Bill Bruford - Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer

Bill Bruford

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Copyright 2018 by Bill Bruford

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruford, Bill, author.

Title: Uncharted : Creativity and the expert drummer / Bill Bruford.

Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2018] | Series: Tracking pop | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039628| ISBN 9780472073788 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780472053780 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780472123674 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Drum setPerformance. | Popular musicPhilosophy and aesthetics.

Classification: LCC ML 1035 . B 78 2018 | DDC 786.9/143dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039628

Cover credit: Photograph by Claude Dufresne, 2006.

To Carolyn and our family

If there is a thread that connects Bill Brufords extraordinary musical career to the considerable achievement of writing this book, it is an ability to communicate a host of complex ideas, elegantly and coherently. There was a polymetric quality to his playinga capacity to set up vivid, plural rhythms within a single frameworkand this capacity to juggle different ideas without missing a beat remains undiminished, though now with different purposethat of communicating about beats rather than with them.

Actually, this book is not so much about beats as those who make them. There will be some people picking up this book, perhaps expecting a relatively easy-going account of great drummers and their playing, who may need to sit down and listen to an Earthworks track, a King Crimson improvisation or two, before reminding themselves that Dr. Bruford, as a player and scholar, does not do easy-going. He made and continues to make demands of uslisteners (as was) and now readers. In the introduction to the book, Bill makes two principal assertions: that (a) experience, the outcome of prolonged and accumulative interaction with environment, is generated by action; and that (b) the way to the human mind is through its cultural products and artifacts. This sentence should be enough to alert most readers that this is no ordinary book about drumming.

All this is not to say that Bill is making unreasonable demands. He is fully aware, as he outlines in his introduction, that different readers may want to focus on particular parts of the book, dependent on their reason for picking up the volume in the first place. I would urge anyone coming to this book from knowing Bills music to trust in him as an author as they did in him as a player; there are so many ideas and perspectives articulated in this book that it takes us well beyond what it means to be a drummer, important as that is.

The book, at its heart, has a simple question, what do drummers do, but in presenting this simple question brings action theory, cultural psychology, systems theories of creativity, and not least, the self-reports of some of the finest players in contemporary music, all to bear on the answering of this question. What makes the book particularly rich, in my view, is that it not only sheds light on the creativity of drumming and drummers but offers ideas and models that could be used in a wider analysis. It contributes to the increasingly important area of performance research and adds to the theorization of creativity in subtle and insightful ways.

The idea of creative practice in music may, at first glance, seem tautologous, but psychological research over recent decades has shown how complex, and poorly understood, is the notion of creativity across human action. One can trace this interest in the analysis of creativity to American research in the 1950s. At that point, when operationalism was becoming hugely influential in education, business management, and psychology more generally, researchers were motivated to measure creativity in a not dissimilar way to intelligencetests of creativity were designed and applied in a thoroughly instrumental way. With the demise of behavioral psychology and the turn toward cognition as the central preoccupation of psychologists, so came a richer and more nuanced turn in the study of what it means to be creative. The work of Keith Sawyer, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Pamela Burnard, and most tellingly, Vlad Glveanu all inform this books construction of a rich theoretical model of musical creativitythe integration of the creative action context of drumming, with a taxonomy of mechanisms that drive the creative impetus, and a model through which cultural meaning may circulate within communities of practice.

In addition to the books rigorous dissection of creativity in drumming and its many facets, it serves a wider purpose in challenging some persistent shibboleths around drumming, drummers, and popular music more broadly. Although the book wisely avoids any crude apologetics or defense of the work of drummersthe reflective awareness, skills, and musical intelligence of the books informants make the case fairly effortlessly. Bill rightly places the work of drummers within the context of a cultures organizing ideologyan ideology in which drumming is marked as a breed apart and a breed below. Rather than taking Simon Friths approach to the difficulty of talking about creativityshot through as it is with ideological baggagewhich is to suggest that we dont use the C word, Bill uses the term to draw out a set of careful thematic distinctions between different forms of creative practice, and he establishes a frame through which we can ask critical questions of creativity in drumming, without ditching the word altogether.

A central theme of the book, established early in the work, is to find a way to describe and understand the sometimes very different practices of drumming within a panoptic model. Bill uses the comparison between Max Roach and session drummer, Blair Sinta, to confront this. In doing so, he sets this up with the idea of a continuum of practice between the functional and the compositional, which very crudely could be paraphrased as thinking or acting within or outside the box. Crucially though, while exploring how drummers work within and without established boundaries, Bill allows that both ends of this continuum are rich in creativity. Not always the same things going on for Roach and Sinta but both very definitely creative. This is important because it takes us beyond the sometimes irritating and simplistic ideology that privileges particular genres as being inherently more or less creative; Bill is nudging us toward an idea of possibility without recourse to a crude notion of better/worse. And that doesnt mean a relativist position here. Bruford is clear that Roach is in a class of his own but this cannot and should not diminish the work of a great studio player such as Sinta.

Part of what makes this a great read is Bills insight into areas of drum expertise that would fall below the radar of most. He describes, in relation to Chad Wackermans account of working for James Taylor, that a necessary skill of drummers is to assess the locus of