![]() … I mean, I may have played a couple of Motown things in the first year off. When was the last time you actually sat down at the drums? In a wide-ranging chat with RS, Bruford reflected on why he never looked back after quitting Yes, the thrills and frustrations of playing with King Crimson, his short-lived tenure with Genesis, making the jump from rock to jazz, his mixed feelings on the word “prog,” and more. (Click here to read Bruford’s thoughts on 12 of his favorite moments from his extensive discography.) In a broader way, it drives home how serious Bruford’s engagement with jazz was - and how, from the moment he left Yes at the height of their success to join King Crimson, a band that had blown his mind in 1969 and that he would play with on and off through 1997, he was always a musician who followed his own compass. Across more than 20 CDs and DVDs, the collection charts Earthworks’ evolution from a quirky, eclectic group built around Bruford’s Simmons electronic drums to a lean, muscular acoustic postbop outfit. One of Bruford’s latest archival projects is Earthworks Complete, a massive box set featuring the band’s entire studio and live output, plus extensive bonus material. ![]() “I confess to being very soppy about all this, and I cannot help but acknowledge the weakness of wanting my work to live on after I’ve gone.” “I’m afraid I’ve got sucked into that whole ‘managing your legacy’ thing,” Bruford says. And in between spending time with family, he’s also attending to his extensive solo catalog, reissuing albums by his late-Seventies fusion band Bruford, his duo with Dutch pianist Michiel Borstlap, and Earthworks itself. ![]() He’s doing pretty well on the writing front, having published a candid and insightful 2009 autobiography, followed by 2018’s Uncharted, a heady but often illuminating study of creativity in drumming, which grew out of the same research at the University of Surrey that earned him a PhD in Music in 2016. Musicians on Musicians: Ringo Starr & Dave Grohl King Crimson's '21st Century Schizoid Man': Inside Prog's Big Bang Yes, King Crimson, and Earthworks Drummer Bill Bruford on 12 Career Highlights There’s other things I want to do now: write books and be with my grandkids and so forth.” And I’m at the stage in life now where I just can’t summon up that commitment to play any kind of music, really. “You can’t half-ass play at rock, or at jazz, either, you’ve got to play jazz or play rock - or something in between like I always was. “I think to play rock - to play any kind of music, actually, but particularly rock - for a drummer, you have to be completely committed to it,” he tells RS via phone from his home in Surrey, England. Since he announced he was calling it quits in 2009, the prog drumming legend - who worked with Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis before founding his own long-running jazz group, Earthworks, and came in at number 16 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Drummers list - hasn’t performed in public a single time, and he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. Retirement is a fluid concept in music, but at 10 years and counting, Bill Bruford’s just might be the real deal.
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