Bill Bruford’s Earthworks - Some Shiver, While He Cavorts (Sofia, Bulgaria, 30th October 1999)

This is Earthworks blowing off steam in Bulgaria at one of any number of gritty European Jazz Festivals that the band was regularly doing at the turn of the millennium. We have Patrick Clahar (tnr sax), Steve Hamilton (pno) and Mark Hodgson (bs); myself on tubs and I wrote the thing. I loved delivering the dynamics as the music gets unobtrusively quieter from 0’51” to its quietest point at around 1’01”, then reverses direction and gets back up to where it started from by the beginning of the tenor solo at 1’31”. The best dynamics are built into the composition such that you scarcely have to mark it. It’s obvious: it goes down to a whisper here. I’m also at my happiest here because the band at this point now has it down. I don’t have to think about the form or what comes next or whether my colleagues will remember – they know. We are interdependent and all we have to do is interact. Towards the end of Patrick’s tour-de-force solo, we’re all pretty much on the edge of our physical capabilities, with th