Drummer Bill Bruford

One of rock’s most distinctive and versatile drummers, Bill Bruford has performed with numerous acts, including prog rock greats Yes and King Crimson. Now the release of his new autobiography coincides with the announcement of his retirement from live playing after 40-odd years.

Even now, there are many fans who still ask Bill Bruford why he left Yes on the cusp of their large-scale success in the wake of Fragile (1971) and Close To The Edge (1972). His work with King Crimson, UK, Bruford, Earthworks, his tours with Genesis, and his duets with Patrick Moraz and Michiel Borstlap all point to a musician determined not to get stuck in a rut musically.

In fact, Bill is known for his honesty in admitting when a musical milestone is reached. It being impossible to top a peak in one particular style or work with a band, he’s constantly moved on to pastures new, to explore fresh avenues and grow as a musician. His ground-breaking innovation with Simmons electronic drums opened up the worlds of melody and harmony to musicians that formerly would be labelled exclusively rhythm specialists, while in comparatively recent times he’s returned to his first love in the shape of an acoustic jazz quartet.

Here, he talks to Performing Musician about working with various bands, his compositional techniques, and why the publication of his autobiography marks another pivotal milestone in his life.

Yes in 1969: (L-R) Peter Banks, Tony Kaye, Chris Squire, Bill Bruford and Jon Anderson.

Photo: Gilles Petard/Redferns

Bill Bruford: “Heck, I didn’t know what a texture was. Did we create those?! Mainly, I was interested in being heard, so was forced to adopt some guerrilla tactics in the absence of microphones [see below]. A lot of Chris’s stuff was very melodic and very high up on the neck in a register almost (not quite!) above the guitar, so he wasn’t being exactly your typical bass player. I didn’t think about locking in with the bass per se, as opposed to finding the instrument that had the most sustained rhythmic continuum and locking in with that. Could be anybody. We were doing things a little differently.”

BB: “Not specifically. I was tied to the drum set and hadn’t yet branched out into percussion or mallet keyboards (I used xylophone and marimba in Crimson and Bruford) and, of course, there were no electronics. Oh, simple days! But Rick brought orchestral size — we always wanted to be a small orchestra — so the music, and hence the drumming, became more expansive and ambitious, with more light, shade and variation. Thank heavens!”

BB: “Yes, I suppose so. I was simply trying to do something that I thought was interesting on the drums that might then just possibly interest others. Didn’t seem much point in all of us drummers playing the same thing. So placing the accent in an unusual part of the measure, and from that progressing to unusual sub-divisions of the measure (‘Long Distance Runaround’) and then unusual time signatures (‘Siberian Khatru’), was part of what I was about. If people recognised my playing at all, I think they were generally referring more to this unusual beat placement than the actual sound of the snare drum. But generally, if something about the drumming smelt funny between about 1968 and 1974, it was probably Bruford on the tubs.”

BB: “Necessity is the mother of invention. There were no mics on the drums when I started and Chris Squire was awfully loud. So I started banging out rimshots with as much cut as possible to get through the racket. I guess you could say it became a signature. The fashion of the day was for snare drums to be a deep, dead, wet ‘thud’, so my open ringing sound seemed a bit weird in that context. Actually, much of the sound character coming from a drum is a function of the way you hit it.

“By the 1970s, we had the novel possibility of recording on 24-tracks. We had to fill all those tracks with something. ‘I know! We’ll stick a mic on every drum and damp the hell out of it, so we get a set of seven puddings occupying seven tracks. Then we can use some fancy EQ to EQ the life back into the puddings. And that way we’ll have no sympathetic vibration and the album will have cost a fortune, because I will have taken a week doing this, and it’ll all be better than Simon and Garfunkel.’ It’s a wonder we didn’t close-mike every piano string for more control. Crap idea, if you think about it. I just let my drums ring, and those harmonics are part of the music, as any idiot now knows.”

BB: “Well, I wasn’t that pig-ignorant. I knew a few chords and could write Fmi7 on a piece of paper. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what a 12-bar blues was or a 2-5-1 progression. But that whole thing on Fragile was a typical Yes misunderstanding. There had been a lot of rows — hence titles like Fragile and Close To The Edge. I always thought we were about to break up, because we all had our own ways of how this songwriting thing could be done. So when we came to Fragile, we were well short of a full album of material we could all agree on.

“I suggested we all individually became ‘composer-in-residence’ for a day; that is, take the instrumentation, resources and talents of the group’s members and use them as you like without further input or discussion from others. This was immediately misconstrued by Wakeman and Howe, both of whom did solo pieces (‘Cans And Brahms’ and ‘Mood For A Day’), and Chris did a bass feature (‘The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)’), all of which rather defeated the object. My humble offering, ‘Five Percent For Nothing’, was a tad brief. I had no assistance and obviously could have used some! If nothing else, the exercise proved we were better as a band than as a bunch of solo artists.”

BB: “He calmed me down a bit. I had a respectable technique relative to other drummers of the day, and like a typical kid I was determined to display this on all possible occasions. Jamie pointed out — sometimes forcefully — that I existed to serve the music; the music didn’t exist to serve me. Young drummers are very myopic and tend to be unable to see beyond their shiny set of cymbals. With Jamie, I began to get a sense of how others heard me and the dramatic role percussion of any description could play in directing or altering or otherwise affecting the course of the music. And nobody other than me cared whether I had a useful paradiddle or not.

“Being familiar with [avant-garde composer John] Cage and other modern composers, Jamie liked the idea of altering or ‘preparing’ the sound of his kit — in his case with chains, sheets of metal, and a baking tray in the bass drum [‘Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part One’]. That was a bit of an ear-opener. When he left I ‘inherited’, as it were, his percussion functions as well as the kit stuff. My ears were getting bigger all the time. They needed to.”

PM: Your various accounts of working with King Crimson have differed substantially between being stressful and creatively constrained to being a very relaxed experience. Which of these observations is correct?

BB: “Some wires have got crossed somewhere. There’s a lot about my time with King Crimson in my autobiography, so I’ll keep this brief. 1) Robert didn’t issue instructions, bring drum parts to the rehearsal room or force anything anywhere. 2) Suggestions were made; balls were thrown in the air for any musician to catch, drop or ignore — all fine with Robert. 3) The notion of an artist working through limitation — using only the blue if you’re Picasso, for example — is not new. In response to a ball thrown in the air labelled ‘less metal’, I developed a hybrid acoustic/electronic drum kit for the ‘80s King Crimson with all manner of unusual percussion, which, among other things, omitted a hi-hat. 4) Nothing in or about King Crimson was relaxing or relaxed.

“Everyone goes about this music-making thing differently, and some find it easier to produce than others. I found music-making difficult and even stressful, although ultimately hugely rewarding.”

BB: “Like most people, I was just trying to find something everyone wanted to play and as quickly as possible. Before computers, and if the music wasn’t entirely written and you were hoping to involve all participants in the creative process to give them some emotional involvement, that meant you were going to have to create it expensively in a rehearsal room. Hence the shortage of time.

“Dave [Stewart] was enormously helpful, as have been my other writing colleagues: Django Bates, Iain Ballamy, Steve Hamilton, Tim Garland and others. Typically, I’d start with something playable all the way through, but an added layer of harmonic sophistication came from Dave. Lots of the ideas came from my rhythmic background, of course. Often, that’s where the piece started.”

BB: “Conventionally, the singer, John Wetton, took care of the words in much the same way as I took care of the engine-room rhythm stuff. Eddie [Jobson] wrote well and had very clear ideas. Allan [Holdsworth] and I played a lesser part to John and Eddie overall.

“UK was a bit of a tightrope with a built-in ‘jazz vs. rock’ fault line. I think we all knew it and all figured that if we could hold it together long enough to make one record, it would at least be an interesting record, as indeed I think it was. It broke Allan in the US; you could hear the sound of a squadron of US guitarists all going back to the drawing board.”

BB: “I don’t remember when I met Patrick, but in the mid ‘80s he came to live a few hundred yards from me in the Surrey Hills. We played informally at his place, and then we decided we’d try just a piano and drums duo and take it out on the road. It worked very well. Patrick is extremely rhythmic, and after a few minutes your ears adjust to the idea that the only bass is coming from the piano.

“We were both on the rebound from big, noisy, complex groups with all the attendant grief, and it was just so great to be that small, mobile and intelligent. Music For Piano And Drums [1983] was made at Phil Manzanera’s place in Chertsey. It was part written (‘Children’s Concerto’, ‘Blue Brains’) and part completely improvised (‘Living Space, ‘Any Suggestions’). We lost the focus a bit when we broadened the blueprint to include Simmons and Kurzweil in a second CD called Flags.”

BB: “Same approach, but 20 years’ worth of water has gone under the bridge. With Patrick I got a real taste for improvising, a path that Jamie Muir had led me down many years earlier in the Crimson days, and this has been continued with Michiel Borstlap.

“Much of the point of adopting this method is to locate and occupy the space between the bar lines, the pitch between the pitches. If it could have been written, there would have been no point in improvising it. This is spontaneous composition, unpredictable honest and raw. Unmanicured, it will convey a truth about the musicians that may be hard to arrive at in any other way.

“A keen improviser learns much about his musical self very quickly. I’ve been able to reach the parts that other methods of music making don’t let me reach. One of my favourite Crimson tracks is the totally improvised, brooding ‘No Warning’ from Three Of A Perfect Pair [1984]. Surprise is a common outcome in improvisation; it’s the audio of your hidden intentions.

“I’ve been doing this thing with Michiel Borstlap in Japan and Europe for a few years now since we met in 2002. He’s a terrific player, a classically trained jazz musician. Our first concert was recorded live and eventually appeared as a DVD, In Concert In Holland. Talk about learning about each other fast!”

BB: “When I started writing for my own bands, I put in a lot of hours on musical theory and scavenged the rest from wherever I could. Since there is little or no improvising in rock, your colleagues’ input, if you want to absorb it, has to be factored in at the composition stage, into the basic structure. Jazz musicians’ compositions, in contrast, are more self-contained, and input from others comes from their interpretation of and improvisations upon the given material.

“My kit was extremely complex, sophisticated, and had a large random element to it. Often, at home, I didn’t know what was going to come out, and I frequently got lucky. The percussion solo on ‘Stromboli Kicks’ is an entirely random selection of short, small percussion samples, assigned to and extracted at random from 10 pads.”

BB: “The technology in my day was horribly crude. It’s much better now on the modern Japanese drums, but the whole area is governed by one huge elephant in the room that no one will address: there is insufficient dynamic headroom. The drums have no dynamic range compared to the acoustic instrument (any acoustic instrument). You can’t explode or whisper on an electronic drum set. When they get that right, there is a chance it’ll be taken up again by musics that require dynamic variation. Whenever I played, I was either immediately too loud or too quiet. To make matters worse, I was a hybrid — half electronic and half acoustic — and balancing the two, and then balancing or playing at the right volume for the ensemble, was all but impossible. And using the butt ends of the sticks to try to get more sound out of the things was killing my technique. But, hey, no complaints! It was a dirty job and somebody had to do it.”

BB: “Around ’96, I knew three things: that I could go no further with electronic drums as they then existed; that I could go no further with King Crimson; and that to make headway in jazz I’d have to leave rock altogether. To get to the other side, you have to kick off from the shore, if you follow me. The acoustic kit followed from that. I reckoned there was a ballsy, visceral, muscular, loud but acoustic jazz to be had, and that was the second edition of Earthworks, with Steve Hamilton (piano), Patrick Clahar (saxes) and Mark Hodgson (bass).”

BB: “There are, I’m sure, endless new musical areas to explore, but not for me. On drums, the next new development I think is in the realm of improvising with, or having an easy facility with, metrical modulation. Wheels within wheels, pulses inside pulses, rhythmic illusions and playfulness — the sort of thing Gavin Harrison does so well.”

BB: “I don’t do regrets. There are plenty of people I didn’t have the chops or vocabulary to play with, so wouldn’t have dreamed of asking.”

BB: “My retirement from public performance is permanent, inasmuch as there is any permanence in life. I have a lot of interests in music that are still current though. I run two small labels: Summerfold Records and Winterfold Records. Summerfold deals with new projects and my newer jazz-ish side, post 1986; Winterfold with my older electric side up to that year. There are now some 35 titles across the two labels, and the newest will be available in the summer. Recorded last year, we’re releasing Skin And Wire: PianoCircus Featuring Bill Bruford Play The Music Of Colin Riley, in which a composer supervises a jazz drummer who used to be a rock drummer playing with a group of classical pianists best known for performing systems music.

“Winterfold and Summerfold have both just released new compilations. The Winterfold Collection takes 13 of the best tracks from across six Winterfold albums, more on my earlier rock side. The Summerfold Collection is a double CD with more than two hours of music from 1987 to the present, featuring a stellar cast of jazz musicians with, among others, Tim Garland, Ralph Towner, Django Bates, Eddie Gomez and Iain Ballamy.”

BB: “I’ve always enjoyed pushing words around on paper, and have done dozens of magazine articles. I was also keeping a diary of sorts, and one day about three years ago it became apparent that I had a book in there somewhere. I’d also taught a cultural studies course at degree level at a local music school and was developing plenty of ideas of my own about this musical life, its purpose and meaning to producer and consumer. I was also impressed by Sting’s Broken Music and Dylan’s Chronicles — neither being ‘straight’ autobiography.

“I enjoy talking to informed fans and commentators at drum clinics and through industry magazines and events, but in a way I’m more intrigued by the person who doesn’t know anything about the music scene. I’d like to bring the stuff we’re talking about to the checkout girl at the supermarket. The danger we all face is that of preaching to the converted — jazz guys playing only to jazz freaks who read jazz magazines, and drummers playing to other drummers reading drum mags at drum clinics. The great pleasure in playing a free festival for 1000 people milling about in a Spanish town square is that you have an opportunity to have your music engage with the uninformed, so they receive it exactly the way it is, without the marketing hype. And mostly, they love it!

“[The book] is a series of observations about the musical life for a non-classical instrumentalist, based on and abstracted from my personal experience. It’s about the pleasures, perils and pitfalls of playing percussion in public, certainly, but it’s also about what musicians do when they are not trying to be rock stars; what they do in the ‘daytime’.”

BB: “The market is too crowded. I have nothing to add to the small army of experts who are already befuddling us all!

For more information on Bill Bruford visit www.billbruford.com, where you can also read the first chapter of his new autobiography, Bill Bruford: The Autobiography: Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks And More, which is out now. 0

Drummer Bill Bruford

One Of A Kind