Bill Bruford - Willowcrest (A Tribute To Buddy Rich)

I knew a lot less about Buddy’s music than you might think. I’d probably asked King Crimson bassist Tony Levin about Rich – interestingly Tony, in his previous life as a jazz musician in the early 1970s, had worked and recorded with the Great Man. I’d interviewed Buddy in London’s Dorchester Hotel and knew his classic West Side Story suite, but I didn’t own any of his albums for some reason, and there was no YouTube or Spotify. Stupidly, I went into ‘Willowcrest’ alarmingly under-prepared. In the event, I didn’t make any horrendous mistakes but neither does this performance add to the pantheon of great interpretations of his music. Elsewhere, I’ve suggested that I did at least as well with the Buddy Rich Big Band as Buddy Rich would have done in King Crimson, a nightmare scenario that doesn’t bear thinking about! I certainly learned a lot about working with big bands, doing this and ‘Lingo’. The sound of all those guys blowing at once is huge in the headphones. There was no sense on my side