BILL BRUFORD
Gradually Going Tornado/The Bruford Tapes/Live At The Venue/4th Album Rehearsal Sessions
WFormer Yes stick-wielder’s titular crew revisited.
ith Yes and UK both receding in his rear-view mirror, Bill Bruford set about making music that would appeal to fans of both bands, while wading purposefully into jazzier territory that better showcased his percussive genius. These doubledisc reissues offer an intermittently thrilling snapshot of the Bruford band circa late 1979, when guitarist Jon Clark took over from Allan Holdsworth and plans for a follow-up to One Of A Kind were underway. Clark clearly clicked with his new bandmates – Bruford, keyboard wizard Dave Stewart and bassist Jeff Berlin – because the resultant album, 1980’s Gradually Going Tornado, is a gem and one of the great unsung prog albums of that decade. That record is paired with The Bruford Tapes, the band’s sole live album that was, inexplicably, originally released only in the US, Canada and Japan in the summer of ’79. Considering that Clark had only been in the band for a matter of weeks, the way the quartet tear through set opener Hell’s Bells like musos possessed is a minor miracle, and the energy is sustained throughout the performance, albeit with numerous moments of elegant restraint thrown in for jazzy measure.
Diehard Bruford fans may already have Live At The Venue and the snappily-titled 4th
Album Rehearsal Sessions, as both were previously available in the lavish Seems Like A Lifetime Ago box set, released in 2017. The former is an undeniably rough’n’ready live recording, but it’s just about punchy and clear enough to satisfy, and is worth hearing for fiery renditions of Land’s End and Age Of Information alone. The latter does what it says on the prosaic tin, serving up a variety of jams, off-cuts and verynearly-finished songs from what would have been the follow-up to Gradually…, had Bruford not been dropped by their label not long after its release. Although the very definition of a fans-only archive release, it still throws up enough moments of sublime ensemble interplay to justify a second reading.