Bill Bruford's Earthworks - All Heaven Broke Loose: a) Psalm b) Old Song (Stuttgart, Mar 30th 1991)

Описание: Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: https://www.shorturl.at/adnpq

This video is basically Earthworks version 0.1, with Django Bates (keys and Eb tenor horn), Iain Ballamy (tenor saxophone) and Tim Harries (acc. bass). The piece grows fairly seamlessly from the gentle opening of ‘Psalm’ to keyboardist Django Bates’ beautiful ‘Old Song’, via a loose but complete defragmentation of harmony and rhythm immediately before the rubato and climactic ‘Old Song’. The original ‘Psalm’ theme is recapitulated at the end, with Tim‘s arco bass adding a dark and sombre note to proceedings.

The track is the title cut from Earthworks 3rd album, 'All Heaven Broke Loose', recorded in Germany in 1991, to the sound of ‘shock and awe’. Remember that? All hell broke loose, so we turned that idea on its head for the title. The sessions and mixing lasted about 100 hours, almost exactly the same length of time it took Coalition Forces to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. My old friend, guitarist and producer David Torn, was twiddling the knobs as producer. We’d spent a fair bit of time together during his albums ‘Cloud About Mercury’ and ‘Door X’, during which we’d come to understand and like each other and our respective musical choices.

Performing on electronic drums, I always took great care to ensure we weren’t all listening to the percussion in a cultural and ritual vacuum. If permitted, an invisible gauze can descend between listener and performer when electronics enter the relationship. Unless in some way humanised, that cold, separating gauze, that may have suited, say, Kraftwerk, was not at all part of my thinking. In performance you have to avoid the graded removal of context from which the listener might derive some sort of musical meaning from the actions:

1) Striking a drum at source, heard at source. See Taiko drummers, below.
2) Striking an amplified drum, the sound of which is then put into and received through a p.a. system - a first level of separation.
3) Striking a sample of the above, which is then put into and received through a p.a. - a second level of separation.
4) Firing a similar sample from a laptop, where even the physical striking is removed - a third level of separation.

It’s too weird for me seeing a performer on stage with a laptop as his or her primary or only axe. Without visual evidence of the instrument being struck, and in the laptop’s case, without evidence even of the musician striking it, the musical meaning of the action is lost to me. That's why in ABWH, the electronic stuff was raised high, so stick could be seen striking pad.

Harmonics, overtones, sympathetic vibration - all the mysteries and generally less controllable elements of music are not to be discarded lightly. They are of the essence. The increasing popularity of the oiled and loin-clothed Oriental Taiko drummers with the housewives of Oslo, Kristiansand or Sheffield, speaks to the vibrant humanity of the percussive arts, and explains why I shall never be far from the acoustic version of my instrument, the drum kit.

Don’t forget to subscribe! And hope to see you same time same place next week.

#billbruford #yes #drummer #paistecymbals ##tamadrums #drumsolos #electronicdrumkit #kingcrimson #earthworks #jazzdrummer #billbrufordsearthworks