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This is very much a Bruford title: a ‘wooden man singing and a stone woman dancing’ sounds like the blueprint for a classical Japanese puppet show. Here we have Mark Hodgson on bass, Steve Hamilton on piano, and Tim Garland on soprano saxophone.
But this video and description is perhaps one for drummers. It appears to be an ad hoc rearrangement of the piece with a whole slower reflective section omitted. Two reasons I can think of for that: 1) we were running out of time and we had to cut a few minutes; or 2) there was some kind of editing error. But hey, if you’re on a stage, stuff happens.
The piece usually has prog-jazz characteristics, with several sections, counter-melodies, meters, moods, and interaction.. Any comparison between the studio version, when we were just learning it, and this live version a couple of years later, will quickly show the effect of road-work on the finished product. Here, with a noisy audience and a sweaty band that knows the song inside out, we were able to play fast and loose. The drum solo is unusually long, for me, at about five minutes. But there’s a lot of content in its performance, so, for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, I think it’s worth showing.
The solo was absolutely a function of the kit layout; something different would have emerged from a traditional setup. Two toms and two cymbals on my right side are balanced by the same on my left side, the two separated by a central cable hi-hat. It allows a call and response thing: what you play on the higher pitched left side, for example, can be mirrored, echoed, or inverted on the deeper left side. Of course, I’d have given my right arm to be ambidextrous, as the old drummer joke goes, because this was the perfect kit to be ambidextrous on. As others have noted, there is no reason why a drummer should have a stronger (or weaker) side at all. It’s just a matter of spending equal amounts of practice time leading with the weaker hand more often than the stronger.
I was propelled into the solo from the manic stone-woman dance, which was mostly in 9/4. The other guys dropped out and I seemed to have been left flying solo. But it felt good, unstoppable, until I ran out of breath (not literally) and moved to some quieter, rubato style out-of-tempo phrases a couple of minutes in.
We’ve already uploaded several tracks from this show in Santiago, Chile, because the audience was very strong, driving we musicians on to better things. There was a sense in which we could do no wrong. Far from encouraging us into some sort of torpor, it egged us on to do better, be sharper. We cared very much that we should deliver a show worthy of all this enthusiasm. So if you’re in an audience and you’re thinking the band is just not ‘getting’ you - your applause, enthusiasm, boredom, whatever - then, I assure you, you’re wrong. They’re getting it, even if they seem to be ignoring it.
There are two other versions of this song by different musicians on this channel. Both feature the full arrangement, if you connoisseurs need to know what we should have been playing that night in Santiago!
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