Clouds

Such an interesting and essentially precise post deserves as considered a response as I can manage.

Yet you get off on the wrong foot by saying that the essence of 1-2-3’s style  came from jazz. This isn’t entirely your fault – again, the records are setting the record wrong – just as the lack of recordings blurs 1-2-3’s importance, the Clouds records are giving the wrong clues to the style of 1-2-3.  Despite containing the same musicians, Clouds was not 1-2-3. It was a completely different band, pushed off direction by Terry Ellis, their manager, who was trying to more directly reach the mainstream.

Yes, jazz was an important component, as was blues, and classical, but so was pop and particularly, pop songs. As Rolling Stone said, 1-2-3 was many things (also read Malreaux’s earlier post). A rough guide might be thinking of a jazzy – classical Vanilla Fudge. Yes, “Sing-Sing-Sing” was a 1-2-3 arrangement and another good clue, but look at “America”, and imagine a repertoire of songs covering that spectrum and beyond. Perhaps it was misleading of me to say that they were ahead of the pack, that gives the impression that they were playing King Crimson, Yes, ELP before these bands existed, when in actual fact, 1-2-3 would still stand on their own as unique, even today. As has been noted, these bands took elements, Yes took the baroque arrangements, Crimson took the melodic grandeur mixed with frantic muso invention, ELP (The Nice) took the concept of a classic organ trio. What these bands produced from there was their own version of elements of 1-2-3. They were all “utterly different and fresher”, all that is said is that the concept largely came from 1-2-3.

At the very least, 1-2-3 was playing a form of progressive music long before these other bands were even formed. But the nature of things in Rock music is that the records are used to make these judgements rather than live performances, and that’s where it went wrong for 1-2-3, though beyond the shores of Prog itself (ironically!), their crucial contribution is more readily accepted.