Progressive vs Prog

 

There's heaps of jazz drumming on the first ELP album. Real proggressive rock is rock music played in a jazz format. It can have many other infuences including classical etc. But it is basically styled on jazz music. Listen to Bruford, Giles, Palmer, Bunker etc. Their drumming is definately jazz based. Then you add the wind instruments suh as flute, clarinet, soprano, sax etc. Jazz once again. Then you look at the way the guitar is played. The guitar isnt the main instrument, it is used as background rhythm or sounds etc. That's how jazz guitarists do it too. It's like a jazz band playing rock music and adding influences. But I guess the keys are more classical based, but there is still alot of jazz fusion style in the keys too. Gentle Giant were pretty jazz based early on especially in the keys. Progressive rock is just a name but it mainly jazz rock with classical influences. Todays music is not the same. Tool, Opeth, Dream theatre etc are just guitar bands who only have about 10% of the similarities of the true progressive bands. Apart from the odd time signatures that's where it ends. It's not true progressive rock. It's just metal mainly and is no where near as good. None of those bands base their music on  hammond organs or wind instruments. Their song writing telents are no where near as good. I don't rate modern bands at all

By the end of the 70s things probably had become that polarised, in the first half of the decade the scene was more diverse and anything that wasn't Top-40 pop was called either Progressive or Heavy... (that's heavy as in deep and meaningful ...not in the modern meaning of the term as in Heavy Rock and Heavy Metal). The Softs and VdGG could be symphonic, but they were also capable of being cacophonic too.

 

I could almost agree with that, except for the symphonic part (where are King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator and Soft Machine et al in your symphonic definition?). In the early 70s the term Progressive was applied to a wide range of bands, many of whom have failed to meet the panoptic standards required of this site, bands such as The Groundhogs and their brand progressive Blues were called Progressive at the time, (and featured in many a school-boys collection of progressive albums), but not (it appears) now. (I'm not removing them from my record collection though - they are there between Greenslade and Gryphon and that's were they are staying ). (yay! for (parenthesis)!)

 

*sharp intake of breath*

 

Like it or not (and most don't) the Progressive Rock genre is a sub-set of Popular Music - it grew out of Pop music, albeit infused with other popular genres such as Jazz and Folk with a smattering of 'Classical' music thrown in for good measure, but it still is Pop music. Evidence of this is everywhere you look, with the exception of a few esoteric bands who are influenced exclusively from music created within the progressive genre, every band is a hairsbreadth away from Pop such that the slightest nudge would tip them over (and often does). One of the biggest (nay the biggest) problem with pigeonholing a band into a sub-genre is that they are seldom consistant from one CD to the next (hooray!) and will jump from sub-genre to sub-genre (and frequently out of the box completely). Sometimes it's like trying to nail jelly to a wall, but it's great fun trying (if a little messy).

 

In time (a looong time) Prog may have diverged enough from 'mainstream' to become seperate genre in the same way Renaissance and Baroque did in the early 1600s. At the moment we are in that transitional period with modern Progressive bands still growing out of, and drawing influences from, existing mainstream Pop, Rock, Jazz and Metal styles (and old Prog bands drifting back and forth between them). Whether you choose to disregard any post 1980 band as not Prog is up to the listener to decide, but that's not the definition used in the Archive.

 

I am not saying that the term Progressive Rock, (eventhough IMO there is very little rock left in Progressive music), should be all-inclusive and encompass every band that dares to venture beyond the norm in popular music, but we should shy away from being all-exclusive and thus allow the genre to continue to grow and flourish.

 

We can draw a line in the sand now and say that anything to the left is Prog Rock and everything to the right is not, but that won't change anything, bands will continue to play around with the boundary, hopping from one side to the other at whim, and what we will be left with is half an Archive that is no more than a snap-shot of the state of Progressive Music frozen at a particular era to an arbitrary ideal and would further add to the derogatory 'dinosaur' epithet we've striven to shake-off for the past 30 years.