Bill Bruford's Earthworks - Some Shiver While He Cavorts (Footloose in NYC, 30th May 2001)
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Looking back, I seemed to have gone for a lot of contrast and movement, or contrast in movement, in my cryptic titles for Earthworks songs. I was trying to evoke what I imagined in the music on a good night: hot and cold, Sahara and snow, wooden men, stone women, cavorting, shivering, dewey-eyed, then dancing, making songs, making dances, standing, being still, being busy. These descriptors may have been interchangeable, but life-long Earthworks fans got used to them and knew what I meant.
In this piece an individual dances, presumably to generate some warmth for himself and a group of shivering others. I’m happy with a single image in the world of instrumental music – A Remark you Made, It Needn’t End in Tears, Fracture - but title, imagery and music must go together as if it was always meant to be.
As in all things musical, tastes and fashion change rapidly over time. I’ve witnessed and adapted to half a century of change in the sphere of popular music. Back then there was jazz, rock and pop, with pretty hard lines of separation. From the rock perspective, jazz was incomprehensible, pretentious, self-indulgent and full of cigarette smokers. From the jazz perspective, rock was moronic, repetitive and sweaty. A jazzer who liked or appreciated, or (worse still) performed rock music, risked being accused of ‘selling out’. For a rocker to attempt to play jazz was literally laughable, as Spinal Tap showed with the immortal Jazz Odyssey.
Both jazzers and rockers could agree at least that pop was banal, lyrically infantile, mawkish and sickly sweet. Audiences were invested in live performance, as the only way to hear the ‘stars’ they’d read about in magazines, there being little in the way of popular music programming on national TV stations.
That was the impossibly ancient world in which I grew up. We musicians are, in many ways, in a better space now. Free as a bird to make whatever musical confection we like, so long as we don’t expect, as a right, that anyone should listen to it. It occurs to me that almost all the music I’ve made under my own direction, has been made on precisely that assumption - that few will hear it, let alone listen to it. So I might as well make it as close as I can to what gives me pleasure. You might argue, well, that’s a bit pessimistic - and post-YouTube, many have indeed heard and listened in gratifyingly large numbers - but you’ve got to admit it’s bullet-proof!
We musicians are finely-tuned to the ongoing commentary about our work, whether we choose to engage with it or not. Occasionally I overhear someone say something interesting, or encouraging, or interesting and encouraging, usually coming out of the men’s room and unaware I’m close by. Two such examples? “If that’s jazz, I like it” (because nobody knows if it’s jazz or not until you call it that); and “I wasn’t a jazz fan until I heard Earthworks”. Earthworks shivered and cavorted and made a particular song and dance that made many want to do the same. Was it ‘real’ jazz, or ‘real’ rock? Who knows? Who cares?
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