THE HENRY COW LEGEND [AKA: LEGEND OR LEG END]

n May of 1968, two students of the University of Cambridge (and distinguished musicians) are going to mount a band. The two boys, a called Fred Frith and another Tim Hodgkinson, initially intended to mount barely a band or of jazz or of blues, main influence of the two, however, both had a taste and a vision broader a lot musical and diversified for imprison his recent project in an alone style. Both also they decided that did not need media for adulate or will be adulated, what will they want even was show their work with total liberty, expondo their visions musicals and politics without rotulações or prejudices. But despite of inside-out to itself "will sell" or it imprison his sound, both never had no problem in touch with others groups or artists that had a better commercial relation or of more success than they (as the Software Machine, Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield), or that had a vision musical still more radical than the group (like the percussores of the Krautrock, the German group Faust), and that subsequently would be Big value for the artistic enlargement and musical of the band, that would be very well utilized by them. It decided itself also that others musicians of equal calibrate went called for be part of that project and that followed of the same influence political-musical of their founders. In 1972, Chris Cutler, a distinguished English drummer, the bass player John greaves and the instrumentalist Lindsay Jogging enter for the team of the Henry Cow, if not closing the classical formation of the group, at least serving of base for the first one (and marvelous) adventure of the band in study. It recorded between the end of 1972 and middle part of 1973, Legend doubtless is the initial landmark of the movement that would go to be defined in the end of the years 70 as RIO, or Rock In Oposition. Here, even still suffering from an influence of the school fusion Canterburiana and of the Crimson of 1969, the so peculiar elements to the group (Break of sonorous times, mixtures of several styles musicals, extremely complex melodies and sometimes to difficult of accompany) already were found (and very) in that work. To first music, to classical "nirvana will go mice" looks us show that the band would traverse a more conventional sound in his I initiate, but already us astonishing for the sonorous effects and musicals that to same in the sample in him elapse of its duration. Upon elapsing of the album, we perceive then that Frith, Hendkinson and his supporters want even is going to flee of any sonorous style defined, as we be able to perceive in the three part of "Teenbeat" and more specifically in "With The Yellow Half-Moon And Blue Stat", where solos unruly complex and necessary rhythms at the same time join with. The group in the end of the disk puts us the political character that the even presented, of sometimes radical form, in his sound and performance (in some shows of the band, the flag of the old Soviet Union be raised in the stage) in the somber one "Lulls to Sleep Funerals Of The Citizen King", in him the band sings of a melancholy, however highly somber form, about the misfortunes It imposed for with the society, without doubts closing with golden key that innovative and different work. To layer of the album also is deed for flee of any vision conventional esthetics, putting in the layer barely the picture of a half, fleeing of the visual grandeur of Roger Deans, Hipgnosis and Paul Whiteheads so in force in the period. Doubtless, a marvelous disk, but also a precursor, where from him, a news forms of the progressive sound be done would be carried out.