The best albums ELP never made

Jurgen , Rick and the rest thought they could 'out ELP' ELP .. and they probably could and did!

My vote is for Refugee.

Other is for those I forgot because I'm getting old.

Triumvirat-the best there is, or was, to be more precise. ELP are great, but T'rat do more than any other band for me, musically.

       The thing is that I think the members of ELP have/had more true faith and belief in the music they made, versus all the members of Triumvirat out there, who could give two you know what's about the group they were in. Except for Helmut Koellen, former lead vocalist/bass and six string guitarist who was the glue that held Triumvirat together, died so long ago. Bummer.

     

I see things differently ... for example, if Keith had made an album of piano, strictly piano, like Rachel Flowers did of some of his material, I think that everyone would have looked at ELP VERY DIFFERENTLY than they do and did then, as a band with a little too much of this and that ... 

IF, his music had been shown to be as well composed and deserving of a classical appreciation, then the only two bands that he might be worried about would be BANCO and maybe TRIUMVIRAT, though, for my tastes, only BANCO fits within a classical mode in its complete piece of work, and the work they did was not about a solo vignette that sounds classical amidst everything else, as is the case with RW. To me, RW is not classical ... he is the ultimate modern famous musician that does bits and pieces, and has not done a complete piece since the day he was born, because he thinks all the pieces he has heard or looked at are boring, compared to his own music, whose only difference is a different instrument ... like Bill Bruford's example on his cymbals ... sounding completely different ... and then he says ... they are exactly the same thing!

None of those keyboard players are as classic minded and strong as, for example, Eberhard Schoenner, and many other folks out there that have been classical and experimental with keyboards since their first day ... but we won't give them an ear ... and some of those bands, in my book, would never be in my choices at all. Even folks like Peter Michael Hamel deserve the mention, although some would suggest that his material is more meditative and weird, than it is anything else, and he IS the professor and scholar in music compared to many of the others here, who just play in a band!

Another example, ANGE deserves to be there a lot more than half those bands, as their design in many pieces, is almost totally classical, and not rock song/hit oriented. I would even add LE ORME, however, it only really applies to a lot of their very early material and ends with FELONA E SERONA.

REFUGEE has been from day one, a favorite of mine, but I do not consider them "classical" even though they did two long pieces, which was more of a comment on THE NICE than it was anything else ... in the end, when Patrick Moraz went in a different direction, classically minded material was not what he did, which suggested that it had been someone else's idea in the first place. Thus, I do not really consider him in that club. I can not speak for his later material as I have not heard anything of his for the past 25 or 30 years.

but I have...I know a lot of people rate Contrappunti very highly but I couldn't get into it.  Smogmagica isn't great but I didn't mind it as much