Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Why do you want to be in music? Do you know what you’re trying to achieve in the medium? What do you want it to give you, and what do you want to give it in return? All good questions, too seldom asked.
In the community of music generators, there is an increasingly firm distinction between what we might call ‘content providers’ on the one hand, and ‘storytellers’ (who used to be called performers), on the other.
For the solo singer-songwriter, the story being told is commonly a personal one with clear authorship. In this context, a story-teller is someone who conveys meaning through performance. Millions of micro-decisions over 50 years, collectively known as my idiolect, become my personal manner of speaking. I share the result when I play my drums. I am telling a non-verbal story through music. Which drum? Where, when, and how hard or softly shall I play it? My story-telling conveys the person that I am, like it or not. I’m up front, and it’s personal. Sublimation of one’s musical personality as a content provider is contrasted to its projection as a story-teller.
For the jazz saxophonist performing her own material, or even re-interpreting that of others, her work similarly falls clearly within the bounds of story-telling. She’s re-interpreting the music within the possibilities afforded by her own idiolect. Rock groups are very much about finding and telling their story, or a story, sometimes connected to a truth.
But what story is the story-teller telling if she is under the baton of a conductor in an orchestra, or the direction of a band-leader or K-Pop producer? Some say she's a 'content provider'. Advertisers, K-Pop entrepreneurs, conductors, musical directors and heavily-invested record companies tend to oversee and control the process of the content generation to ensure they get what they believe the market wants.These providers have chosen to sublimate the expression of their feeling and emotions in the process of providing the music precisely as required.
Gradually Going Tornado is about story-telling. The album artwork jumps straight in; it takes its name from the artwork of Romanian artist Paul Neagu, which was used for the album sleeve. Something about the foetal position of the figure on the front said he was about to uncoil, and unleash an astonishing amount of power, or so it seemed to me.
Guitarist Allan Holdsworth had departed the band before recording began. His absence left a black whole into which others stepped magnificently. Dave Stewart contributed ‘Land’s End’, a quintessential piece of beautiful English pastoral writing that, like Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’, evokes the magnificent smashing of the Atlantic rollers against the rocks in his adopted UK county of Cornwall.
The sinister ‘Gothic 17’ came to life largely under Dave’s close engagement with my early first draft. The album contains arguably Jeff Berlin’s greatest set of performances with the band. He offered us his ‘Tower of Power’-ish hymn to a boxing hero, Joe Frazier. His bass solo on ‘Palewell Park’ is the art of the story-teller writ large. Few can deny that had the word ‘genius’ not been invented, this performance would have surely brought it into being.
Many early-career music-generators have only the sketchiest of ideas about what is driving them to forge a living in the occupation. I think I was always a performer/story-teller, wishing to project and interact live with an audience and my colleagues. Not for me the loneliness of the long-distance content-provider, sublimating his personal idiolect in the interest of putting bread on the table. I like to eat, too. I guess I was just lucky to be able to afford to do the projection thing. Whatever the psychology; for me, I chose right.
But I could have chosen wrong, and followed perhaps a less joyful path; gradually going tornado. I guess the takeaway here is: know yourself, before you tangle with the powerful medicine that is music.
#drummer #drums #kingcrimson #yes #jazz #musicimprovisation #music #yes #drumming #billbrufordsearthworks #tamadrums #paistecymbals
Why do you want to be in music? Do you know what you’re trying to achieve in the medium? What do you want it to give you, and what do you want to give it in return? All good questions, too seldom asked.
In the community of music generators, there is an increasingly firm distinction between what we might call ‘content providers’ on the one hand, and ‘storytellers’ (who used to be called performers), on the other.
For the solo singer-songwriter, the story being told is commonly a personal one with clear authorship. In this context, a story-teller is someone who conveys meaning through performance. Millions of micro-decisions over 50 years, collectively known as my idiolect, become my personal manner of speaking. I share the result when I play my drums. I am telling a non-verbal story through music. Which drum? Where, when, and how hard or softly shall I play it? My story-telling conveys the person that I am, like it or not. I’m up front, and it’s personal. Sublimation of one’s musical personality as a content provider is contrasted to its projection as a story-teller.
For the jazz saxophonist performing her own material, or even re-interpreting that of others, her work similarly falls clearly within the bounds of story-telling. She’s re-interpreting the music within the possibilities afforded by her own idiolect. Rock groups are very much about finding and telling their story, or a story, sometimes connected to a truth.
But what story is the story-teller telling if she is under the baton of a conductor in an orchestra, or the direction of a band-leader or K-Pop producer? Some say she's a 'content provider'. Advertisers, K-Pop entrepreneurs, conductors, musical directors and heavily-invested record companies tend to oversee and control the process of the content generation to ensure they get what they believe the market wants.These providers have chosen to sublimate the expression of their feeling and emotions in the process of providing the music precisely as required.
Gradually Going Tornado is about story-telling. The album artwork jumps straight in; it takes its name from the artwork of Romanian artist Paul Neagu, which was used for the album sleeve. Something about the foetal position of the figure on the front said he was about to uncoil, and unleash an astonishing amount of power, or so it seemed to me.
Guitarist Allan Holdsworth had departed the band before recording began. His absence left a black whole into which others stepped magnificently. Dave Stewart contributed ‘Land’s End’, a quintessential piece of beautiful English pastoral writing that, like Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’, evokes the magnificent smashing of the Atlantic rollers against the rocks in his adopted UK county of Cornwall.
The sinister ‘Gothic 17’ came to life largely under Dave’s close engagement with my early first draft. The album contains arguably Jeff Berlin’s greatest set of performances with the band. He offered us his ‘Tower of Power’-ish hymn to a boxing hero, Joe Frazier. His bass solo on ‘Palewell Park’ is the art of the story-teller writ large. Few can deny that had the word ‘genius’ not been invented, this performance would have surely brought it into being.
Many early-career music-generators have only the sketchiest of ideas about what is driving them to forge a living in the occupation. I think I was always a performer/story-teller, wishing to project and interact live with an audience and my colleagues. Not for me the loneliness of the long-distance content-provider, sublimating his personal idiolect in the interest of putting bread on the table. I like to eat, too. I guess I was just lucky to be able to afford to do the projection thing. Whatever the psychology; for me, I chose right.
But I could have chosen wrong, and followed perhaps a less joyful path; gradually going tornado. I guess the takeaway here is: know yourself, before you tangle with the powerful medicine that is music.
#drummer #drums #kingcrimson #yes #jazz #musicimprovisation #music #yes #drumming #billbrufordsearthworks #tamadrums #paistecymbals
