Bill Bruford

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Bill Bruford bigraphy, stories - Monarchs

Bill Bruford : biography

17 May 1949 –

William Scott "Bill" Bruford (born 17 May 1949 in Sevenoaks, Kent) is an English drummer, percussionist, composer, producer, and record label owner. He was the original drummer for the progressive rock group Yes, from 1968-1972. Bruford has performed for numerous popular acts since the early 1970s, including a stint as touring drummer for Genesis in 1976. Following his departure from Yes and at various times until 1997, Bruford was the drummer for progressive rock band King Crimson. Bruford moved away from progressive rock to concentrate on jazz, leading his own jazz group, Earthworks, for several years. He retired from public performance in 2009, but continues to run his two record labels and to speak and write about music. His autobiography, Bill Bruford: The Autobiography, was published in early 2009.

Yes

In the early seventies, Bruford found his first commercial success, visibility and stability. He played on their first five albums including the LPs The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge. He left Yes in 1972, returning briefly for the Union album which was released in 1991. While performing with Yes in the 1970s, although seemingly a close-knit band, Bruford remembers the whole era as being very hot blooded and argumentative, with personality conflicts being the eventual reason for his exit from the group. These, for him, included problems in understanding other members’ accents, differences in social backgrounds, and many other issues that set the band in a constant state of friction between Bruford, Chris Squire, and Jon Anderson. Retrieved – 29 November 2006 He also once had a fist-fight with Squire after a concert, because they had violently disagreed about who had played badly. Despite these personal issues, Bruford played all the drums on Squire’s 1975 solo album, Fish Out of Water. After leaving the band, in addition to Fish Out of Water, during the same year, Bruford played drums on the majority of Roy Harper’s HQ.

The band members were no strangers to alcohol, but Bruford doesn’t remember a lot of "sex, drugs and rock n’ roll". The whole band used to drink a lot of alcohol, and they often visited a club in London called the Speakeasy that the band’s manager, Roy Flynn, also managed. The Speakeasy stayed open until two or three in the morning, so Yes could play a gig in England within a hundred-and-fifty mile radius and still make it back to the Speakeasy at about two o’clock, where they drank "large amounts" of whiskey and Coke. Retrieved – 29 November 2006

King Crimson

Bruford accepted an invitation from Robert Fripp to join King Crimson, a band he had wanted to join for quite some time. He later compared this to "going over the Berlin Wall into East Germany" – Bruford stated that "In Yes, there was an endless debate about should it be F natural in the bass with G sharp on top by the organ. In King Crimson…you were just supposed to know." His instinct to remember complicated drum parts was shown when he learned how to play the long percussion and guitar part in the middle of "21st Century Schizoid Man", "by listening to it and just learning it." He admits that his note-reading skills are slower than he would like: "I learned how to read the horizontal lines, but not the vertical notes." Despite this he has successfully written many compositions over the years, albeit slowly.

Bruford was more interested in artistic pursuits, and the framework of King Crimson appealed to that sensibility in him. He cites the six months that the group contained avant-garde percussionist Jamie Muir as tremendously influential on him as a player, opening him up to "musical worlds I had only vaguely suspected existed." Violin, viola and keyboard player David Cross was selected to flesh out the sound of the new band. Rehearsals began in September 1972, followed by an extensive UK tour. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was released early the next year, and the group spent the remainder of 1973 touring Britain, Europe, and America.