ABWH - Your Move / I've Seen All Good People (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA 1989)

For anyone new here, I should explain that ABWH is short for the name of a YES off-shoot group called Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, and I was the band’s drummer. We were around in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Not long. If you blinked, you missed it. Here, we’re performing a song that’s about 18 years old in 1989, from the Yes album. So, about half a century of popular music fashion has passed under the bridge since the music was invented and arranged. But, irrespective of fashion, we’ve got some quality here. How did we come by this music? By collective collaboration, is how: kicking ideas around in a basement somewhere in London.

There may be a lot of instrumental music instruction on the net, especially for drummers, but harder to come-by is useful help about collaboration with others. I was reminded of this with a recent Drumeo video of a drummer-led band walking us through a band rehearsal, and the various pathways the group’s embryonic composition might take as it grows under collaborative hands. The video showed the effects of dynamic and timbral changes as the drummer offered several options to the others in the group as to how the song might be approached and developed, from the perspective of his instrument.

This was great musical stuff. All participants were on board, willing to try stuff. The best options circulated around one or two people doing less or nothing; cutting back to see what were the essential components, without which the composition wouldn’t work. When you’ve located them – say, a bass part or a guitar rhythmic figure at a (perhaps) different tempo - you can carefully build on those solid foundations to enhance the mood that those elements seem to evoke.

If the ‘song’ has singing, all activity is typically slanted towards making the lyric and voice(s) work. They will need to be feather-bedded in the best possible sonics to project the intended meaning. Take for example, the brilliant ‘All Right Now’ by Free. Right from the top, the slashing guitar chords and vocal are married together as one, with big holes for the rhythmic sunlight to appear. But wait! There’s NO BASS. They’re saving it for a knock-out punch at the chorus. It then features in a little interlude with one of the most melodic bass lines in rock. This is the art of arrangement, somewhat in decline these days, but downgraded at your peril.

Anyway, what immediately strikes me here about ‘Your Move’ is the strength and clarity of the singing. In no small part, it’s like that because the supporting arrangement allows it to be. The timbral colour and fragility of Steve Howe’s Portuguese 12-string valachia, the dull heartbeat of the drumming; the tight backing vocals; all are designed to enhance the mood as the narrative unfolds.

Most of the bands I’ve been have either had no singing or large instrumental sections in between vocal passages, allowing tons of room for instrumentalists to bring whatever expertise they have to the cause. Since the vast majority of popular music has singing, it surprised we progressive rockers that our music of the 70s would gain any traction with the public at all. Surprised the heck out of Atlantic Records.
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Видео ABWH - Your Move / I've Seen All Good People (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA 1989) канала Bill Bruford