Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: www.shorturl.at/adnpq
Here we are with one of my favourite editions of Earthworks in the grimy, sweaty, now defunct NYC club ‘The Bottom Line’. Good jazz writing has sufficient information for the musicians to get their teeth into, without offering so much it forces them to pay attention to the paper all the time. They are there to improvise, after all. It’s a knack you learn over a few years if you stick with it, and this song gets the balance about right.
The title phrase comes from drummer Shelley Manne, who for many years ran a jazz club in LA. It's the best definition of the jazz musician I’ve come across; a guy who never plays it the same way once.
The music known as jazz emerged from a fecund swamp of racial, societal, socio-economic and music-ecological circumstances peculiar to the southern United States, in the early years of the 20th century. However, a century later, it’s fair to say that it has grown big and strong and after some adolescent embarrassments (smooth jazz?), it has left home with a confident step, as arguably one of the United States’ greatest cultural exports. It embraces people of all genders and all religious, cultural, and political persuasions. It admits and adapts the music of the Hassidic Jew, the African, the European, the South American, the Cuban and probably the Tibetan, all though I can’t confirm the latter. How does it do this? Because it is intensely flexible, admitting and portable.
Can we Europeans play jazz? The great thing about being one of these outsiders - i.e. a European - is that I had and retain a huge admiration and affection for the gangling adolescent, but didn’t feel intimidated by the cultural baggage on his shoulders. Earthworks made up its jazz from pretty much anything left lying around. We’d throw some stuff in the pot, add some British progressive rock, two tablespoons of British humour, one teaspoon of understatement and some seasoning and hey presto! - some local flavour for the jazz gumbo.
Like a stone thrown into a multi-cultural pond, the ripples of jazz spread out in concentric ethnic circles too numerous to mention. Each new group would be admitted only grudgingly - notably in the case of female jazz musicians - and each group pulling up the drawbridge after it, loudly shouting “No more! Jazz is full! It’s being corrupted! Watered down!”. Happily life went on and the most exciting game-changers of whatever ethnicity or gender were duly admitted to the inner circle.
If popular music is mostly vocal music, the genre of jazz is mostly about instrumental performance. It’s the space you’ll probably end up in if you want to focus on your development as an instrumentalist, in real time collaboration, with people like Steve Hamilton, Mark Hodgson or Patrick Clahar, all heard in this video. It was a privilege to work with men of their calibre.
#billbruford #drumsolos #jazzdrumming #improvisationmusic#kingcrimson #tamadrums #electronicdrumkit #yes #rockdrummer #paistecymbals #billbrufordsearthworks
18 апр 2024
