. People now know we’re a jazz outfit.
JazzReview: You’re certainly established. There’s no novelty involved, not like when you first had Earthworks and people might have thought, “OK, he’s trying something different from King Crimson.” After fourteen years, it’s not a hobby.
Bill Bruford: Sure. It’s a work in progress. I hate that word project that you hear a lot. I don’t do projects. Crimson wasn’t a project and neither is Earthworks. These are life. You know, the way you work at it you want to work hard at it. The word project somehow puts it down. I’m living it. You’re listening, talking to musicians, practicing, rehearsing, working – it’s a full time gig. No doubt about it.
JazzReview: With all the time involved with Earthworks, do you find time to work on other things?
Bill Bruford: It’s part of the lore of band leading that your phone stops ringing. You know, you don’t really call Miles [Davis] to come work on your date as it were. Not only because he’s Miles, but what are you going to give him to play? Doesn’t he want too much money, doesn’t he want to play in 15/8, and he’s probably busy anyway. And if you hire Miles, they’re kind of going to be looking at him rather than it’s your gig. So naturally your phone stops. And that’s OK, I’m used to that.
With Earthworks, we’re booked up until Christmas. Not in terms of flat out, but what’s going to be what. We have trips to South America and Southeast Asia coming up. We do quite a lot of long haul stuff. We also spend a lot of time in England now. Robert [Fripp, “leader” of King Crimson, had this problem with playing in England. We hardly did it at all because of Fripp. And I missed that, you know. For twenty-five years I hardly played in my home country. And we’ve done two long, full tours with Earthworks now, twenty cities each. It may not sound long in American terms, but it’s a month tour. And you get quite a way in England. And I’ve enjoyed that, bringing the music home a bit. We play a lot in Europe. We just did twenty dates in Germany and Japan. And we’re profitable, so I can pay the guys. You can get paid, and that’s something.
The logistics in the States are getting harder since 9/11. It’s impacting everybody. Now, just to jump on that plane to fly somewhere else is a major two-hour search and it’s adding time to our day. Time is money. So touring is not as easy as it was. We’re back in the van, because who wants to be at the airport all morning?
JazzReview: Yeah, in the time spent there you could have driven to your next gig.
Bill Bruford: Yeah, even if you’re flying a hundred miles, you’ve got to be three hours in the airport. Just the same, no complaints. I’ve got plenty of energy, but at times, you know, after a month of fairly hefty roadwork, you feel it. We’ve just been in Japan and Europe before we came here.
In July we have some nice shows in England with [ex-Police drummer] Stewart Copeland. It’s unusual getting Stewart out from LA to England. We’re doing two things and he’s playing his movie music. And like so many of these things these days, for a promoter to put on an event with a couple of drummers, he needs a theme. Well obviously we’re both guys from famous rock groups, but we’re obviously drummers with our heads on our shoulders, and the theme of the thing is drummers that write. So they’ll post it as that. And I’ll play some of my jazz stuff and he’s playing with a fourteen-piece ensemble. And that will be a Tama and Paiste heaven! [laughs] So how the manufacturers help, that comes into it too. That works really well. So life’s pretty good.
I’m always fascinated to hear how other people do it. Like I said, I’m always talking to Steve [Smith] - and no one has it any easier. It used to be that two drummers would sit down, me and Dave Weckl, right. “You know that flam thing you did? It’s really great. How did you do that?” That was a traditional exchange of information. Now what do they do? They talk about how much it costs to ship your drums to Israel and back. And life’s like that. For band leading drummers it’s how can you make it work? You want to play the tunes, you want to play your stuff, but there’s no doubt the market works against it.
JazzReview: And for a drummer, it’s not like you have one little sax case to carry.
Bill Bruford: Yeah, that’s a project, and I usually have an assistant. I don’t quite have to do it myself, but economics pays, and I’m reducing my thing to a fairly small trap set: four toms, kick, and snare. And it could easily function at two toms, kick, and snare if the room was really small. And it’s not about the number of drums.
But, I still chase the same things. I’m still looking for economy and expression, [whispers] trying to control the dynamics. Everything in jazz is that the dynamics are great. And stick control of course becomes so important. It’s the ability to burn at a quieter volume. It’s such a skill. All the guys I know are trying to play quietly. For a while in this industry, it’s like you develop this monumental technique like the Kenny Aaronoffs. And there’s a sort of credibility paid for that. But all the guys I like are all moving in the opposite direction, trying to play this thing quieter…to have the intensity. So in a way, in my life, nothing’s changed. I’m still after the same things. And you kid yourself, or you don’t kid yourself and get better.
I guess we’ll probably make another record in due course. In a way, I can make records faster than the system can take them. The difficulty is, you can make records for your mother-in-law, but if you want to get it heard in America, if you want it in the Chicago Reader or something, you have to go away to keep churning records out. So we’ll pause. And anyway, there’s another adage, which says “musicians shouldn’t record everything they can think of.” Let’s edit here a bit and record the right record.
JazzReview: You have a new live CD Footloose and Fancy Free and a live DVD Footloose In NYC that have just been released.
Bill Bruford: It’s nice to play live. Certainly [the previous CD] The Sound Of Surprise has a more controlled studio thing about it, lovely it is too, the balance and reverb settings. And no people dropping trays of cutlery [Laughs] But all the jazz I grew up with were live. Nowadays the recording quality of it’s going to sound great. You can say the drums are in a slightly weird place, or the saxophone sounds a bit strange, but in general, if you could hear anything when I was growing up, it was the drums and the saxophone. So that’s great. The New York one is of course filmed and somewhat different compositions. And being jazz, different performances. The CD and DVD are different pieces, but designed to look compatible. They’re brother and sister. They have a similar art direction. You buy one and you get quite different from the other. That’s about the story so far.
JazzReview: With all the work the band takes, do you get much of a chance to check out some of the other things happening out there, like on the Internet?
Bill Bruford: There’s a ton of this stuff now. And great that there is, because nobody wants to be ignored. It’s not that I’m not interested, but sometimes in just taking a few minutes to look and that’s another day gone. Also, it’s very hard for me to know if it’s JazzReview.com, is the audience three men and a dog? Or is it 50,000 of the prime jazz audience in the United States? There are a lot of distractions when you are a bandleader. Sometimes when you have a bad day you can sit down at the drums and say, “Thank God I’m here so I can just play.” And that means that you can get distracted from composition and so forth. You have to carve out time of the day to be creative. It’s very tempting to look at JazzReview.com, very tempting to answer another fifty e-mails about what drumsticks you use, because that stuff’s always there. And you have to find time to think seriously about the drums. For me, I try to keep all the other stuff for afternoon. I’m good with a drum set and music from 10-1.
So I’m a fairly organized kind of guy. But if you abandon that, you can spend your entire life worrying about the keyboard amp at the gig. And you can arguably have more assistants, but then you are in a negative pay thing. You’re thinking then, well, it’s vanity music. The music has to pay for itself. If people want to hear it, they’ll pay for it. I don’t like free gigs. On a whole, I think people should pay a little something and absolutely get what they paid for. And demand your money back if you don’t get the sound of surprise, or if you don’t get great music. By all means, get your money back. But free means, “Ah, it’s just another band.” I value it a lot. It’s sweat and blood. But there’s also a common thing where you get people thinking you’re paying $25 for two hours of music. I think you’re paying $25 for the thirty-three years of experience that gets you those two hours. Which deep down, the audience knows. In a jazz club like this it can look deceptively casual. The fact is, the guys are very committed. Everybody’s awake onstage. We don’t have passengers.
For more information: http://www.billbruford.com
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