Terry Bozzio is back | And selling his kits

Terry Bozzio has not played a stage in over eight years.

That ends this year: he is joining BEAT for a 40-date US tour.

And at the same time, in what has to be one of the more unusual pieces of drum news this year, his personal collection of instruments has gone on sale.

Who is Terry Bozzio?

If the name is new to you, the short version is that he is one of the most technically formidable and genuinely strange drummers alive.

He got the Frank Zappa gig at 24 by sight-reading “The Black Page” — a piece Zappa wrote more or less specifically to be unplayable. He then went on to Missing Persons, to Jeff Beck, and to a long solo career built around enormous tuned drum kits, playing entirely composed solo drum music with melody and harmony in it.

That last part is what makes him unusual. Most drum solos are rhythm. Bozzio writes pieces, on kits with dozens of pitched drums and cymbals, performed alone for a whole evening.

Nobody else has really done it.

The collection

The Terry Bozzio Collection is now live at Donn Bennett’s Drum Vault, and it is not a merch drop. It is the actual instruments: stage-played kits, signature snares, rare prototypes and drums used across his work with Zappa, Missing Persons and Jeff Beck.

Many pieces are personally signed and come with certificates of authenticity.

The detail we liked most is that Bozzio and Bennett have apparently made a deliberate effort to keep a lot of the prices within reach of ordinary drummers and fans, rather than pricing the lot for museums and investors.

That is a nicer instinct than it might sound. Historic instruments have a habit of vanishing into collections and never being hit again. Selling them at prices where working drummers can actually buy one means some of these drums go back into rooms and get played.

The return

Eight years is a long time away, and BEAT — the Adrian Belew-led project revisiting 1980s King Crimson material — is an interesting place to come back to. That repertoire is angular, odd-metered, and full of interlocking parts, which is very much Bozzio’s native language.

Forty dates is also not a gentle re-entry. That is a proper tour.

He has also mentioned a new drumming instruction book on the way, so the teaching side is not finished either.

Final thoughts

There is something quietly moving about doing both of these at once — selling the instruments that documented your career whilst booking forty nights to add to it.

It reads less like winding down and more like clearing the shed so there is room to work.

If you have never sat down with his solo drum performances, do that this week. It will not sound like anything else you have heard, and it will almost certainly change what you think a drum kit is for.

For other drummers who treat the kit as a complete instrument rather than an accompaniment, Thomas Lang is the obvious place to go next, and Benny Greb approaches the same idea from the groove side. If it is the enormous-kit end that appeals, our bass drum cymbal mount guide covers the practical business of fitting more onto a kit than the stands were designed for.