Bill Bruford's Earthworks - Revel Without A Pause (Footloose in NYC, 30th May 2001)
Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: https://www.shorturl.at/adnpq
This song originated as the opening cut of Earthworks’ final studio album, the Sound of Surprise (2001), with Patrick Clahar (tenor saxophone) Steve Hamilton (piano), Mark Hodgson (bass), Me (drums and producer) all present here. I’ve written elsewhere about how the events of those few days in a small North London studio produced that polished outcome. Luck, fair weather, the material well played in on the road in a preceding tour; all these things helped too. In my darker moments, when I feel I’ve achieved very little on a drum set, and have far to go - oh yes; we all have those moments – I can put on the album version of this track and feel a little better.
This version was recorded live, warts and all, at the Bottom Line in NYC. It was a good time for Earthworks. We were touring freely and profitably, albeit as a result of some heavy groundwork from the band’s leader. When this was recorded in 2001, it was still possible for a quartet coming from the UK to the US to play 16 dates straight in a row from Boston to San Diego without having to sleep on somebody’s floor. We were a sustainable proposition. But things were changing fast around us.
Were things better back when I started? Depends on your definition of ‘better’, and better for whom? If we reduce it to those of us making popular music, many have reframed the late twentieth-century as a ‘golden’ age in that particular pursuit. In the post-Beatles sunshine, record companies were awash with money they couldn’t spend fast enough. British art schools were churning out glamorous young things with ideas about fashion and its relationship to music. Stereo multi-track recording was promising endless manipulation of music sound sources. Furthermore, the enormous market of a place known to us as America was ready, waiting and primed with FM radio, with which the music of the glamorous young things might be beamed around the nation.
Everyone wanted live music. Recording the stuff was still expensive. Music tended to be made by specialist people called musicians, and the idea that anyone could be a musician had yet to be conceived. So yes, things were better for the individual performer in many ways. The relatively local but expanding market ensured there was more money next year than this, and this year wasn’t bad anyway. Music wasn’t free, despite the insistence of a group of young left-wing Italians that it should be, as they helpfully let down the tyres of King Crimson’s equipment truck outside the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome, 1973.
This was the music ecology in which I grew up, long since changed beyond recognition. Nothing we can do to bring it back. The small near-jazz backwater in the UK in which I choose to operate, hangs by a thread of financial viability, with venues and musicians struggling to exist. I find it tough to jump up in front of a crowd of rosy-cheeked young musicians in 2024 and tell them they’re unlikely to make a living playing what they want, as I was fortunate to do. Were I to do so, I’d be happily ignored; written off as a sour old git who hasn’t got any answers. And they’d be right, I haven’t. But I’m good with questions, though.
#drumsolos #billbruford #jazzdrumming #electronicdrumkit #improvisationmusic #paistecymbals #rockdrummer #tamadrums #kingcrimson #yes #abwh #billbrufordsearthworks #jonanderson #rickwakeman #stevehowe #billbrufordsearthworks
Watch video Bill Bruford's Earthworks - Revel Without A Pause (Footloose in NYC, 30th May 2001) online without registration, duration hours minute second in high quality. This video was added by user Bill Bruford 01 January 1970, don't forget to share it with your friends and acquaintances, it has been viewed on our site 4,65 once and liked it 46 people.