Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: https://www.shorturl.at/adnpq

“Yeah, but you can’t play tunes on those things!” sneers the unbeliever, pointing at my drum kit. That depends on your definition of ‘tune’ or ‘melody’, but I spent some time with electronic drums trying to ring tunes or melodic patterns out of them. The melodic and chordal framework to much of Earthworks’ music was played in real time from pre-stored patches on the Simmons drum kit: that was the original blueprint for the group.

This track ‘Stromboli Kicks’ is a case in point. The drumkit plays all the chordal harmony and changes colour like a chameleon four times before the horn solo at 3'23". Granted, it took a lot of sweat and the electronic set was a cumbersome instrument that eventually became unsustainable, but I was at it long enough to prove the unbeliever wrong. Try ‘Bridge of Inhibition’, ‘Pilgrim’s Way’, ‘Stromboli Kicks’, ‘Up North’, ‘Hotel Splendour’ or a dozen others from the Earthworks catalogue, or King Crimson’s ‘Waiting Man’, if you don’t believe me.

The Western drum kit is unpitched, or more precisely, of indefinite pitch. A prejudice against unpitched instruments, coming from the association between drums and noise on the one hand and musical sounds on the other, can be traced back centuries. Disappointingly, the association continues to be heavily promoted to children globally through Roger Hargreaves’ “Mr. Men” series of books, in which “Mr. Noisy: the Musician” is, somehow inevitably, a drummer.

A toxic Western art music ideology has nurtured a sense of inferiority on the part of those who perform on instruments of indefinite pitch, relative to those who perform on pitched instruments, and accorded the indefinite people low status. Hence the drummer jokes. It exacerbates the separation of thought from feeling and the concomitant downplay of intellect among we drummers. The supremacy of pitch and the marginalisation of those who perform ‘only with rhythm’ has created a circling of the wagons which, I suggest, finds the less secure among us unwilling to engage with the broader musical picture in case he or she be found lacking in inventiveness. I like the broader musical picture and have always wanted to be part of it.

I don’t really know why I dived so deeply into the drums-and-melody issue, but I blame Max Roach. His solos, such as ‘The Drum also Waltzes’ or ‘For Big Sid’, were (unpitched) masterpieces. Maybe I needed to assuage feelings of insufficiency or inferiority, to persuade others that I was necessary. It was probably a compensation mechanism born of reaction to the prevailing pitched-instrument prejudice.

Around this time I met Max backstage at a King Crimson show. Aged past 70 and as interested as ever, he’d come to check out the latest deal in electronic drums, to see if these toys could really do anything. My friend who brought him, Steve Apicella, said Max had managed to sleep through most of the music – which was a first for anyone within the first thirty rows of a King Crimson performance. Max gave me more than he could ever have imagined.

Visit Bill’s online store for exclusive and signed items: https://www.shorturl.at/adnpq

#billbruford #drumsolos #improvisationmusic #jazzdrumming #kingcrimson #paistecymbals #yes #tamadrums #electronicdrumkit #rockdrummer