131 Albums Before In the Court of the Crimson King that Every Prog Fan Should Know - Introduction
This blog has a fairly limited audience - aficionados of Progressive Rock. It limits itself further by delving into a large selection of albums that may not be familiar to those who have been stuck on the big six Prog bands or burrowed into holes such as Zeuhl, Neo-Prog, Canterbury, or Progressive Metal.
It's a blog about a musical opinion. When it comes to opinions, it always helps to know where the writer is coming from - background, knowledge, and musical preferences.
I grew into adolescence during the 70s, and my internal world was populated by my big brother’s records. My rock radio station, KMOD in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a little provincial and watered down, but still had room to broadcast some counter-cultural excesses. Films and books that drew me in usually pondered the future and alternate worlds.
By the time I was in high school I had embraced the progressive rock ethos. My first love was Rush, but I eventually settled into the classic body of early seventies prog rock, exemplified by Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. In my brother’s record collection I found records by bands like Styx, Kansas, the Alan Parsons Project and Starcastle, not to mention Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, all records that characterize a kind of second wave of Prog, that didn’t exactly expand the palette but at least enriched my listening repertoire. For a while I was content with this, dabbling in the progressive-leaning hard rock and heavy metal that was coming into vogue in the early 80s. I would read British music magazines like Kerrang! and got to know some of the new wave of artists starting to be called Neo-Prog. At the same time, I began to dabble my record listening toes into avant-garde jazzers like Cecil Taylor.
In college, I formally studied classical music. Classical is a vast world, whose chestnuts have been plundered by Progressive Rock bands. One would hear about how musical idols like Rick Wakeman and Kerry Minnear boasted music conservatory credentials. I became ever more intrigued with how classical music could be incorporated into compositions for rock instruments. In the late 80s, I hit another listening motherlode through a late night show on public radio that explored progressive music from Italy, France, Germany and elsewhere.
The borders of what I perceived as progressive music kept expanding in ever-widening circles. What had been a somewhat homogeneous core of progrock bands exploded into a seemingly endless network of migrating musicians, of influences (both obvious and tenuous), and of often starkly individualistic voices and approaches. At the same time, I noticed that a lot of more populist music that didn’t stray very far if at all from radio friendly pop and rock conventions would be confusingly but comfortably labeled Progressive Rock.
Somehow, despite the multifarious approaches, all of this music seemed part of one common body of artistic endeavor. The music could be an unsubtle emulation of an earlier symphonic progressive band; or an academic and dissonant, politically-charged chamber rock opus, or a stark, minimalistic utterance suspended in its abstraction. Somehow, all of it was being labeled by print media and academics as Progressive Rock. The dizzying limitlessness of it was irresistible.
In my college years, I was working on classical piano and composition degrees and postgraduate work. The gulf between progressive music and what was labeled as "classical music" was difficult for me to quantify, but it was clearly a sharp division. I concluded that while progressive music was free to borrow or even take on the clothing of any other style, by the mid-20th century classical music had become exclusive in nature - defined by subject matter it wasn’t allowed to address and styles it rejected.
In Ashley Kahn’s book on the making of Kind of Blue, he notes that in the late-50s, record labels considered “popular music” to include most everything outside of classical music, including the ever more intellectualized strains of jazz that were coming to the fore.
“Columbia assigned its classical efforts to its Masterworks department, but there was no such segregation between jazz and pop during the fifties… In those days, the two musical genres were a lot closer: they were recorded in the same studios working with the same producers, arrangers, and often the same musicians… Columbia’s genre-blind attitude caught may jazz stalwarts of the day off guard. Avakian remembers being visited in the fifties by a European jazz record distributor who was befuddled to find “Popular” on his office door.” - p. 48.
Terminology is always slippery in music. There are myriad ways to refer to the kind of music I'm interested in talking about. The most accurate designation would be "progressive popular music." It encompasses rock, pop, jazz, folk, electronic and much else. At the eve of the 70s, the words "progressive" and "underground" were used interchangeably. Since then, there is an array of more or less accepted terms for it - Progressive Rock (with big or little letter "p" and "r"), prog, progrock (with or without the two words separated), progressive music, etc. Art rock is another confusing term that is sometimes synonymous with prog and sometimes refers to a subset of prog with a quirky pop flavor. In the end, I don't recognize any difference between what all of these refer to. In his book, A New Day Yesterday, Mike Barnes states:
“And so progressive rock became an all-gates-open way of expanding rock music by incorporating elements from classical, jazz, R&B, free improvisation, folk, blues, soul, electronics and Eastern music.” - p. 40
Considering the range of music cobbled into the progressive category, I purport that it stands as the most versatile genre, both in terms of musical content and the textual ideas it explores. Progressive music can be academic or street-smart. It can be extremely complex or absurdly simple. It can be democrat, republican, libertarian, socialist, fascist, anarchist or green, Christian, satanic, or agnostic. Eight seconds long or eighty minutes long.
I see progressive rock as an inclusive genre. I get impatient with those who try to exclude certain music as "not prog" based on some characteristic - maybe it's too jazzy or doesn't have enough rock groove or doesn't have an electric guitar. Or the band generated too many pop tunes in ratio to their progressive material. I'll always argue for a more inclusive concept of prog.
Do I love all progressive music? Well, I love music that stretches boundaries, pushes envelopes, and questions received wisdom. Or at least I love some of it. Whether we like to admit it or not, each of us has a set of musical conventions that tug naggingly at us, even as we seek new frontiers. So there's quite a lot of progressive music I don't particularly care for. But I can almost always respect its progressive essence.
We all have limited time on this planet. Knowing we have a finite number of musical experiences left to us, how do we decide what to listen to next? It's a question I constantly ask. Listening to newly written and released music is hugely important to me. But so is fleshing out my knowledge of what came before.
For my own use, I've used a few distinct resources to determine a course of travel through the history of prog, generating a chronological list of about 2,000 albums released between 1959 and the present day. I want them to meet certain quasi-objective criteria of significance in terms of popularity, influence on fellow musicians, and sustained interest over time by the listening public and connoisseurs. I purposefully came up with a way to construct the list that excludes some of my favorite stuff and encourages me to dive into some personally uncharted waters. When arranged in order of release date, the list offers a thread of musical activity through time and geography. I'll share more about my methodology for making the list in a later post.
I've gradually come to regard some non-rock material as too crucial to the Progressive Rock story to exclude from the picture. In particular, the line between rock and jazz becomes almost obliterated in the early 70s. So I begin the chronology with some very progressive jazz albums that appeared in 1959. They're crucial to telling the Progressive Rock story. No electric instruments will be heard until the 17th album in my list. To combat any accusations of impertinence, I rely on the testimony of a quintessential Prog authority, Robert Wyatt, as quoted in Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell's book Beyond and Before -
“as far as we were concerned, there was already something called progressive rock - which was jazz.” - p. 105.
Will I get through my list of 2000 albums while I'm still breathing? Certainly not. Starting unfinishable projects is one of my passions.
Part of that list might be achievable though. We'll see how it goes. My list starts with 131 Albums Before In the Court of the Crimson King that Every Prog Fan Should Know. I'll try to do them justice.
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