Bill Bruford’s Earthworks - Never The Same Way Once (Footloose in NYC, 30th May 2001)

Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: Here we are with one of my favourite editions of Earthworks in the grimy, sweaty, now defunct NYC club ‘The Bottom Line’. Good jazz writing has sufficient information for the musicians to get their teeth into, without offering so much it forces them to pay attention to the paper all the time. They are there to improvise, after all. It’s a knack you learn over a few years if you stick with it, and this song gets the balance about right. The title phrase comes from drummer Shelley Manne, who for many years ran a jazz club in LA. It’s the best definition of the jazz musician I’ve come across; a guy who never plays it the same way once. The music known as jazz emerged from a fecund swamp of racial, societal, socio-economic and music-ecological circumstances peculiar to the southern United States, in the early years of the 20th century. However, a century later, it’s fair to say that it has grown big an