Bruford with Towner and Gomez - If Summer Had its Ghosts
Bill Bruford with Ralph Towner and Eddie Gomez
If Summer Had its Ghosts
Produced by Bill Bruford
Personnel:
Bill Bruford - drums, percussion
Ralph Towner - 12 string and classical guitars, piano, electronic keyboards
Eddie Gomez - bass
I do not know why, but I waited a few years after its release to actually getting around to picking this up. There was absolutely no reason to deprive myself of the joy of listening to this.
As is even mentioned in the liner notes, (at the time) the pairing of beat-surgeon Bruford (coming off the recent revival of bleeding-edge art rocker unit King Crimson)* with the delicate fingerstyle acoustic playing of Towner and the bassist most noted for a decade with the brilliant Bill Evans trio starting in the mid-sixties didn't appear so much incongruous as unlikely. While Bruford had always worn his jazz influences on his sleeve (even when subsuming them in cacophonic workouts and his dense electronic chordal drums), it was in the mid 90s that he took the plunge into full acoustic jazz, with this release and the first of what became his second major incarnation of his Earthworks unit, and their release The Sound of Surprise.**
This is the most low key material since his first duet album with Patrick Moraz in the mid 80s but has a much different ambience. This has a relaxed aire, a totally unforced vibe of three guys casually working through some very interesting material. Some of it is somber, some simply laid back, but all of it comes together well as a complete album. This is not to say the material is breezy; some of the arrangements are quite involved, like the overlapping articulation in Splendour Among Shadows, or the deceptively minimalist Silent Pool, which sounds like it could have been a lost track from Steve Reich's oevre with its shifting pulse. The closest this comes to anything from previous Bruford is the last track, Now is The Next Time, which structurally hints to the Bates/Ballamy Earthworks era.***
Towner has such a clean, crisp guitar tone, and that and his piano playing is very much in the ECM vein. He knows how to coax a good set of sounds out of the 12 string in particular, with in uplifting resonance and occasionally jangly tones. Gomez, like all great jazz bassists, provides a grounded pivot point for the others to reference, while dropping an accentuating riff or short solo when appropriate; his is a method that is tasteful from opening note to coda. Bruford proves why he is one of the most influential and revered players...he actually uses drums musically as opposed to just trying to sneak in as many fills as he can or being as loud as possible. This is his gig, and he does not exhibit any hint of having anything to prove. The result is some really velvet playing. Almost exclusively acoustic trapkit, with a little logdrum hither and electronic kalimba yon, he has an intimacy and comfort behind the throne few others can.
This whole album will appeal to anyone wanting a kind of earthy jazz; people who like the Americana-laced releases from Bill Frisell, or various similar sounding releases from across the ECM stable, like Marc Johnson or the new Manu Katche album, Neighborhoods.
* Bruford initially joined KC in the early 70s, and played on every album subsequent until 1998, including such influential releases as Red and Discipline. This album was actually released under the Discipline Global Mobile label, founded by KC emir Robert Fripp.
** Bruford spent the late 70s also running a jazz-rock fusion quartet named Bruford and later founded an experimental electric jazz unit called Bill Bruford's Earthworks, which featured the talents of multi-instrumentalist Django Bates saxman and Iain Ballamy, both of whom are UK jazz stars in their own right, the latter alos being the founder of Feral Records with multimedia artist Dave McKean. The initial Eartworks lineup only changed bassists once and was centered on Bruford's development of chordal drums, by which he used electronic drums to not only polyrhthymic parts, but melodic phrases and key changes and offering a rather interesting foundation for soloists. The band had a very unique sound that I have never heard really emulated in terms of compositional style and sound palette.
*** Oddly enough, this is the one track written by Towner.
If Summer Had its Ghosts
Produced by Bill Bruford
Personnel:
Bill Bruford - drums, percussion
Ralph Towner - 12 string and classical guitars, piano, electronic keyboards
Eddie Gomez - bass
I do not know why, but I waited a few years after its release to actually getting around to picking this up. There was absolutely no reason to deprive myself of the joy of listening to this.
As is even mentioned in the liner notes, (at the time) the pairing of beat-surgeon Bruford (coming off the recent revival of bleeding-edge art rocker unit King Crimson)* with the delicate fingerstyle acoustic playing of Towner and the bassist most noted for a decade with the brilliant Bill Evans trio starting in the mid-sixties didn't appear so much incongruous as unlikely. While Bruford had always worn his jazz influences on his sleeve (even when subsuming them in cacophonic workouts and his dense electronic chordal drums), it was in the mid 90s that he took the plunge into full acoustic jazz, with this release and the first of what became his second major incarnation of his Earthworks unit, and their release The Sound of Surprise.**
This is the most low key material since his first duet album with Patrick Moraz in the mid 80s but has a much different ambience. This has a relaxed aire, a totally unforced vibe of three guys casually working through some very interesting material. Some of it is somber, some simply laid back, but all of it comes together well as a complete album. This is not to say the material is breezy; some of the arrangements are quite involved, like the overlapping articulation in Splendour Among Shadows, or the deceptively minimalist Silent Pool, which sounds like it could have been a lost track from Steve Reich's oevre with its shifting pulse. The closest this comes to anything from previous Bruford is the last track, Now is The Next Time, which structurally hints to the Bates/Ballamy Earthworks era.***
Towner has such a clean, crisp guitar tone, and that and his piano playing is very much in the ECM vein. He knows how to coax a good set of sounds out of the 12 string in particular, with in uplifting resonance and occasionally jangly tones. Gomez, like all great jazz bassists, provides a grounded pivot point for the others to reference, while dropping an accentuating riff or short solo when appropriate; his is a method that is tasteful from opening note to coda. Bruford proves why he is one of the most influential and revered players...he actually uses drums musically as opposed to just trying to sneak in as many fills as he can or being as loud as possible. This is his gig, and he does not exhibit any hint of having anything to prove. The result is some really velvet playing. Almost exclusively acoustic trapkit, with a little logdrum hither and electronic kalimba yon, he has an intimacy and comfort behind the throne few others can.
This whole album will appeal to anyone wanting a kind of earthy jazz; people who like the Americana-laced releases from Bill Frisell, or various similar sounding releases from across the ECM stable, like Marc Johnson or the new Manu Katche album, Neighborhoods.
* Bruford initially joined KC in the early 70s, and played on every album subsequent until 1998, including such influential releases as Red and Discipline. This album was actually released under the Discipline Global Mobile label, founded by KC emir Robert Fripp.
** Bruford spent the late 70s also running a jazz-rock fusion quartet named Bruford and later founded an experimental electric jazz unit called Bill Bruford's Earthworks, which featured the talents of multi-instrumentalist Django Bates saxman and Iain Ballamy, both of whom are UK jazz stars in their own right, the latter alos being the founder of Feral Records with multimedia artist Dave McKean. The initial Eartworks lineup only changed bassists once and was centered on Bruford's development of chordal drums, by which he used electronic drums to not only polyrhthymic parts, but melodic phrases and key changes and offering a rather interesting foundation for soloists. The band had a very unique sound that I have never heard really emulated in terms of compositional style and sound palette.
*** Oddly enough, this is the one track written by Towner.
posted by theloniusfunk at 2:01 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home