Progressive RockJazz

Winterfold Records / Cherry Red · 18 September 2026

«Full Circle» opens at a fast tempo with a drum pattern straight out of Bill Bruford’s own eighties band, and what follows confirms this is a live recording: entrances that search for each other, air between the players, decisions made on the spot. The tape draws on shows played across the UK and Europe between late 2025 and early 2026.

Bruford, who’d stepped off stages in 2009, plays drums; Pete Roth, a German-born, England-based guitarist who studied jazz and went on to work as Bruford’s own drum tech, carries the instrument’s lead voice; Mike Pratt, a London double bassist and bassist with years at Ronnie Scott’s behind him, closes the triangle. The roles shift from track to track and none of the three settles into a fixed accompanying part.

Of the CD’s nine pieces, seven are originals, one is a declared improvisation on the Largo from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, and the other a version of «Summertime» that arrives taken apart in pieces. The high point is «Original Sin», eight and a quarter minutes that open in staccato, move through a guitar solo that never repeats an idea, and close with a drum ending that sounds like a full band. «Dancing With Grace» works the other way round: a relaxed entrance, soft swing, the bass picking up the melody without the handover ever being audible.

The second half of «Looking Forward To Looking Back» is where it falls short. After a country-and-blues groove that sets up the exchanges between Roth and Pratt, the improvisation that follows never quite locks onto what came before it, and on a fifty-seven-minute record a stretch like that shows. Winterfold Records — Bruford’s own rock label, within Cherry Red — puts it out as a double digipak, with a thirty-five-minute DVD filmed at the Cranleigh Arts Centre and a booklet of notes and photographs.

Rating: 7.2/10

Text by Guillem Cardós