On his upcoming solo album Cheating The Polygraph, Porcupine Tree drummer Gavin Harrison reworks, rearranges and, in many ways, re-imagines eight of the band's songs in a big band fashion. It's a fresh and daring concept that started to evolve in 2009, after he was asked by Buddy Rich's daughter, Cathy, to perform at a memorial concert for her late father.

"Cathy said to me, ‘You’re welcome to play any of Buddy’s tunes, of course, but what would be really fun is if you did a song from your band,'" Harrison explains. "My band's music isn’t anything like Buddy's, obviously, so I thought about it, and then I got together with Laurence Cottle, a big band arranger, to see what might work."

Harrison had firm ideas for the sound he was looking for: "I told Laurence, ‘I don’t want this to be funny," Harrison says. "It couldn’t be comedy, cheesy, ‘rock does swing’ or anything like that. I thought it should be serious music. We went with that approach, and it came out great."

The 2009 memorial concert didn't pan out (although Harrison did participate in a 25th Anniversary Buddy Rich tribute show in 2012), but once Harrison and Cottle had worked up the first tune, they decided to try another. "I asked Laurence to write an arrangement of Cheating The Polygraph. Once we did that second piece, I said, ‘What about a whole album?’"

Over a five-year period, Harrison and Cottle worked on a selection of Porcupine Tree songs, reworking arrangements and cutting them apart, recording brass with demo drums and then recording keeper drum tracks after the new arrangements were complete. “It was a fascinating process," Harrison notes. "There were actually 10 songs that just wouldn’t work. We started them, wrote an intro or a verse, a middle-eight, but we ultimately decided there wasn’t enough material in certain songs to work with. They were more about atmosphere, sound and vibe than strictly chords and melody. So I gave up on those pieces and concentrated on the ones that gave me enough to rearrange.”

Of the finished album, Harrison stresses that listeners unfamiliar with Porcupine Tree's catalog won't have a hard time appreciating the music. "They're enjoyable pieces, and they sound nothing like the originals," he says. And despite the big band milieu, the drummer emphasizes that his agenda was decidedly anti-retro: “We’re not trying to do Glenn Miller. This is much more Frank Zappa, Don Ellis, Lalo Schifrin, Patrick Williams – some of the more modern big band thinkers. I’ve always been fascinated by modernism in art, so this album follows through on that futuristic-thinking concept."

Gavin Harrison's Cheating The Polygraph will be released April 13 in the UK, April 14 in North America, April 17 in Germany and April 22 in Japan. Physical pre-orders are available at the Kscope webstore. It is also available as a vinyl pre-order, as a CD/vinyl bundle pre-order and via iTunes.

On the following pages, Harrison runs down his top five tips for drummers.