PEL Special: Bill Bruford on Nakedly Examined Music #25

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is Mark Linsenmayer of the Partially Examined Life. You're about to hear a special presentation of a recent episode from the Nakedly Examined Music Podcast, which was a spin off of the Partially Examined Life. Hope you'll take a listen here. If you like what you Hear, go to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and subscribe to that podcast. This interview you're about to hear was with a guest that is perhaps my most influential figure yet, Bill Bruford, and I wanted to share this one in particular with you to show you that stylistically the podcast is branching out.

Bill is someone who started with the rock bands yes and King crimson in the 70s and then went on to play jazz. So we're going to hear a lot of instrumental music. Or in the case of the vocal music, he doesn't really care about the vocals, so that's not what we talk about. Since this episode went up a few weeks ago, I I've gotten to record episodes with a few other artists in this sort of vein. Paul Wertico was one who was Pat Metheny's drummer in the 80s. Really amazing player Michael Manring, one of the most incredible bass players you'll ever hear.

Both those episodes are not yet posted. Keep a lookout for them. One that I did just post on is Peter Knight, an incredible violin player and thoughtful songwriter from the British folk rock band Steeleye Span. I've also gotten guests in the classical music world in hip hop electronic music, and I hope to keep on widening my purview now. Bill in particular is fully as thoughtful as any of the philosophy professionals we've had on the podcast. Very articulate, a fascinating writer. So this one I think is pretty chock full of ideas. Hope you enjoy it and go over to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com to hear more.

You are listening to Nakedly Examined Music, a podcast about songs and songwriting. My name is Mark Linsenmayer. For more information Please check out nakedlyexaminedmusic.com My guest for episode and 25 is Bill Bruford, an amazing drummer and composer and now scholar since he retired from music in 2009. You're right now listening to 5% for nothing, his very first composition, which is a track off of the 1972 album Fragile by Yes, the band that made him famous, which he quit at the height of its fame and in 1973 jumps to King Crimson, another of the top three 70s prog bands that you should know about and played on their albums in the mid-70s and-80s and-90s off and on.

We're gonna start today by talking about King Crimson's one more red nightmare from 1974. After that he had a brief stint in the band uk. Bill and his guitarist Allan Holdsworth both left UK after one album to be in the band Bruford. And we're gonna listen to the big hit single from 1979, Hell's Bells from Bruford at the end of this podcast. And right now you are hearing the title track from that same album. After his stint with crimson in the 80s, Bill went further into jazz with his band Earthworks and also was a pioneer in using electronic drum.

After a brief reunion in the late 80s with yes and some more time with King Crimson, he reformed Earthworks, pursued a more traditional acoustic jazz setup, which is more or less what he did for the rest of his career. Though he's done many, many collaborations with other musicians, especially other far out percussionists. He's played lots of different kinds of drums and drum configurations. The second song we're going to be

3:19 Unknown speaker: talking about is called Thistle down from

3:21 Mark: an album recorded in 1992, if Summer had Its Ghosts by Bill Bruford, Eddie Gomez and Ralph Towner. And then the third song we're going to talk about is Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians, which is an improvisational number from Bill Bruford and keyboardist Michiel Borstlap from their 2004 album Every Step a Dance, Every Word a Song. For more information about Bill, please check out bill bruford.com Good afternoon.

3:46 Unknown speaker: Hello, Mark.

So I will have played 5% for nothing. That was your first composition. You were filling out the rest of the Fragile album because you hadn't written enough stuff as a group. So that's all out of the way that is told.

Okay, great.

And now we are evolving. We are jumping years forward past that band that nobody cares about and nobody ever asks you about. Right? To Red. You had asked to do as our first song here, one more Red Nightmare from the 1974 album Red. Let's give a brief introduction sort of what should they be listening for? What is the context of this? What do you want people to get out of this?

Well, it's got strong instrumental playing. There's something really grinding, I think, about early heavy metal ish jazz here. That's really nice as a thick. But John used to double the bass quite often, I think, and the thick heavy guitar sound sounds tremendous. And a lot of drum action. For some reason I thought I felt obliged to provide you with something with some Drum action Otherwise we'd all go to sleep. So I think that's about it. And a great tortuous song about a nightmare involving flying.

And this is just co written by the band, right?

Yeah.

Sam. Nightmares and thousand feet unfair Convince her I don't care Safer houses I swear Adjusted using the virtues of cruising when altitude dropping My ear popping One more red diameter. Sam. Neck as I turn around I heard what you shouting get off. Can't be the Stewart baby But the cap is the baby One more nightmare. Reality stirred me My angel had heard me the prayer been I should repeat the dream is now broken the ruby is broken Me safe and sound asleep on the greyhound One more and nightmare. Sam. Ram. Sam.

Along with the title track, which I guess I see this almost as an extension of because it involves a similar feel, a similar minor key.

We got stuck on this word red a lot, didn't we?

How did this evolve? Did this start as an improvisation just based over that main riff that da da da da da da da da

A typical way of working around that time, there would have been an instrumental figure of something flying around in the rehearsal room, which was no doubt Robert's opening phrase. And we would have toyed around with that for a bit until somebody said, I think this needs a vocal. And so we would have flattened it out with some chords upon which John could sing. And then he used to collaborate really closely with someone called Richard Palmer James, who was his writing partner. So I didn't have anything to do with the words at all. I was disinterested in words.

And John would have just found something that suited him and his voice and his pitch and so forth. And we returned to the instrumental return after some singing, at which point we had a song that was about two minutes long, I think, Insufficient, in other words. And we then branched off into yet another instrumental section, which would have been lifted from somewhere else or was probably homeless at the time for a saxophone. Alto. Saxophone solo, which goes on a fair bit. Right.

That was just some other song that was already floating around there that was glommed onto this.

Yes, I think so. Everything would have been floating until it could find a home and put this in context. Of course, in those days we were only looking for 40 minutes worth of music that was as much as a vinyl album could take. And for us that would have been six or seven songs at the most. And we really struggled to find six or seven songs. We weren't very prolific.

You got those three albums in a very tight time frame.

So, yeah, we were Always on the road. And there was no time set aside for this business of writing songs or anything. So somehow you were spat off the road and into a studio and then out of the studio and back onto the road again.

So I was gorging on as much of your autobiography as I can get through last night.

Oh, I'm sorry to inflict that on you.

I mean, I should say it's a series of essays with some autobiographical things thrown in there. So it's one thing very informative. I knew you'd have a lot to say about the structure of music. I was looking at the description of prog rock. You're talking about the long yes songs and other things of that era, of having the angry masculine establish the riff part and then it slows down to a long, dreamy something that somebody can sing over. And then you go back to a more aggressive instrumental thing and just the way that those would be structured.

And even though there's no soft when it gets into the vocal, when you actually get into the verse, it simplifies into more of a straight ahead rock thing. But there seems to be the tension here between the main riff where you get to really open up. And even though it's fairly self contained, it's rock in that it's got the guitar riff that then you're reacting to, but the reaction that you have is as big and sprawling as anything you could want in a 20 minute jazz piece.

So I think that's all true. I think you've got the context about right. Bear in mind in 74 when this song one more red nightmare was written and recorded, was kind of towards a difficult part. The progressive rock bit where I think we thought, or Robert thought really, that it was all becoming a bit of a dinosaur and that King Crimson probably ought to end fairly soon and make a skillful and elegant departure before the progressive rock machinery collapsed all around everybody. Now, he may have been a bit early on that. And of course we were perennially misunderstanding the size of the United States and how long you could go on on playing something in the US before it got even remotely tired.

But we felt we wanted to put some clear blue water between us and the dreamy Fae vocals of the progressive rockers and back to the frantic introduction and stuff that we had done. So in a way we're getting more metallic.

I always kind of want my bands to have the best of everything in it. In other words, can't there be a band that has. Catchy. This is why the UK album that you played on Appealed to me. Can you have something that has a catchy melody, something that is memorable as songs, but yet has as cool instrumentals as I would like. But on a song like this, you've got your wide open. Really. The memorable part is the initial instrumental and then when it tightens into the verse, drum wise, you really back off. You're just playing a straight ahead rock beat pretty much. And there's a fancy fill in here and there, but for the most part, you kind of have to get out of the way.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's fine. That's what I thought drummers did when called upon. We could provide whatever necessary. Whatever level of rhythmic density was required, be it metrical or lots of notes or timbrally interesting as it later became. We could provide that if necessary, as and when necessary. But traditionally when a singer is singing, you support the song. And there became times when certain numbers of drummers would get irritated by singers singing.

Yeah, I mean, I noticed you didn't completely give up on that by the Bruford period, where you've got a couple of the albums, singers break in at least briefly.

Indeed. So they did. But clearly in my own band, Bruford, we had moved more to an instrumental area and preferred to think of it as instrumental rock.

So what was the role? I mean, why would you even have that in there in those places at all? Is it just because Jeff Berlin wanted to do that in a couple of songs?

No, not at all. And I don't want to over exaggerate this. I mean, songs can be beautiful too. Songs can be wonderful. And there's lots of interesting things a drummer can do behind a song. So I don't think we should over exaggerate this particular. But drummers, I think, feel easier when there's no singer about. They have other things they can do.

Sure, yeah. I had just had Trey Gunn on the show and we went through Level 5, one of the later King Crimson songs that is sort of a descendant of One More Red Nightmare, but it doesn't have the going to the vocal section. I guess I didn't even realize until I was charting it out this morning that One More Red Nightmare has such a repetitive structure just in that it has the three sections and then it repeats those three sections. It always feels like it's going in a surprising direction to me.

It probably went in a surprising direction to us too.

And getting into that tight vocal place in order to then have something to release to seemed effective in a way that, I don't know, maybe with the straight Instrumental stuff. It's easier to get more completely lost in it.

Yes, it's possibly true. I'm not familiar with the level five piece so I think Thrak.

It was the same basic structure.

A lot of territory was covered in the early 70s and since then there has been a lot of repetition and reconfiguring of lots of that stuff. So in a way rock and pop has a habit of salamander like kind of eating its own tail and reusing these paradigms that have been around for a while and it's not a problem at all. But eventually I heard too much stuff coming around and my interest waned until I gave up performance. As you might know, in 2009. I've had enough I think of it by around that time. But during the time I was there I had a fantastic time. Really enjoying doing whatever I could get away with on a drum.

Yeah. So you've got this C section the. With the saxes over most of the time.

Yeah. And some hand clapping.

Actually I was wondering about that. It sounded like you've got two distinctive percussion sounds that come out in here. I mean on the main riff on the A section. Is that just a china cymbal or is it the baking tray symbol that especially harsh.

I haven't heard this for a while. Give me a break. I don't know which symbol it was.

All right.

I can't remember symbols. I have no interest in percussion instruments per se at all. There was a so called baking tray symbol around at the time. That's right. Which is featured on the drum fills quite a bit at the beginning of the track. Yes.

And I don't know if it was exactly this but I actually did somewhere in this time around hearing this drill a hole in one of my baking trays to put on top of a hi hat just to. I don't think it was ever used to profit on any recordings.

But you weren't the only guy drilling holes in baking trays to get trashier sounds. That's true.

So that's a hand clap through a flanger or something. This distinctive thing that it sounds like that doesn't.

I wouldn't remember whether it was a flange on it, but it sounds a bit like that. Or multi track in some way. Automatically double track maybe. We use ADT on everything. Automatic double tracking. All right.

So I assumed initially hearing it that that was part of some wacky thing you'd put in your drum set. But then actually listening more closely.

20:01 Mark: No.

20:02 Unknown speaker: You're just playing regular snare drums under that and in fact, interacting with it in such a way that it's pretty clear you're not playing the clapping thing, you know, with one hand while doing the snare with the other or something.

Indeed I'm not. And of course, six years later, we would have used a linn drum machine's hand clap for that. I. I guess. But that wasn't around at the time.

This sounds like a noise that it doesn't yell hand clap. Adds to the chaotic effect of the whole thing.

Yeah. And the rhythmic drive too.

So we get to the C section here under that sax solo, which you kind of establish that dun, dun, dun. Even before the second guitar comes in. This is kind of what confuses me on this because I usually think of. Crimson is a live band. And you're listed as a three piece at the time. Although I know that you still had David Cross playing some violin parts. And you had some sax on this song. But there's clearly two guitars. The main one and then this bom bom, bom. There's a separate bass part.

No, I would think it's a guitar overdub.

20:53 Mark: Okay.

20:54 Unknown speaker: Given that it's the main riff that establishes that whole section. Maybe it's just the fact that it's instrumental or that it's so firmly established. But I mean, you get to spice it up by doing a lot of double kick drum little fills and things. And just turning things around in fun ways.

It was often the way the continuum or the repetitive figure would be in the guitar. And the drums could go loosely around that. The more interesting and different ways of phrasing around any particular figure. And that's a very good example. Was appreciated. People like that. It was fun to do. So that was quite a common technique.

And I believe you even switch around right toward the end. That you're essentially playing in three, four through it. That you just turned the beat around

21:33 Mark: for a little bit.

21:34 Unknown speaker: I probably lost a beat. So you can call it turning it around if you like. That's right. Stuff could happen. So long as the music had that forward motion and you never lost it. You could really open up on the drums. And a lot of King Crimson things. Certainly I went from very, very tight playing sometimes through to very, very out jazz playing sometimes. It was a wonderful band for that. One of the great gigs that any drummer would have killed for. Possibly Frank Zappa, you know, Peter Gabriel and King Crimson were the great drum gigs that we all lined up to play.

I know Trey had said, at least when he was in the band that everything was road tested before you recorded it. Was that the case here or was this to some extent a studio creation?

That's a very good question. No, the latter is more true. We got so burned with doing this stuff in short order, fast in the studio and thinking, wow, I could have done that a different way. That eventually we managed to kick against the grain because the economics was such that you had to have some fresh music out to go on tour. Touring was loss making, so you wouldn't go on tour to lose money unless you were selling tons of records. So without new repertoire, it wasn't much point in going on tours.

You're saying new repertoire is already on an album that you are promoting, or new repertoire that you are working toward

new repertoire that's on an album you're promoting. So to go out without the artifact for people to buy would be financially suicidal, but not suicidal. But it was expensive. So to road test music was difficult. And then of course, there was a thing called a bootleg. Remember bootlegs? You know, people record it and then put that out on an album.

That's not just your phone. That's not what that.

You're too young to remember this. Then you've got. It's all snared up because somebody else had recorded it and stuck it out on an album before you'd managed to return and record the perfect version that you clearly wanted to record. So it all got pretty messy. I don't think we ever really solved it. We tried to road test things to a degree, but there were no rules, really.

Well, let's get the second song on the table so that we can contrast and compare. This is thistledown, recorded in 1992, released in 1997. If summer had Its Ghosts by you

23:50 Mark: and Eddie Gomez and Ralph Towner.

23:53 Unknown speaker: So tell me a little about this collaboration. So the song, at least Amazon says Eddie Gomez is the official composer on this song.

23:59 Mark: Is that right?

24:00 Unknown speaker: No, that's a mistake. So I don't quite know. Are you sure we're not playing Amethyst, which is his song? We're playing Thistle down, which is my song.

All right, Amazon is wrong. That's fine.

Perfectly okay. I think just to give you some context here, really, drummer led albums by this point had become kind of tattooed and oiled, muscle bound. Huge amount of technical dexterity from the Billy Cobhams and Dave Weckls of the day and so forth. And I was edging away from this. I was trying to look for a more poetic way of using drums, rhythm, melody, my sense of rhythm and Electronic drums had appeared and were getting pretty good. So the instrument I'm playing on this is an electronic drum kit of about 10 pads, and each pad has a kalimba note assigned to it.

Actually, it's not a kalimba, it's a sample of a kalimba, but altered by me. But it sounds a bit like a thumb piano. So think of the drum kit as being one large thumb piano. But the thing is, you can play the thumb piano with all the chords and notes that you might want, unlike a thumb piano, which, as you know, is semi definitely pitched. So you can play anything you want on an electronic drum set. But of course, there's going to be quite a choreography of stick movement around the kit because certain notes are on certain pads, so you have to remember that, which is a bit of a feat of memory.

But there's a very pretty feel to this, I think, which is very light. Ralph's acoustic guitar playing is absolutely sublime. I mean, just the introduction to this alone is worth the price of admission. Eddie Gomez, as you might know, is one of your country's finest bass players

from the Bill Evans Trio for a long time.

25:31 Mark: Yes.

25:32 Unknown speaker: Yeah, we're looking for kind of chamber jazz here, really. And just at the end, the drums don't actually appear. My main instrument, that doesn't appear until about 2/3 of the way through. And when it does, it's slightly unusual. I'm trying to play so quietly, you wouldn't believe it. And the microphones are. Is very close, mic'd and mixed well up in the mix. But I'm trying to play them feather light, the lightest sticks I can. You get very intimate sound that way, and you'll hear that about two thirds of the way through. So it's really kalimba acoustic guitar. Ralph is doubling on piano for the melody, and Eddie Gomez on bass. A drum kit, a Drummer turns up 2/3 of the way through.

Sa.

This is obviously overdubbed since you have Ralph Towner doing both keyboards and guitar. I know from hearing other interviews with you about Earthworks and how you liked to make music, I assumed this was not just recorded piece by piece. Or was it. Did you just put all the. The fake kalimba stuff down first and then things came over that or how did this work?

No, done us a trio first. There was no click with acoustic guitar.

30:41 Mark: Okay.

30:41 Unknown speaker: Bass and kalimba. Added to that later was a drummer 2/3 of the way through and a pianist.

That is not surprising to me that in a traditional pop setup, you know how. Okay, we're Going to leave a big space for piano here. But in a jazz setting where the interaction between all the musicians live in is pretty essential. What was the trick to that? Or I should just ask Ralph that question?

I think you see this is far too black and white. People like me are entirely pragmatic. You do whatever is necessary to get yourself to hear whatever it is you want to hear. Sometimes automation is necessary. Sometimes there are not enough hands. Sometimes there's not enough money. Sometimes there's not enough time. If it's music that can be done and it sounds well, all improvised, all played at one once now by nine people, that's terrific. And I've done plenty of that. If it's the kind of music there's nine people and it's too many. There's not enough time and nobody understands what's going on. And a machine will start you. Maybe to be replaced later. Don't know. That's another way of doing it. There are many ways to skin a cat to make an omelette. Sure.

Even just conveying to the other musicians what the song is. I know that in your Bruford time you had written on keyboard and then would present it on keyboard. Here's the basic structure. And then have the other guys flesh it out harmonically. Is that how it worked on this one?

Yeah. Roughly. I don't think I've ever arrived at any bit of music that I've ever liked by the same method. Almost always different. Sometimes I've been contributing founder members. Sometimes I've had almost nothing to do with it whatsoever. Sometimes I've played a completely flat dynamic part. Sometimes I've been told what to play play Sometimes never told what to play. There is every conceivable combination. That's partly what makes making music so interesting. That the way 5% for nothing. One more Red Nightmare, Thistle down and the next couple of songs we're going to play are all entirely different from each other. It's not a symphony orchestra. It's not a chamber quartet.

So this collection of drum pads that made up the kalimba.

32:41 Mark: Yeah.

32:41 Unknown speaker: This really amazes me just in terms of. It takes people a whole career just to really learn the pattern of steel drums or the pattern of xylophone when transitioning from regular drum kit. And you're just sort of doing this on the fly for one song. Or did you just take this setup and use it for several different things?

Indeed. No. Around that time it was really interesting. Digital technology had come on board. There was kind of onboard sampling from a Simmons SDX unit. So suddenly we could have the sound of panes of glass breaking backwards. But we could also have it pitched to a tonality or semi. Definitely pitched or whatever. We could blend it with metal sound. We could do anything we wanted. So it was really becoming very interesting. And for a while there. And this would now be very late 80s and into the mid-90s, I was on board with quite a lot of hybrid drum kit, really, which was half acoustic. There were still the remnants of what we would know as a traditional drum set, but also a lot of onboard electronic stuff. But for your listeners should know, this electronic stuff is played by flesh and blood, Arms.

Sure.

And wrists. It's not played by a machine. You have to extract the sound under the stick. And this stuff could be velocity. Very sensitive under velocity. So that it might sound like a whispering, very quiet triangle under a very light, quiet stroke. But it might morph over time and seamlessly into a huge church bell as the stroke got louder and louder and louder. For example.

And for a kalimba, how many volumes do you need? Like if you're playing a thumb piano with your hands? There's not that many. Many different.

I agree. That particular one is not much dynamic change in any of the particular times, as they say, any of the particular notes. But within other songs I've played electronic percussion.

It's very sensitive not to anticipate the song here, but I know that one starts off with. Is it log drums? That's not the digital pads by that point. That's going to be with Michiel Borstlap from 2004. So you were completely away from the pads by that point.

There were no pads by that point. Correct. For reasons I'll tell you about when we get into it.

So a little more on this. So I know you're actually playing the melody, the main head of the song, on this kalimba setup some of the time.

No, no, forgive me. No, I'm not. I'm playing an arpeggiated version of chords that are changed.

Well, actually, this is just pretty far into the song. I noticed at one time the piano does it. And then you were echoing him playing.

Very true. There's a close relationship to what I'm playing and the top line, which is if usually the. The piano.

So the beginning of the song, obviously, you know you're playing an arpeggiated thing, as you were saying. So was it a matter that you just had these things set up in the correct chords? There's not that many chords in this song, right?

No, not that many chords. But, yes, you're right. There's about 10 pads, perhaps. All right.

So you could just improvise between a few patterns and know that you're going to be approximately in the right tonal space.

Yes. A little more scientific than that, but broadly, you've got that. It's a written part, effectively. Sure. So I'm not improvising on that Kalimba. It is what it is and it has a structure and it does certain things at certain times. The way the song is delivered has that feel of three or four guys playing together in a room.

And then about a minute in, then it adds. Is it a shaker or is it just an extra pad? That.

That's a good point. I think the shaker would have been an overdub. An electronic overdub. Yeah. All right.

So structurally, you got a really strong head here. And then it goes to this minor key thing with some guitar soloing and piano soloing.

Yeah, There's a bass solo too.

Yeah. About two minutes in. Can you say anything about the vocabulary you were drawing on here? The whole thing has a Latin feel when the drums actually come in.

Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It has a soft Latin feel to it, I'd say. It's hard to say more about it, to be honest. I mean, it is what it is. I. I can't tell you any more about it than that. Do I love Latin music? Of course. You know, I mean, who doesn't? Do I play it? No, not at all. It's a kind of light jazz version of it that you hear perhaps a little ecm. Ish. The German label. Ecm.

36:41 Mark: Yep.

36:41 Unknown speaker: Something about the recording of the cymbals there that reminds me a little bit of this. I'm looking for a very warm and inviting sound and I think we certainly achieved that in context, as I said earlier, to Aggressive Drummer album, which are all heavy fusion notes, because you can

clearly hear that it's still you. Between the One More Red Nightmare, the main thing that answers the main guitar riff in the A section of that song and what's going on by the end of this song. You've got this offbeat ride cymbal thing. But I don't know if it's just a combination of you playing much more sensitively by this point, or completely different engineering on the cymbals and other things, so that it just has a completely different effect.

Both of those things, I think. You know, I mean, I've changed so much. I feel often when I play that I adopt a character for a particular Song a bit like, if you ask me to play Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, I'm going to adopt that Shylock Persona. It's the same with music. I feel like I adopt a certain character. I've done session work. I want to make the thing work as best as I can, and whatever it takes to do that's what will get done. So I try not to impose myself, try to be flexible. If the song Thistledown is screaming to be played in that kind of way, that's the way it'll be played. It's anything that makes it work, really.

And I've wondered what the source is of just even the completely different use of snare prototypically in rock. I mean, you might even have the snare hooked up to a God almighty thinking the giant 80s reverb. So every time the snare touches, a giant explosion has gone off. And since it doesn't have anything like that, you're able to use it with such a dynamic range that you can put it in just as thickly as the cymbals in given parts. It's not disruptive. It flows.

I like that a lot. And again, I think the general flattening of dynamics, the homogeneity of drumming these days has really given me a bit of a problem. Tempos have become very square. I think it's fair to say, although I don't have any research on this, that drumming is becoming more homogenous by the minute. The tempos are becoming more equalized. The timbral, the sounds are becoming more equalized. It's a frightening kind of world for drummers because there really is only seems to be one kind of standard beat available, and everybody plays it. I, on the other hand, have felt I played. I can't think of any other kind of drumming I could possibly have not touched Somehow in the 40 years I was around doing it. So I enjoyed that. And I think it must be very hard to do that now.

You've stumbled a little into the area of your current academic research that I was wondering about. In an email to me, you had said something about, you know, I thought when I was younger I was being creative on the drums or something, and I almost read this as. But now that I've studied the musicology of drumming for the past five years, I realized that the whole role of the drummer is just to imitate the human heartbeat. And so that's why Everybody plays at 120 beats per minute. And I was just misguided in.

You've leapt rather rapidly to Some rather strange conclusions. I'm not sure I was trying to imply that at all.

When you say, look, everybody's playing the same beat. The kind of defenses of that that I've heard in the past have been because drumming is just. It's so primal and it relates to this. Why would you expect the underlying human instincts or whatever that are being channeled through this tribal thing to be complex?

Oh, wow. Wow. Well, I don't know what world that guy lives in, but it ain't certainly my world. Wow. Drums and percussion are such an unbelievably highly sophisticated instrument that can sound unbelievably painfully bad when played badly and unbelievably beautiful when played sublimely. And there are hundreds of drummers who move that instrument forward through thick and thin, through all sorts of things. And I don't buy into this sort of primal nonsense at all. That's a very weird idea, I think.

Give me an idea of the kind of stuff your research is turning toward at this point in investigating drumming, I'm

not so much interested in the music really, as the psychology of musicians and what they do in performance and why they do it in performance. What do musicians do? What do drummers do? Why do they do it? Is there anything creative about it? If there is anything creative about it, how might that inform their practice? Don't we want all drummers to be creative? If we don't want them to be creative, what are they for? A number of things in this area. In other words, what are drummers doing? Why do we have drummers? Will we have drummers in 25 years time?

And if so, what shape and form, what will they be playing? Because surely when you can download what you can download now, why would you want to even mess with a drummer at all? So I'm beginning to personally feel I know what drummers do, but I think popular music refutes and uses drummers badly. Unintelligent drummers have, in a way, brought this upon themselves because they kowtow and conform to what it's required, which is 120 beats a minute and what they call the standard rock beat. And millions of drummers do that. And pretty soon, if they don't wake up, there won't be any need for them to do that because that is, of course, very easily done by a machine.

So if drummers want to contribute, they're going to have to contribute a little more than they currently do.

I think this makes an excellent transition to the third song. So this is from your Bill Buford Michiel Borstlap the album is Every Step a Dance, Every word a song. 2004, the song is the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians.

Would you like me to put a little context on this or do you want to hear it first?

Let's put some context on it. The context I was hearing from what you were saying is the way that you've described this before, is these are improvisational conversations between two musicians, as opposed to in pop music. Part of what I was talking about, the primal use of the beat, is if you see the whole song as not a conversation between musicians, but a single expression of a single voice. Not literally a voice.

Indeed, yes.

And so then what is the role of the drums or the drum machine in that? It could be just the footsteps of the person, like it becomes part of the ornament, part of the atmosphere, part of the organism, but not actually an interactive piece of a conversation like we have here.

Indeed. So, and I think you hit a very good word there. Interactional is key in one way or another, another to much of the music. And we said earlier on that some of the stuff that we played earlier, I think this can't quite remember, perhaps Thistle down was not entirely interactional. Some was, some wasn't. This, however, is just two people. Now. Conversations with two people can be great fun. Drum duets, duos, do you know, Mark Guiliana and Brad Mehldau, maybe musicians in twos have a wonderful sonic space because, of course, anybody can react to anything.

The context of. For this particular performance is a typical jazz festival. You get up at seven in the morning here in the uk, you fly to some German town. You know, there's a Steinway, there's a rental drum set, no electronics. You don't get a sound check. You follow three other sweaty bands, you're on next. You just set the instruments up and pretty much start playing. As a drummer like me approaches the drum stool at the beginning of such a set of music, without a single note of prepared music available to him, I can tell you, the stomach turns over with a degree of, what the hell are we going to play?

And sometimes it's not so good and sometimes it's absolutely tremendous. And this happens to be one of the latter, I think. And it sounds. I don't know how much you can play. I hope you can play lots of it.

I'd like to play the whole thing. You had said fade it at 4:21. And what I originally interpreted that for some reason was Fade it in at 4:21. So I started listening to the last Half, you know, after only listening to the first half once and being amazed by the time we get to the last, last half, you're actually changing sections in unison. Like it really sounds planned, but it's just. You've signaled with a certain riff that now we're going back to that other part here. Whereas at the beginning you're kind of feeling each other out a little more.

Sam. It. It. It. Sam. Sa. J.

So the thing that immediately struck me about this is as a conversation that Mikhail is starting with this kind of slow synth part and that you come in with this pretty quickly. What I have written down as the Morse code pattern. Is it timbales Cowbell? What is the.

I'm playing what they call a log drum.

Right. The log drum is the beginning.

Yeah, log drum for a while to start with. And a seven pattern which he picks up and plays a series of long sustained chords, big powerful chords. Which sound really nice. But he has a second hand instrument, so he can play between the large orchestral sized chords and the piano that he has there as well. I also happen to think the recording quality, the sound of the instruments is tremendous, considering there's no sound check for either the musicians or the recording engineer. So that's a classic. We love playing in Germany because they're very good at this kind of stuff.

Was it at least multi tracked or was this all just. This was the mix. This is just how the mix sounds.

Good question. It was broadcast live, I think. So I had no hand in the mix at all. This is the mix you got. That's exactly what we played. And there's absolutely nothing done to it. And I think what went well on this particularly is the form of it. In other words, often when you're improvising, you can be looking at different forms. People go on too long, they don't self edit. You can lose a shape of something. This is a big shape, almost a progressive rock shape. It's like instrumental progressive rock that's been unrehearsed, completely unrehearsed.

In other words, this is being made up on the fly. And there's something very nice about great fun to do. And at the end of it you go, if that was as good as I thought it was, it's like arriving at the bottom of a toboggan run. If that proves to be as exciting as I thought it was when I was doing it, it'll be great. And I thought it was exciting. And it is to me now that

big hook waits until. Because this is not planned, that this is Something that he stumbles across a full almost four minutes into the song. It reprises a little bit. It kind of establishes the feel for some of what's going on for the middle of the song. It actually doesn't reprise for the end. Like we mostly go back to that fast.

That Morse code, you call it Morse code. It's a kind of seven. It involves cowbells too.

Yes, that's what I was.

It's a cowbell in the right hand and a lot of toms are kind of Afro Latin. 7. Cow bell, bell rhythm.

How many times had you done this with Michiel before this around. You did a whole other album before this one with him, right?

We did a fair bit of work for two or three years together.

55:44 Mark: Okay.

55:45 Unknown speaker: So I knew him pretty well. He's a very highly thought of Dutch pianist. One of their top guys.

Sure. I had looked up this duo on YouTube and had seen something from the first gig you did together where that was made into a DVD right there. And just the level of comfort that you have at this point with each other is quite a bit beyond what was probably only a couple years earlier.

That's true. That DVD that is around a lot and was on YouTube and stuff was our first gig time we'd ever played together.

Yeah.

Amazing.

So again, it's like a couple of boxers. Feeling each other out. You used that phrase about feeling each other out a little bit. I think that idea hovers over that first dvd. You're finding out what the other guy does, what's his choices, what does he do if I do this? What does he. He do when I say this, what will he do there? And so forth. And it's all surprising and can be fascinating.

Of course, just the introduction of that fast cowbell thing early on seems like that's a pretty hard punch. Pretty early.

It's a really hard punch. It's very aggressive.

We've established this nice little log drum thing and he's playing this relaxed synth parts. And then suddenly we come in on, okay, this is going to be a high energy. This is going to be able to carry it.

This is punk jazz. I mean, this is loud. There's 3,800 Germans in a tent and it's hot and it's late. And I've never seen these drums before. I've had no chance to tune them, but yet they sound tremendous to me. And the musician reacts to the environment. What's the ecology like here? And if that's what it's going to be like. And the drums sound Big and powerful, like Black Sabbath. I'm going to play jazz Black Sabbath. I mean, it's going to be big, it's going to be loud, and he's going to have to react to that and vice versa. So I like that kind of thing. It's performance. It is not automated. No one's asleep.

But we do have some kind of genre conventions that you can retreat to and use as a base that you've got the, you know, the basic swing thing. When I'm not throwing a punch, I'm going to back into this thing sort of as a slight default and use variations off of that.

Yes, absolutely.

Which, an interesting one that I was hearing, I don't know, about six or seven minutes in, was still on the ride cymbal. Instead of doing the da da da da, it's ta da ta da. Every time you would do the on beat. Instead of do that, just double it. And just throwing that rhythm into that light jazz oeuvre, you know, that you had set up with the other beat. Is that as revolutionary and disconcerting as it feels to me, or is that just. I haven't kept up with jazz for the last 20 years.

Maybe that may be all of the above, I don't know. But what's going on in my brain as I make this and listen to it, and what's going on in your brain as you receive it? I don't know to what extent we're even singing from the same hymn sheet. The way you're receiving this is filtered and mediated by everything you've ever done and listened to as a kid in this position now, same as me. Thing is, we haven't listened to the same thing, so it's hard for us, especially since the music isn't playing right now. Alternatively, we could do another podcast for four hours on one of these songs and go into some serious detail.

But to me, I'm not really a nuts and bolts man. I don't really care a whole lot about this reverb, that symbol. I'm a very much a big picture guy. Has the thing got the feeling, the overall feeling that I want it to have? I mean, there's somewhere in it, there's some outrageously pooled drum fills, which if it was a recording in a studio, somebody would have stopped it and said, you ought to do that again. I don't mind. I'm okay with that. The expression is right. The actual execution is lacking. But once in a while it does lack. So, you know, we play wrong notes.

So what I didn't notice it actually fleeing the tempo. Although since you're setting it up and it's so free that what counts as a creative change in what counts as a mistake. I don't think that's clear at all.

Absolutely, you're perfectly right. I was just referring to sort of four beat section where the drums go completely nuts. And perhaps it was a little over enthusiastic. Put it like that. I'm trying to say that nothing is perfect and I don't want it to be perfect. And I've never looked for any kind of perfection or industrial accuracy. I may seem to others like a very tight on the nail on the money kind of drama, but to me I'm a complete mess and I think that's fine. I'm okay with that. Interesting, isn't it?

1:00:09 Mark: Yes.

1:00:09 Unknown speaker: If I were playing, came in with one of my songs and in fact I've played with lots of drummers who were at least directly influenced by Rush and so secondarily influenced you and Ginger Baker and the lot of you that brought this about and that I'm trying to have to constantly tell. Can you just play a little less in that section? Can you just back off? Because drums are so exciting in themselves. And that's why having a song like the Crimson song, which even though it counts as a song, it has lyrics in it, but having the space to be able to let loose in those parts seems essential for keeping good musicians happy.

Yeah, but it's a pity, isn't it? It's a lacking somewhere that we have to keep the drummer happy. That's a lacking. It's a lacking somehow. Either the song can't accommodate rhythmic interest or the drummer is excessive or demanding something, whatever. There's a disconnect here between. Between what the customer wants, which is the standard rock beat, preferably 120 bpm, and what the drummer can now do and wants to give, which is a major problem. So they have these things called drum clinics where drummers gather, thousands of them gather to hear the latest developments on the interest. And there isn't any other kind of musician around at all. They're only drummers playing to other drummers in a kind of aberrant pattern of behavior. Which is really weird, isn't it? Why? Because they can't do it in your song. Isn't that interesting?

What seems to make a song of whatever sort have life is that there's some way. I'm trying to generalize from the dumb thing I was saying before about the 120 beat permitted channeling something biological is that as long as there's some image of the human spirit, however you want to put it in the music. So it's very clear, clear in this duet that what makes you a mess, as you say, is that you're kind of reacting to the spur of the moment impulse of your energy levels. So what's natural about it is about the flow, the ebb and flow of energy levels.

So when you talk about it as having a conversation, but even having a conversation involves, I was going to say, too much conventional structure in that we have words and have to have coherent thoughts. Obviously there's conventional, like the jazz that we're relying on with music as well. But there's something more immediate and primal about. As if you were taking a look at when you're hyperventilating or something, or some other natural biological process, but that is kind of unpredictable and you're trying to make it interesting. So it's more like a dance.

Yes. Another way of looking at this is the process, product thing. So that on the one hand, it's the product or the artifact that's made, that's transported from city to city and played every night at 8 o'.

Clock.

Call it a rock song. Let's just call it a song. And they can be fabulous. They can be from James Taylor to anybody. They can be wonderful songs. And that's transported as is and reproduced as is on a nightly basis. As distinct from the jazz musician's process, shall we say, which is what you're hearing on that last particular track. The music is a direct function of those people on that night, in that environment, of that place. It will never be the same in Cleveland as it was in Cincinnati. It can't be. And the audience is being invited to observe the growth or otherwise of these musicians doing this process.

The process is interesting. The process is what it's about. The process is the performance. The product for that kind of musician is relatively immaterial on the whole. I have a lousy stereo system. On the whole, I don't really care what the music mixes so long as I can hear everybody. And I don't really care about the product that much. The process is more important to me. For other people, totally understandably, the product is what's more important. And when we were in UK together, Holdsworth, Bruford, Wetton and Jobson, we had two product guys and two process guys.

Holdsworth and me are the process. If this is really naked, kind of Holdsworth and myself and two product guys, really, who concerned themselves very much with the Artifact, which was Jobson and Wetton. And if you can hold that together, you can have a fantastic album. We got one fantastic album.

And it seems maybe what made those songs as good as they were when they were recorded is because they had the right amount of process that went into them as opposed to then. I mean, it seems reading your book and interviews, that what deadened you about rock so much was exactly what you say is having to play this a hundred times in the road. It's not necessarily coming to a definitive or definitive sounding or whatever version of the recording. Like how many times you just kind of have to work up the song and feel each other out and get something that sounds like it's really in the pocket and that it's hitting the note that you want. And then if you could just say, okay, that recording is now done. Let's start a new song. Like, would that be still a satisfactory way to be in the world of songs for you?

Some do. Some are actually incapable of going around the world repeating these things and find it tedious to the point of torture. I'm a middle ground kind of guy. I like to not know everything there is to know about the music at the beginning of the tour so that I can find out something during the course of the tour and hopefully find something about myself and the type of music that we're doing. The worst thing for me is to be rehearsed to death before a year long tour. At which point there's nothing to do but repeat ad nauseam. And I'm simply not constitutionally strong enough to do that. And I admire those members of Dire Straits or whatever who are capable of going around for seemingly years on end doing these songs, which is beyond me.

Do you see that as sheerly professionalism and being a craftsman, as you say, and being in the pocket or what seemed overlooked to me in the way that you were describing that is that a song is supposed to kind of cast a spell, that it's not really like you and I having the same conversation. This is what you're saying in another interview again and again, a hundred times. Because it's more like two people having sex 100 times. Like if the song is effective enough, maybe that it's supposed to be this kind of ecstatic moment to put these notes together as opposed to these other notes.

And the reason that you want to have Alan Holdsworth play the same solo again and again is because it was so transcendent. And we're to trying, trying to. Not even just for the sake of the audience. But for the sake of making it gel, at least have something that's. Hopefully there's some room for the musicians to vary from night to night. But the song itself is supposed to summon something that is special enough that it is repeatable. Or there's just nothing that works for 100 dates.

I appreciate the intellectual niceties of all this, but it seems to me the primary beneficiary of all that is the listeners, the audience.

Sure.

And I agree. You can cast a different spell in Cincinnati, the spell it casting Cleveland. And of course it will fall upon different ears and you can say, well, it's a different listener every night, of course. So our job is to produce the thing, the rabbit out of the hat, and it will be different from room to room and so forth. And there is something in that, but I'm not persuaded. But it's not an intellectual exercise. It's one of passion and art. And if you can't do it, you don't want to do it and don't do it, as it were. I'm just better. If it's more wild, it's more off the card. It's every possibility of it going wrong and every possibility of me being surprised, then I'm happy. When I'm not happy is when I know everything there is to know about where this music's going. Yeah.

One of the other interviews that I had done with Tim Quirk from Too Much Joy, which is basically a punk band, very influenced by the who and described stumbling on something, a particular move or a particular thing that he was doing live while on a particular gig that just really worked and the audience really reacted to that. And then what comes of that? And I can see the same thing. If you're in a Crimson kind of situation and you fall on some particularly effective semi improvisational exchange, then it seems like there's the pressure to like, well, how can we codify that? How can we do that again? How can we recreate that magic again and again? So there's something about this chasing the magic spell that seems ultimately kind of futile or at least has its own dynamic that is probably problematic in certain ways.

It is really a problem. And I think you're getting very close to one of the key kind of problems here of being a performing musician. In the popular world. I'm not going to even go near the classical tradition, but in the popular world, that is really a problem. A lot of people say the most interesting people and musicians who would be fantastic in groups would never dream of going near Them because they're so impossible. This whole touring record being successful for or trying to be popular or trying to earn a living at it, business so God awful that anybody with half a mind, half a heart wouldn't get involved in the first place.

It's like there's a built in kind of kink, a built in disconnect in the process of making this music and getting it out there to people, which is daily becoming more horrific. I think with the complexity of getting a pair of ears to listen to you. Happily, I don't have to worry.

I'm not sure why I didn't think when I was trying to describe the magic spell thing of classical music. Because of course you're playing the same exact thing every time, but you know, picturing the same violin concerto, even though you're playing the same notes, it's the way that it would vary from time to time is the feel, the passion of the moment that it seems like you can still get some of that same mojo that you're channeling. In this duet with Michiel Borstlap playing at least as the soloist, I don't know about, as the background oboist or something in a classical song setting.

It's possible. Although by far the greatest attendees of Music Psychology Therapists are highly paid symphony musicians.

Music Psychology Therapists, Okay. I didn't even know that was a thing.

The guys who are all ill. There's a wonderful documentary Southeast Asia tour or something with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil. I strongly recommend it. And it's a wonderful orchestra, of course, but there's a lot of backstage bitching and a lot of backstage camera work and individual interviews with all of them. And they're all the sickest load of thoroughbreds you've ever come across in your life. They're all psychotic with illnesses of one sort or another, despite a lifestyle you'd kill for without riders and police escorts and dedicated 747s and on board psychotherapists and the rest of it. It's incredible. And you think these are supposed to be happy musicians.

Is that a function of the repetition?

It's a function of the loss of control. As a musician, you hope to have some control over what you do. The difficulty with a symphony musician is that it might go wrong. It's a bit like flying a plane. When you go, ba, ba, ba, ba at the beginning of the Beethoven's Fifth, there is a possibility that it might go wrong or worse. And who do they care about the most? Do they care about the audience? The Listener? No, they don't give a damn about the listener. Do they care about the conductor? Couldn't care less. Do they care about the section leader?

Maybe. Who do they care about the most? The musicians on their immediate left and immediate right. Why? Because they can start a whole thing in the rank in the file on about how your tongue isn't quite what it was, that your vibrato was a little. Maybe he's not quite up to it. And this stuff, you should. Got to get this dvd. It's tremendous. So it makes being in a major rock group seem, first of all a breeze and secondly, rather underpinning paid because we mostly do what we want.

I'm trying to think of the worst kind of way you could mess up during roundabout or whatever you happen to be playing.

Yeah, absolutely. I can mess up a roundabout. It's a wrong note. Who cares? I mean, a couple of people will notice, most won't. I'm apologetic. It probably won't happen the following night. So what? And I feel I have some stake, I have emotional stake. The music, I was partly there when it was being created. I may have chipped in, I may have written the damn thing, but. But I have stake in it, unlike many of our symphonic friends.

Well, this sounds like a good introduction to the final song that we're gonna leave people with, which is Hell's Bells from your One Of a Kind album, 1979. Now, this was the single. It was written by Alan Gowen and Dave Stewart.

It was.

So was this a leftover from National Health or whatever band they were in before?

No.

Well, really, funnily enough, Alan Gowan died right at the inception of this, so it was kind of. I think Dave took an idea of Alan's and flying and finished it off and brought it to our band and said, how about this? And we all loved it immediately. Just felt so joyous and so much fun. And even hearing it now brings a huge smile to my face. It's a sort of gung ho quality of guys all in a room together banging and out again before click tracks. There's a moment that always makes me smile just as we get into a double tempo. Allan has been playing guitar solo with this lovely rich guitar guitar melody at the beginning, which is big sort of long notes.

And then it starts to get double tempo, very light, very fast. And he takes off, starts really burning and the tempo sags there really badly. Have a good listen and you'll see it sag there. And I think it was me thinking, we can't play this fast or Allan will have a heart attack. Something like that. And again, that didn't seem to be a problem. I think we probably all smiled at that moment. Nobody cared and we didn't have to rewrite record it, which is always great.

So I've always loved Hell's Bells and that became the single.

It did.

It's amazing. This is very joyful and I guess as long as you don't have to play it 100 times, then it's.

It keeps the magic very much so.

Well, jeez, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Okay, Mark, see you later. Bye. Bye.

Well, that was super fun.

1:16:47 Mark: Thanks so much to Bill. Amazing career, amazing musician, and a scholar to boot. If you're coming from a singer songwriter place like I I am, he really challenges some of your fundamental assumptions about what music is for. So I hope this has been a nice introduction for some of you to an area of music that you might otherwise not have poked your nose into. I hope you check out more of his work@billproofer.com or if you go to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and look at the blog post associated with this episode, then I will link to some live performances and related songs and the autobiography that we talked about.

Now, Bill was a familiar figure to me, but prior to researching for this interview, I had not spent much time with his solo work with Earthworks with really this whole branch of jazz. And I'm very much looking to expand our horizons in other directions. So I encourage you to reach out to me@markakedlyexaminedmusic.com and let me know who you'd like to hear on this show. And it would also, of course, be helpful for you to go to the itunes store and leave a nice review for the podcast. If you want to hear some of my music, go to marklint.com and be sure to check out my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

thanks again to Bill. Until next time, keep on musicing. This is Mark Linsenmayer signing off.