BILL BRUFORD The Autobiography [deluxe signed edition]
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THE DELUXE EDITION OF 25 SETS
The package contains:
- an exclusive Bruford Signature 10" splash cymbal made for Foruli by Paiste, forged from a proprietary bronze developed specifically for cymbals, handcrafted from start to finish by highly skilled Swiss craftsmen - only available with this book set
- the complete Signature Edition book and record package
- a custom handmade solander case exclusive to the Deluxe Edition
Forewords by MARK GUILIANA (David Bowie, Avishai Cohen, Heernt) and MIKE PORTNOY (Dream Theater, Adrenaline Mob)
Bill Bruford's professional musical career began in 1968. He was a guiding light in the British Art Rock movement, recording and touring internationally with Yes and King Crimson from 1968-74, and became known as the godfather of progressive-rock drumming. Since then he has worked with many other artists, including Gong, National Health, Genesis and U.K., and has led his own bands Bruford and Earthworks.
This is Bill's memoir of life at the heart of prog rock, art rock and modern jazz. It is an honest and entertaining account of life on the road and in the studio rubbing shoulders with the famous, the less famous, and the infamous, and creating an impressive tally of great music.
A rock musician with the temperament of a classical musician, who became a jazz musician, Bruford defies all the clichés about drummers. He says "You write what you have to write, you play what you have to play, because you can't sleep at night. If you can sleep at night, you shouldn't be doing this anyway".
From time to time, at polite dinner parties, someone will ask Bill what he does. He replies that he is a musician. "Yes, but what do you really do?" retorts the enquirer. This memoir answers that question.
ABOUT THE ALBUM From Conception to Birth Bill Bruford Catalogue number FEP4/5 Double black vinyl sleeved in black disco bags and accompanied by two numbered offset lithographic art prints, all sleeved within die cut outer bags 500 copies, only available with the Foruli limited editions of Bill Bruford: The Autobiography A1 - BRIDGE OF INHIBITION: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1986 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK A2 - BRIDGE OF INHIBITION: MASTER Composers: Bill Bruford, Django Bates, Iain Ballamy Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: October 1986 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Django Bates (horn, keys), Iain Ballamy (saxes), Mick Hutton (bass) Producers: Dave Stewart and Bill Bruford Recording location: Terminal 24 Studios, London, UK A3 - PRESSURE: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1986 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Iain Ballamy (alto saxophone), Patrick Moraz (keys) Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK A4 - PRESSURE: MASTER Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: October 1986 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Django Bates (horn, keys), Iain Ballamy (saxes), Mick Hutton (bass) Producers: Dave Stewart and Bill Bruford Recording location: Terminal 24 Studios, London, UK A5 - HOTEL SPLENDOUR: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1990 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK A6 - HOTEL SPLENDOUR: MASTER Composers: Bill Bruford, Django Bates, Iain Ballamy Publisher: EG Music / Universal Music Publishing Recording date: January 1991 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Django Bates (horn, keys), Iain Ballamy (saxes), Tim Harries (bass) Producers: David Torn and Bill Bruford Recording location: CMP Studios, Zerkall, Germany B1 - LINGO: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1993 Performers: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK B2 - LINGO: MASTER Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: May 1994 Performer: Bill Bruford (drums) with the Buddy Rich Orchestra Producer: Neil Peart Recording location: Power Station, NYC, USA B3 - IF SUMMER HAD ITS GHOSTS: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1996 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK B4 - IF SUMMER HAD ITS GHOSTS: MASTER Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: February 1997 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Ralph Towner (guitar), Eddie Gomez (bass) Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Make Believe Ballroom, West Shokan, NY, USA C1 - ORIGINAL SIN: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1996 Performers: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK C2 - ORIGINAL SIN: MASTER Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: February 1997 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Tony Levin (bass), Chris Botti (trumpet), David Torn (guitar) Producer: Tony Levin Recording location: Make Believe Ballroom, West Shokan, NY, USA C3 - FOOTLOOSE AND FANCY FREE: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 1998 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK C4 - FOOTLOOSE AND FANCY FREE: MASTER Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: November 1998 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Patrick Clahar (saxophone), Steve Hamilton (piano), Mark Hodgson (bass) Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Livingston Studios, London, UK D1 - TRIPLICITY: DEMO Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 2000 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK D2 - TRIPLICITY: MASTER Composers: Bill Bruford, Steve Hamilton Publisher: Universal Music Publishing / Copyright Control Recording date: November 2000 Performers: Bill Bruford (drums), Patrick Clahar (saxophone), Steve Hamilton (piano), Mark Hodgson (bass) Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Livingston Studios, London, UK D3 - BANYAN Composer: Bill Bruford Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Recording date: 2002 Performer: Bill Bruford Producer: Bill Bruford Recording location: Home demo, UK |
Bill Bruford’s notes on From Conception to Birth
It’s surprisingly uncommon practice, but I thought it might be interesting to offer some sketches of how several of my tunes began life. These audio demonstrations - or ‘demos’ for short - are extremely rough because they were only intended for the ears of the musicians whose job it would be to bring them to life. Had they been required for a record company executive’s decision for investment - the more usual purpose of demos - more care and attention would have been lavished. Musicians will tend to see the general thrust of the music more quickly than business people, and are happy enough with the rougher stone.
In the visual arts it’s quite common to see preparatory studies alongside the finished work. Indeed some prefer the incomplete sketch, holding out as it does an open-ended promise of how things might be or might have been. Audio demos or original sketches of the finished musical item have been increasingly possible with the advent of simple home-recording devices, and it was a visit to the Van Gogh museum to see the artist’s Potato Eaters and attendant sketches that provided the gestation for From Conception to Birth.
The vinyl album From Conception to Birth has 17 tracks. 8 demos precede the relevant sections of their 8 released masters, allowing direct comparison, and there is one additional demo that never made it to master stage. The demos reflect my chequered history in the realm of home recording. Given my efforts with electronic percussion - or perhaps because of them - it may surprise some to learn I’m something of a technophobe, and nothing of a recording engineer. Early demos were more or less straight into what we used to call a ghetto-blaster. That was followed briefly by Teac Portastudio 4-track cassette recordings, which rapidly morphed into my favourite axe, the Roland MC500. I played in the midi data from my Yamaha keyboard, and outputted to sounds from my Korg O1/W orchestra-in-a-box. Everything on sides 2, 3, and 4 was recorded that way. Low tech it certainly was, but I was pleased with my Holdsworth ‘soundalike’ guitar playing on Lingo, my cheesy 12-string guitar that I had the nerve to play Ralph Towner before the sessions for If Summer Had Its Ghosts, and the drumming on the unreleased Banyan.
There is an honourable – if fatal – tradition among musicians of ‘falling in love with the demo’. In this, the composer has played his weedy version to himself so many times that he comes to hear its manifest flaws as attributes. He becomes deaf to the beauties of the new version being produced on the session, and wastes many hours trying to recreate the un-recreatable original. Not me. I was relieved and grateful, but not surprised, when this material sprang instantly to life in rehearsal rooms under the hands of the skilled musicians with whom I was lucky to play it. The way my amateurish sketches began to breathe and flex and break free from the stone-lined, midi-data encasements in which they were conceived was a constant reminder of the value of all-at-once human playing and the value of musical relationships of the flesh-and-blood rather than the automated kind.
I never quite made it to the laptop and software world of composition that seems made for more agile brains than mine. I had written the tunes on this album and many like them because my various bands needed something to play. When I retreated from organising groups, that need evaporated, and I ended up mostly as an improvising musician. Arnold Schoenberg allegedly offered the notion that all composition is just very slow improvisation, and I accept the corollary to be true, that improvisation is extremely fast composition. Things sound best to me when the composed sounds improvised and the improvised sounds composed. I was always most comfortable in the cracks between the two.
Bill Bruford, June 2011
Bill Bruford's story is not just for drummers. It is for all artists, musicians, music lovers, or anyone who wonders what it s really like to spend your life trying to make the music you love. - Neil Peart, Rush Bill Bruford's autobiography is a frequently hilarious recounting of his long life in progressive rock and jazz. Defying every drummer joke you ve ever heard, he writes successfully from inside the music . - David Fricke, Rolling Stone Bruford's autobiography not only provides a humorous insight into the daily detail of a successful musician's life but also grapples with the big existential issues of what it takes to be an artist of any sort in the modern world - David Sinclair, The Guardian Professorial in its remit and written with a bone-dry wit and an authoritative elegance that will be the envy of many far more high-profile cultural commentators, this might just end up becoming one of the best-informed, most informative textbooks of its time - Marco Rossi, Shindig An engaging and dryly witty style that makes for an easy, can't-put-it-down read...This book addresses matters anecdotal, technical, practical, emotional and philosophical with style, panache and élan -John Kelman, All About Jazz Head and shoulders above the majority of books in its class - Jeff Miers, Buffalo News Bruford is a literate biographer and honest - Steven Rosen, Curled up With a Good Book It's frank, cynical, very amusing, inspiring, thought provoking and highly recommended - Brent Keefe, Drummer Magazine Bill Bruford's autobiography is one of the most original books you ll ever come across, penned by a man that some would still label a rock star - Adam Garrie, usaprogmusic.com The most extraordinary autobiography I've ever read on music - David Etheridge, Performing Musician |