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If you’re only ever going to listen to one Bruford interview, this is probably the one you need. Why? Because [a] I know no one has time for lengthy interviews, so this has been divided into 18 short ‘chapters’ - scroll down and click on a topic that takes your fancy - and [b] it contains private archival documentation of this musician’s music endeavours now made public for the first time - gig notebooks, tour itineraries, personal and business correspondence and so forth - that some might find interesting.
The Rock Hall of Fame has an impressive Library and Archives, to which I’ve recently donated dozens of boxes of papers. The thrust here is that this material might be used and useful in research seeking a perspective on the everyday ‘off-instrument’ negotiations that a late 20th century music-writing drummer, who navigates his or her way through a slew of bands and 41-years’ worth of their contractual relationships with publishers, managers, record companies, will inevitably encounter. That such a career was documented makes it perhaps unusual in the drum community, as both an atypical research topic and a study in the extreme end of drummer productivity.
The entire collection has been catalogued in a meticulous and painstaking way, and is available in physical form at the Library and Archives in Cleveland USA. An exhaustive ‘Finding Aid’ is provided at the end of the interview in chapter 18.
Don’t worry if you have no immediate plans to be in Cleveland USA; much of the material has been digitised and the rest is projected to be digitised and the whole collection available online by the end of 2022. My thanks to Jason Hanley, Andy Leach and their team at the Archives for the care and attention to detail they’ve taken on this project, and to you for listening.
Chapters:
08:26 Origins of ‘Heart of the Sunrise’
11:38 Leaving the band Yes
13:46 King Crimson as a different animal
15:54 Live versus studio
18:41 Perfection
20:25 The business of music
26:06 The composing-leader
28:30 Growing up with jazz
29:52 Earthworks: ‘Nerve’
32:33 Electronic schematic for Earthworks drum kit
35:08 Electronic drums spark creativity
36:11 The special guest: Chris Squire / Al Di Meola / Kazumi Watanabe / Roy Harper
44:38 Gig notebooks
47:30 Tour itineraries
49:20 The idea of the improviser
54:10 David Torn’s ‘Previous Man’
56:27 Cultural differences between UK and US musicians
59:26 Bruford Archive now available at Rock Hall Library and Archives. Finding aid summary #billbrufordsearthworks