electronics, getting early midi-mapping and hexi-decimal code, you know all that nonsense.

It kind of drove me crazy, logistically, you know, the early days of computers. They’d come up on baggage claim smashed to bits. You’ve got an 8:00 show and at 7:55 you never knew whether the thing’s going to be working.

On the other hand, when it did work, it had a real charm, with these three British guys on top. Django Bates is now a very distinguished professor at the Copenhagen University. Iain Ballamy is one of our country’s best jazz tenor players, he’s a good guy.

They loved it, the whole idea that the drummer wasn’t going to go ting, ting, ta ting, ting, ta ting. But the complexity of getting that drum kit to be expressive was really hard. So the first decade we did that, and that’s on one of those DVDs.

Then eventually, after King Crimson in the mid-‘90s, we reconvened as an acoustic thing. Now we have stellar acoustic players, all young guys. There’s a kid here in the UK called Gwilym Simcock, these guys are of a technical standard that’s unbelievable. He went to the royal college as a classical musician and graduated with a first BA and first in his class in everything.

Here’s the weird thing, he moved straight

to jazz and overnight could play like Keith Jarrett. Now that’s very weird. So he has all that and all the classical technique, but it’s very rare for classically trained kids to move to the freedom and space of jazz. Like a duck to water, he suddenly knew exactly what to do. Extraordinary, and very rare.

JM: He didn’t listen to it as a kid? BB: A little bit, but because he’s so young, it probably would’ve been Chick Corea or something when he was very young.

JM: They just suck everything up like sponges.

BB: Yeah, extraordinary, and Mark Juliana is the same. This is the type of talented new generation of kids. Don’t ever worry that there’s no talent, the talent is unbelievable, it’s just finding it and directing it.

It probably isn’t coming out of Berklee or PIT, because those people are more cranky, they never quite got to those kids. There’s nothing wrong with Berklee or PIT, it’s just that those people are somehow from a different frame of mind. They don’t want to go to school. They’re already hearing things.

JM: I think a lot of the people that go to those schools also look at them as a vehicle to make it. Not necessarily going to Berklee

to learn a suspended fourth, but go to Berklee because if the best guitar player sees me there and I jam with him, I might have my opportunity. BB: Yeah, that’s right, and that’s very understandable. So, Gwilym and Tim Garland, our tenor player, is one of the country’s best here, too. He’s out with Chick Corea, doing Chick Corea and Gary Burton’s 25^th anniversary of playing together. But here’s the thing, he’s their musical director, in the sense that he handles their orchestras. Each show has an orchestra. So in Sydney, he’s given the Sydney Philharmonic to play with and conduct.

JM: That’s quite a feat.

BB: Earthworks has just had 20 years – (laughing) yeah, still running! And that’s kind of my jazz gig, it’s devolved and evolved into being acoustic music, but with a strong jazz kind of influence to it.

Did a couple of DVDs on that, with footage from throughout 20 years. Volume 1 is the second ten years, the 2000’s, and volume 2 is the first ten years, the 1990’s. A reversed order. And there was a lot of footage on that. Again I’m sitting looking at it, thinking I’d love to have this out, this looks great. So, that’s worked out well, and now Earthworks is kind of on hiatus.