Bruford's SOLO SPOTLIGHT No.3: The Drum also Waltzes (Flags, 1985)
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This week’s Solo Spotlight feature is the first of two ‘homages’ to life-long drum influencers. First up is Max Roach’s ‘The Drum Also Waltzes’. If you’re unfamiliar with Max, and you pretend to play drums, check him out immediately, and learn. Before Max, many had never thought of the drum set performer as capable of producing a stand-alone solo composition, with themes, variations, a beginning, middle and end. For Max, his solo pieces were “…about design. It isn’t about melody and harmony. It’s about periods and question marks. Think of it as constructing a building with sound. It’s architecture”.
Much ink has been spilt on Max’s contribution to the art of the drummer. Suffice it to say he embodied elegance, economy, and effortlessness; three characteristics of performance that the young, poorly-formed Bruford badly needed to adopt. An older Bruford strives for those qualities – the three E's - in performance to this day.
Being largely improvised and afro-centric, ‘the Drum also Waltzes’ was not slavishly constrained by an original text or chart. It was open enough for other drummers to make their drum also waltz. So I didn’t notate and then regurgitate Roach’s version of events. I played as much of the original as seemed necessary, before my improvisations, which were unlike Roach’s.
I kept the steady ‘one’ on the bass drum and ‘two’ (and sometimes ‘three’) on the pedalled hat, as a continuum over which the hands would push and pull, establishing and releasing tension in increasingly lengthy phrases as the story progressed to its peak at around 2’23”. And that’s Patrick Moraz, pianist in the Moraz-Bruford duo, playing claves on the second beat of each measure; hanging on for grim death.
Max and I met briefly in the 80s, brought together by film maker Steve Apicella. Max even, bravely, attended a King Crimson concert in 1984, full of electronic kit. We were different - culturally, intellectually, technically, aesthetically - but he alwaus wanted to hear the new stuff. His music had a direct line into my little white soul, no doubt about it.
Hope you're enjoying our new-ish Solo Spotlight Feature. No. 4 in the series is scheduled for November 15th. See you then! Bill
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