Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman?

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 richardh wrote:

 Gerinski wrote:

Prog would be orphan without any of them, had to vote "both" even if that's like not voting at all. Personally Emerson has always been my favourite, probably because Tarkus and Trilogy are the first Prog albums I remember listening to when I was a child and they were responsible for my life-long love for Prog. He was also an innovator and he would stick to his way of seeing things, not falling into the hypes or trends, as confirmed by his rejection of the Mellotron when every keyboardist at the time wanted one dearly.Wakeman jumped on the train of mixing genuinely classical music in the rock and made very good albums at it, but I believe that Keith was the one having the more genuine vision of wanting to make modern "classical-rock" music. It's had to guess but I'm not sure Wakeman would have done what he did if Emerson had not existed.Considering the total length of their careers though, Wakeman has produced more consistently good music.

Agree on many things although I do think that Emerson's solo career is a little underrated while Wakeman has made a fair few albums that could be avoided although I like the Retro (1 & 2) and Out There albums.
<span style="line-height: 1.2;">Emerson has a much smaller catalogue of solo albums but even his last one ( The Keith Emerson Band ft Marc Bonilla) is excellent and there aren't any ones that should be avoided. Pleased to see Changing States get a reissue as well.</span> 

I don't think that Rick's doing avoidable albums is a fair way of taking points away from him.  He has done so many of them that they almost can't even be counted.  Unfortunatley I have only heard one solo album from Emerson, the last one, which was nice, but there are many albums from Wakeman that I like better... actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there was none of his albums that I would like better than Wakeman's 70's classic albums (and some other later albums too).  Even more so, there are at least 3 or 4 albums from Wakeman that I like better than any ELP album, and then I can even add Fragile and CttE.

Poll Question: Which of these two keyboards wizards from 60's & 70's do you prefer?
Poll Choice	Votes	Poll Statistics
Keith Emerson	49	[39.84%]
Rick Wakeman	49	[39.84%]
Both	22	[17.89%]
Neither	3	[2.44%]
You can not vote in this poll