Bill Bruford's Earthworks - White Knuckle Wedding (Paderborn, 16th May, 2005)

Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: https://www.shorturl.at/adnpq Bill Bruford: Drums Tim Garland: Flute Gwilym Simcock: Piano Laurence Cottle: Bass #billbruford #earthworks By 2005, Earthworks, born 1987, had been around some 18 years and we’d covered a lot of ground, both physical and musical. Some eleven musicians, all British, had been through the band, and these guys playing here - Gwilym Simcock (piano), Tim Garland (flute), and Laurie Cottle (bass) - were the last three in, and as good as you can get. Simcock and Garland, notably, went on to great international success with Pat Metheny and the late Chick Corea respectively. I’m thinking of the music in 11/4 because I’m always looking for the slow pulse, the quarter note that you can tap your foot to. That keeps the pulse grounded and it won’t run away with you. Others, perhaps top line players, might choose to feel it as alternating measures of 6/8 and 5/8. I sent four inter-related 11/4 rhythms to Tim by fax (remember them?) one afternoon as a rhythmic bed for something, and he came back within a day or two with the superstructure of White Knuckle Wedding sitting comfortably on top. Wish I could do that. What a man. The good old log drum – the same log drum on King Crimson’s ‘Sheltering Sky’ and ‘Discipline’ - makes a couple of appearances, but it’s been put out to pasture now. Note the logic in Gwilym’s piano solo. At 2’05” his opening phrases are directly informed by the flute’s closing phrases. Each subsequent idea follows logically from the idea that preceded it. By contrast, at 2’21” I introduce a great little up-turned Chinese cymbal that works really well, but abandon it far too soon only ten seconds later. What an idiot. Could have got more mileage out of that, or developed the idea further. This exemplifies a less attractive side to my own playing generally: a tendency to fidget; to change cymbal, drum, attack or dynamic precipitously and even unnecessarily in an inappropriate place. Why? Probably attention-seeking, an endemic problem with we drummers, as Robert Fripp has been known to observe. #billbrufordsearthworks