Bill Bruford - World Drummers Ensemble Part 1 (Live In Amsterdam, 2005)

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The drum culture is a broad church. The four guys on stage here are from wildly different backgrounds, yet the sounds they produce emanate from empathetic listening, big ears, buckets of experience and an ability to play whatever it is they want to hear, and not always with prior discussion. No one here thinks one type of music is inherently ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another, merely that they set out to achieve different things, and do it with more or less efficiency.

The four guys are introduced playing at the beginning: Doudou, playing his one-stick, 100-year old sabar drum, is Senegal’s greatest griot drummer. The sounds he gets from that drum send shivers down my spine. Luis is originally from Cuba, now in Los Angeles, CA. Chad and I play western style kits. A privilege to play with these guys.

But this is a long way from a free for all. At 2.26 we launch into a piece called Ritm Kompozisyon by the Turkish ‘Harem Percussion Group’. It’s really tightly organised and orchestrated and immensely exciting to play. I seem to be the only guy who hasn’t committed it to memory, which is not a good thing.

What made the World Drummers Ensemble a little different was the group's cross-cultural approach to the composition - and they are compositions. Senegal’s drum culture is all aural. I remember Doudou teaching us a groove he wanted to use. The highly trained, sight-reading Chad Wackerman was on my left, with paper and pencil poised, ready to write down the master’s (unwritable) groove. “Put it away”, I suggested to Chad, “gotta just listen”. Without obvious definite Western pitches, your sense of melody goes to the semi-definite pitches of the drums, increasing and refining your awareness of pitch.

Of the sound on the full album, All About Jazz critic John Kelman says “The mix perfectly mirrors the onstage image on the front cover—Wackerman on the left, followed by Rose, Conte and, finally, Bruford on the right— making it possible to not only absorb the music as a whole, but also resolve and hear what each individual is contributing to the blend. A little over a third of the CD is taken up by compositions by Rose, which range from primitive simplicity to complex interaction. But most strikingly, throughout all the music, rhythm and melody intersect effectively on instruments that many have come to think of in purely metric terms”. I trust we can forgive John for the careless colonialism of a phrase like ‘primitive simplicity’. ‘A Coat of Many Colors’ by the World Drummers Ensemble is available here:
https://burningshed.com/store/billbruford/worlddrummers_coatofmany_cd

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Видео Bill Bruford - World Drummers Ensemble Part 1 (Live In Amsterdam, 2005) канала Bill Bruford