Bill Bruford – Feels Good to Me – Review
June 5th, 2005
 |
BILL BRUFORD To make a review of an album like this is a really hard task for me since it’s been for more than 20 years in my list of favorite records, like most of Bill Bruford’s discography, and sincerely I’d love to get rid of this responsibility just by giving it a score of 10. |
|
|
What I want to say here is that there is a real reason to be happy that the Voiceprint label is re-issuing and re-mastering Bruford’s discography. “Feels Good to Me” was the debut album of this worshiped percussion master, who broke all of the laws with style and precision and at the same time paid tribute to the great jazz masters during the 70’s, throughout his works with the bands Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Gong and National Health. Without that background, it is hard to explain how someone can produce such an extraordinary debut album. Especially because “Feels Good to Me” was Bruford’s chance to show his own musical identity, far from the defined musical styles of bands like Yes and King Crimson. For this mission Bill Bruford put together the perfect progressive jazz rock band: Allan Holdsworth on the guitar, Jeff Berlin on bass, Dave Stewart on keyboards, and Annette Peacock on vocals. The result is a completely new, original and incomparable musical identity. The union of the martian tonalities of Holsworth’s dislocated phrasing, the expressionist and impeccable bass from Berlin, the mellow melt-in-mouth Moog lines by Stewart, and the personal vocals from Peacock, all-together combined with the rich and meticulous work of Bruford, turn this last one into a whole band unity and identity. Bill Bruford offers a peculiar fusion of progressive rock and jazz with this album, very rich in melodies, tonalities and nuances. Some songs like “Back to the Beginning” create a really beautiful atmosphere, wrapped by the delicious synth phrases by Dave Stewart, only comparable to the ones by David Sancious in my own view. Anette Peacock brings a really fresh touch to the music in a style that is close to the later new wave experiments of Robert Fripp and the League of Gentlemen during the early 80’s. In “Sample and Hold”, probably influenced by both of them, Bill Bruford goes a step further from the contemporary structures of Frank Zappa and the jazz fusion of Weather Report, building a complex world of measures and harmonies. “Feels Good to Me”, which entitles the album, is one of these tracks to put on display, with that classic jazz rock melody and that delicious synthesizer chorus line. In this album, it’s proven that Bill Bruford is not just one of the best percussionists in the world, but that he is a first class writer and arranger. Of course this wouldn’t be possible if it was not because of his proximity to the world of the harmonic percussion and his peculiar ability to work with percussive timbers that, in my view, are the real foundation of this work. “Either End of August” is surprisingly close to Bruford’s future works with the jazz ensemble Earthworks, coined with the magnific flugelhorn performance by Kenny Wheeler. The album closes with a bonus track, a live version of the demolishing “Joe Frazier”, that was released as a studio version in the album “Gradually Going Tornado”. For those who love progressive jazz rock, this album is not just indispensable, but is an absolutely incomparable and irreplaceable work. |
||