Interview with Bill Bruford in Boston Rock
Date Submitted: 18-Apr-1994
Submitted By: Gary Hanley (ghanley at novalink dot com)
This article appeared in the Feb '94 issue of Boston Rock, and I'm
forwarding it with permission from the author. Enjoy!
-- Gary
Interview with Bill Bruford
Close to the hedge: The symphonic music of Yes
by Michael Bloom
Bill Bruford probably has the most impressive resume of any musician
associated with the old classic progressive rock of the '70s. Moreover,
he's one of the handful still making waves in the industry, by making
interesting new music.
So he didn't feel much more constrained than I did to talk about that blast
from the past he was recently involved with, _The Symphonic Music of Yes_
(RCA Victor), even though that's what the publicist who set up the
interview thought we were doing. As we shall see, he's got other irons on
the fire nowadays. But he did give us the unsentimental inside dope on that
record, in his droll and articulate manner.
"Setting up an album these days is a bit like Hollywood," he
explained. "You have to run a script, put together a package... You get a
phone call, 'We're doing this, do you want to be in or out.' And it came
past my desk and it was a case of 'I think maybe I'd rather play drums on
this than have someone else do it.' Personally I thought it was quite good,
and I quite enjoyed re-recording stuff and having a second go at it."
For you studio mavens, here's how they did it. "The band played generally
as a rock group, live in the studio. We had five days, I think, and did the
eight or nine or whatever cuts. They'd been rearranged, David Palmer had
extended some sections and cut out others and so forth, so my mental
arrangements of these ancient pieces of music were somewhat scuppered. So
there were charts. Tim Harries is the bass player from Earthworks, very
good sightreader. So there were a lot of charts everywhere, and we just
played those-- and played them as a rock group, with the full intention
they should sound very good. There were no sequencers running.
"And then maybe a week later, there were three three-hour sessions for the
orchestra, which was recorded by Alan Parsons. I don't really know Alan
Parsons's work, but he seems to be a bit of a whiz at orchestral
recording. 54 musicians came in, and in nine hours-- which is quite quick
to do all that, you have to watch the clock, because they go into triple
overtime... As the last dying notes in the last piece ebbed away, they just
got there in time, I think, it was one of those high stress situations. I
wasn't there for that."
So there wasn't a lot of creative involvement on Bruford's part, and his
ego isn't on the line here. "Occasionally saying, David, you should really
leave this passage out, and you've got the beat wrong in this, and you're
misunderstanding the tempo of this, that and the other. So I was able to
correct and iron out one or two things that were going to go badly wrong
metrically, sort of the rhythm consultant to the stars!"
So when I described the record as a botch, Bruford wasn't too bent out of
shape. Much. Yes in its prime, which included most of the music on this
record, required five talented guys working at peak efficiency to perform
this music, and I figured if you could spread that information out among 54
people, you might get more nuance in there-- especially since Stravinsky,
one of the all-time masters of orchestral color, was admittedly a big
influence on the band.
"Possibly so," he admitted. "Where we missed that, you're a dissatisfied
customer, and where we got that right you're more or less okay. And I
agree, to take a balanced view here, it's an uneven album. But there are
moments of grandeur... I think the basses on the front of 'Heart of the
Sunrise,' there's a certain timbral quality there which is really
wonderful."
Yeah, that's one of the good bits. I also kinda like the entrance of the
"Close to the Edge" waltz theme, and a few other examples of clever
orchestral voicings. Which makes the bulk of the album that much more
frustrating, knowing that if they'd focused on the orchestra first, it
could have been brilliant.
"There you go, now. That's a different way of doing it, and the record
company would see that as tampering with 'classic' tracks. That's the world
we're living in nowadays, there are orders, instructions issued to the
musicians... Ironically, even though they will now let us senior serious
sober proficient professional musicians have the London Philharmonic at our
current age, and at 18 and 20 years old they wouldn't let us have such a
thing, we probably would have made better use of it then."
How did Yes do what they did at 18 and 20 years old, anyway? "With an
awful lot of blood spilled on the floor! Nothing was ever written down,
they weren't in that sense written. But we would all set up the instruments
in a circle, the traditional rehearsal room style, and stare at our feet
for a bit-- until somebody said, 'Well, I've got a bit of a riff and it
goes pom, pom,' and then Wakeman would say, 'We can put that over some
chord change,' and I'd say, 'Well that's not really much fun, can't we
halve the tempo or something,' and it would go to and fro like this in a
painfully slow and very amateurish method, and nobody really knew what was
happening.
"Jon Anderson would have a guitar in his hands and play two ghastly chords
which nobody wanted to play, and it was always a case of if you've got
something better, do it. So Steve would begin to figure out some other
little chord change or movement around what Jon had offered, and he'd sing
on top of anything that came, and away you go. It wasn't Sibelius sitting
down and writing something, it was four kids all sort of knocking shoulders
together.
"I think two or three times those particular four or five guys got
very lucky, with 'Close to the Edge' and 'Heart of the Sunrise.' Now you
can't afford to do that any more, there's too many professionals around,
and I wouldn't ever want to sit around again in rehearsal rooms the way we
did.
And that's about all the insight Bruford can offer about Yes. He has no
idea how they work nowadays. "I must immediately say I'm not a member of
Yes, and not purporting to be a member of Yes. There is a group called Yes
in Los Angeles, which I think comprises, as of yesterday, Alan White, Chris
Squire, Trevor Rabin, Jon Anderson and Tony Kaye. The Howe-Bruford-Wakeman
faction is on the whole not required, which is fine by more or less all
parties," he laughs.
"You know, I run my own group, it's a small group called Earthworks, and
when that has rehearsals, people bring in bits of paper. But tunes on the
whole are written, I mean those guys read and write, and they're much
sketchier things and they can just be played much more quickly. I love that
about the jazz side. I get my sense of improvisation and chaos from being
in a room with people who are all banging away at the same time."
The next Earthworks album should be out in a month or so, consisting of
live recordings from the last tour. "I'm very pleased with this live stuff,
definitely my best playing in a long time. I was thrilled to be able to
wail and get it down." Most of it, he says, was recorded at Nightstage,
and he was disappointed to learn that the club no longer exists.
Despite a much lower commercial profile than Yes-- or perhaps because of
that-- Bruford finds Earthworks more musically satisfying. For example,
Earthworks gets to improvise a lot, which Yes never really did. "You
absolutely are glued to the edge of your seat, or as a drummer I am," he
enthuses. "Not quite knowing which way the wind's going to blow next,
juggling, trying to make sense out of it, that is great fun. And of course
you can't do that in rock music on the whole."
And Bruford should know, as he was also once a member of one of rock's all
time great improvising ensembles, King Crimson. "When Crimson stopped in
'84, to me that was kind of a watershed. That felt like the end of that
particular time, where you could somehow be creative, quote-unquote, in a
major label rock group as a drummer, that you could think of things and do
things that were interesting. There was a core audience, a couple hundred
thousand guys who would support such a thing, and you could make a living
at it. No one's talking about getting rich, but you could make a living at
it. Since '84 I've found that to be more or less impossible in the music
industry. So I moved sideways into jazz, where people go when they want to
do that stuff on the drum set. And fine too, I have no trouble with that."
So we discussed King Crimson for a while. "You don't jam with Robert
Fripp," he observed drily. I mentioned how Fripp, in his booklet notes to
the _Great Deceiver_ box set, calls me clueless.
"Oh does he? Well there you go. That's an honor, if you've only been called
clueless. You should hear what I've been called. We're in a very rarefied
group of writers and musicians who've been disparaged internationally, so
join the club!"
END