In a career spanning podcast released yesterday, April 29 2022, Bill Bruford looks back over his time in Yes, King Crimson, Bruford and Earthworks projects.
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Thanks. All consistent with his autobiography, not surprisingly. But I like his explanation of the organising principle of his collected works: not the style of music played, but his role as drummer in a project and his relationship to the other musicians involved in creating the music. Which is also consistent with his academic analysis of how percussion and percussionists contribute to a musical event. -
The Strange Brew podcasts, all of them including Bruford and a bunch of other Yes-related ones, are also available on Prime Music.Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.Comment
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Thoughtful and ironic as usual.
Strange Brews is highly recommended. Bernard isn’t a master interviewer, but most of his guests don’t need much encouragement to tell (interesting) tales.
He also plays complete songs instead of snippets.
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Strange Brew is one of my favourite podcasts. Jaspn's interviews with the various members of 10cc (Eric Stewart in particular) are must listens for fans of that band!Comment
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Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.Comment
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Reading the notes accompanying the 2CD collection Heavenly Bodies: an Expanded Collection, I'm struck by something Bill says which certainly chimes with me as a listener:
"I'm sometimes asked why I ended up playing jazz, having started in something called rock. After a brief aberration in the late 60s and 70s, rock music had reverted to type, namely in that it is the preserve of the song-writer, record-producer, and record company, and is an area generally hostile to the ideas of a free-thinking instrumentalist.
That is probably as it should be, but it means the purveyors of the more marginal, fringe ideas that fuelled trock in the post-Beatles era - the people who brought Indian music, classical music, psychedelia, jazz, minimalism and the like, in short all the things that made rock interesting to people like me - had been booted out, back to where they came from, branded as the meddlers they indeed were. I went back to jazz. There, a listening relationship between performer and audience is still possible. Waiting for someone at a major record company with access to the mass market to give you permission to play, and who probably knew little about, or cared for, the music, became insufferable."
This take on the shift back to type chimes particularly with me, insofar as it describes in general terms my own views on what became of rock music during the course of the 1980s, especially, but was already well underway by the end of the 1970s, and largely continues to be the way of things now, certainly in the mainstream currents of rock music. It also mirrors my view of Yes during the same span, to where they are now.Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.Comment
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