Bill Bruford’s Earthworks - Seems Like A Lifetime Ago Pt. 1 / One Of A Kind (Live In Santiago 2002)

Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: Tim Garland grew up with the sound of the ‘Bruford’ band – Berlin, Holdsworth, Stewart, Peacock – ringing in his ears. When he started playing with me he was particularly keen to resurrect some of the material, and we duly sewed some of it into our concert set. ‘Seems Like a Lifetime Ago Pt.1’ takes us right back to my first album in 1977. I didn’t think it would work with Earthworks, but I like the way the lighter weight instrumentation, with tenor saxophone as lead voice, gives the song an entirely different glow – neither ‘better’ nor ‘worse’, just different to the original. Plus we were always short of relaxing middle-tempo music, so this gave the audience a breather. Now I wish I’d let it run longer. This segues into ‘One of a Kind’. Musicians make mistakes, quite regularly. Concentration and fingers slip, music (and bass players) fall off stands, equipment malfunctions, drummers drop or break sticks. Mostly these mistakes are individual and private such that neither co-performers nor audience notice. Usually it’s recoverable; sometimes it’s just a trainwreck, with no hope of return! Whatever, it’s unconventional to draw attention to it. While not quite a trainwreck, the derailment at about the 3’00” mark in this track ‘One of a Kind’ is a case in point. No idea who started the problem – don’t care – but the recovery was quite slick. The point I’m making is that it’s not about mistakes. Happily, listeners in popular music (by which I mean anything outside the broad category of ‘classical’ music) don’t give a fig about wrong notes, or even right notes in the wrong place. What audiences want to see and hear (and tend to applaud) is commitment - commitment to the phrase, to the song, to the project, to the performance. They want to see performers actively engaged - thinking on their feet, and wide awake. They don’t pay for fakery, humbug or performance by numbers. How do I know this? Because I’m a listener and audient too, both on and off stage. There were never any passengers in Earthworks. #billbruford #earthworks