When Bill Bruford sits down behind his kit on Saturday night at the London Jazz Festival he will be about to celebrate 40 years as a professional drummer. It’s an anniversary that has put him in pensive mood. And, as we sit in a murky London pub, we try to think of old-timers from the golden age of British rock still punishing a hi-hat. We’re having trouble. “Well, John Bonham is gone, and so is [Keith] Moon. Charlie Watts – he’s just about keeping up, doing the human jukebox thing. Ringo . . . is he still touring?”

Bruford, one of the sharpest, most creative percussionists of his generation, made his name barnstorming around the world with the then highly successful (now sadly unfashionable) titans of prog rock – Yes, King Crimson and Genesis – before moving into the saner realms of jazz, his first love.

“If you survive in this industry for 40 years without too many cuts and bruises, still sober and still getting excited by the smell of a drum set, then you get reflective,” he says. “People think this is a glamourous industry, but it comes with a lot of rough edges. Even though people see I’m obviously enjoying playing, the rest of the stuff can be hard.”

Part of the problem is his illustrious past, and audiences that can’t forget music he made when he was 23. “Sentimental America is all but impossible to play in,” he says. “They’re listening to you playing jazz and they’re hearing Close to the Edge[Yes’s 1972 meisterwerk]. Typically the person in the audience is a well-meaning gent of 45 and he says: ‘Bill, I love what you’re doing, don’t ever stop.’ I guess I’m affirming to him that Close to the Edge is still alive but I think: ‘The hell with this, don’t instruct me not to stop.’ ”

Bruford, whose demeanour is more urbane college lecturer than seasoned road warrior, laughs heartily but, at 58, he is unsure of his next move. “Has anyone over 60, outside maybe of Picasso, really offered fresh directions?” he muses. But he doesn’t want to appear to be whingeing, he’s had a splendid time. “I’ve been extremely well-paid and hardly ripped off at all.”

It’s just that nobody ever discusses retirement in music – “there’s no gold watch”. He is thinking about taking a sabbatical but is worried about his chops getting rusty. Should he be making way for the youngsters? Not for nothing is his new album called In Two Minds. “One of the worst records I’ve heard was by one of my favourite drummers, Max Roach, not long before he died, where you could see daylight between the bass player and drummer. I wish he hadn’t made it.”

He is not interested in the nostalgia circuit. “Even now Yes have an audience of 2,000 to 3,000 in at least 200 cities around the world, so they can keep mining that ad nauseam, but it is definitely ad nauseam.”

No call from Genesis for their just-completed pension-bolstering world tour? He laughs. “I did nine months with them in 1976 and I wasn’t very good at it.” Why not? “I feel I need some sort of emotional commitment to the music,” he says diplomatically. Still, he was paid a then-princely £500 a week.

He was much happier with the knotty machinations of King Crimson, an outfit led by the cerebral guitarist Robert Fripp. “The Redrecord [from 1974] was really good, but making it was like pulling teeth. I didn’t really appreciate the record we were making but Robert did. It’s way ahead of everyone else. Years later Kurt Cobain said he liked it, so sales went through the roof.”

But juggling jazz and rock became harder. “My interest in laying down a big beat ended with the last millennium. Happily jazz exists. Everyone hates ‘jazz’ but it’s the only word to describe a musician who wants to say something fresh and react to what others are doing around him.”

This is what Bruford will be up to at the Purcell Room when he plays with his regular improvising partner, the Dutch jazz pianist Michiel Borstlap. “There’s a kind of music that can only be arrived at through improvisation, a kind that you wouldn’t have dreamt of writing down. And that is really exciting.”

His other longstanding jazz project, Earthworks, is off the road. “It’s parked up, refuelling. The key is still in the car and I can drive it any time but I do think you do need a clear idea of what you’re doing when you play a concert.”

Ah, that uncertainty again. But the more we talk, the less retirement seems an option – just some downsizing. “Once I would fly to Tokyo for two nights’ work,” he says. “Not any more.”

So Bill Bruford won’t be expiring with his boots on, then. He smiles. “I’m not going to die in a hotel room. I’m too white, British, angst-ridden and middle-class for that.”

In Two Minds is released by Summerfold. Bruford-Borstlap play the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London SE1 (www.southbankcentre.co.uk; 0871 6632505) Saturday 24th November 2007

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010