Interview with Bill Bruford in Paiste news issue
Date Submitted: 31-Mar-1995
Submitted By: Terry F. Kroetsch (tkroetsc at mach1 dot wlu dot ca)
"double drumming in the new king crimson" by bill bruford
( from Paiste news issue 2 1995 - good issue with carl palmer, bonham etc
- it's free and I think they keep you on the mailing list - Paiste
America 460 Atlas St, Brea, CA 92621)
Greetings from the front. Pat Mastelotto and I are hard at work at
Gabriel's Real World Studios in England, wrestilng the new King Crimson
album to the ground. It's noisy, dirty and surprisingly delicate work...no
one said it would be fun, but somebody's got to do it. The music is huge
bleak, drafty and ornate in dark corners - a bit like Edinburgh Castle. I
only hope it doesn't frighten the horses.
Working with another drummer is an area in which I have some experience,
with Jamie Muir, Phil Collins, and Alan White, among others. You have to
be that much more adaptable, flexible and nimble on your feet. You may want
to listen more carefully and be that much more generous in your
choices. Double drummer work is paradoxically both more confining and more
liberating: confining in the sense that if you've agreed to play it, you've
got to play, and liberating because having a human metronome in the band
can allow you to fly to areas which hitherto would have left your fellow
instrumentalists with their foot in the air.
I was amused recently at a gig in Buenos Aires when, after the show, an
otherwise happy customer seemed vexed by the double drumming, insisting the
Pat and I were rather wide of the mark, if not extremely untogether. Now we
have our less than elegant moments, but this was, for this character, a
continual problem throughout the show. "You just don't play together"...and
then it dawned that his idea of, and only understanding of double drumming
was that both players should play the same instruments at the same time -
Allman Brothers style, and rhythmic counterpoint, polyrhythms, percussion
to drum kit, metrical superimposition, rhythmic illusions and the rest of
the huge array of possibilities was, quite literally "untogether". I
thought this was a charming view. Needless to say, Pat and I immediately
resolved to avoid duplication like the plague, the better to avoid being
mistaken for said Allmans.
Playing the same thing as the other guy has always seemed to me to be the
most feeble place to start when looking for double drumming strategies. By
all means play the same thing a sixteenth, a quarter, an eighth note, a day
later, or earlier, but at the same time? Unwise. Perhaps better to look
for interlocking rhtyhms each of which on its own has a life, but when
played togther has a power greater than the sum of the components.
Then there's metric modulation, illusion and superimposition, the sort of
thing Trilock and Gavin Harrison are demons at. Two metres on top of each
other, one at a faster pulse than the other, wheels within wheels, big and
slow, light and fast - oh yes folks, we've tackled it all one way or
another at Real World in the past few weeks. How about assigning timbres?
He gets the wood, you get the metals. He gets the high drums, you get the
low...and so it goes on.
Throughout all this we've been well served by a huge supply of Paiste
Cymbals, from piggy-backed trashy mini-cups to the roar of a huge
China. What combinations of percussion timbres and sounds are used when,
and how much has to be one of the greatest defining features of a track,
and that's before you've even figured out what to play. Perhaps we all
concentrate rather too much on how to play, rather than where and when to
play.
You'll love it or loath it, but the new King Crimson beast makes one heck
of a CD.
- Bill Bruford