[Bill's Blog - Studio stuff: the Burning for Buddy sessions]

Legendary progressive rock drummer Bill Bruford has a book due out this March titled Bill Bruford: The Autobiograpy. Bruford was the original drummer for Yes, played with King Crimson from 1972 until 1997 and is one of Neil Peart's more prominent early influences. Neil recruited Bruford to play on his 1994 Burning for Buddy project and Bruford describes the experience in detail in his upcoming book. He recently posted an excerpt from this portion of the book to his blog:

... An altogether grander 1994 project centered on Neil Peart, the charming and successful drummer with Canadian rockers Rush, who had taken it upon himself to make a series of recordings of Buddy Rich’s music. Buddy had passed away in 1987, but The Buddy Rich Orchestra was still very much a working organism, featuring several of the musicians who were in the band when their leader was alive, most notably tenor saxophonist Steve Marcus. The idea was for an A-list of the most celebrated drummers of the day to do a couple of tunes each from the standard Rich Orchestra repertoire. The resulting CDs were to be called Burning For Buddy, and time was duly booked at the Power Station recording studio in Manhattan.

For reasons best known to himself, Neil thought I’d be suitable for this project and got in touch to explain the plan. He suggested a couple of tunes, and I, with what must have seemed like arrogance but in fact was that old insecurity, said fine, but how about one of his and one of mine? Neil asked for a demo of my proposed tune, which was duly approved, and I went off to see English trumpeter and arranger Chris Batchelor to have the composition transcribed. ...

You can read the entire excerpt at this link. Thanks to David J for the info.

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