Playlists

We live in times so perverse that we need to escape them for our own good. We need music that doesn't catapult us up and down through predictable structures. In a society that emphasizes competition, this album is passive. Rather than trying to slice each other up like blood-thirsty be-boppers, these musicians improvise collectively. They prefer a peaceful stasis to a headlong scramble from one cadence to the next.

(Tony Scott, 1964, quoted in Judie Eremo, "New Age Musicians", 1988)

At first glance, few musical phenomena seem more distant from one another than progressive rock and new age. Dizzying shifts and dynamic emphasis on one side, a seraphic quest for stillness on the other. Virtuosity vs. background sound, intergalactic clashes vs. inner calm. And yet, surprising as it may or may not be, the list of musicians who have worked across both fields is enormous — so much so that narrowing it down to around forty names for a meaningful overview has meant leaving out some significant figures.

But what connects the two fields isn't just a list of shared names, and once you drop the stereotypes, the overlap becomes downright obvious. Progressive rock has played a great deal, especially through the flash-rock about-turns of its symphonic strand, on contrasts of intensity, and in doing so has thoroughly explored the possibilities of pianissimo passages, expanded atmospheres and slowly evolving layers. As a true child of the psychedelic big bang, it has also often foregrounded the inner, even spiritual dimension of the musical experience, and valued expanded forms and instrumental textures more than any other branch of pop-rock. It has bet on stylistic hybridity and on building new musical territories for the mind to escape into, believed in the revolution promised by electronic instruments and studio manipulation, and devised ways to induce the widest range of sensations in the listener — including focus, comfort, and tranquility.

New age music, for its part, has been and still is much more than an offshoot of elevator music good only for filling pyramid- and chakra-themed compilations. Over a span running roughly from the second half of the Seventies to the early Nineties, it constituted an extremely free and prolific territory in which musicians interested in expanding musical language could operate at the crossroads of pop, traditional music, instrumental rock, syncretic jazz and improvisation, art music, and electronic experimentation. Initially removed from market logic, and later leaning on a niche increasingly drawn toward the mainstream, these artists created music unmoored from song form, often following paths inspired by pioneering experiences that had developed a few years earlier within the progressive scene.

Playing an unexpected pioneering role were "borderline" acts such as Third Ear Band and Jade Warrior in Britain, Clearlight in France, or in Italy Aktuala and Telaio Magnetico.

Of course, much more than prog flowed into the new age aesthetic. Some ingredients, such as the minimalism of Glass, Reich and Riley, the electric folk of Celtic outfit Pentangle, and the electric jazz that later morphed into Weather Report-style fusion, are inspirations common to both strands, as are Embryo and Passport. Other musical elements, from kraut and kosmische flotations to space rock to the late-hippie sounds of free festivals, are the fruit of paths that ran parallel to progressive rock and were far from lacking in overlap. Two careers are emblematic of just how close, from a certain point in the Seventies onward, the ties between these phenomena became: those of Mike Oldfield and Vangelis. Far from isolated cases, the two are merely the tip of an iceberg that includes other notable names such as David Bedford, a composer orbiting the Canterbury scene and a collaborator of Oldfield and Kevin Ayers, Jon Anderson, Robert Fripp... to whom, as the years went by, were added former Yes man Patrick Moraz, former Genesis member Anthony Phillips, former Nucleus and Soft Machine man Karl Jenkins, former Happy The Man and Camel member Kit Watkins, Heldon's Richard Pinhas, Peter Gabriel's keyboardist Larry Fast, and even, if only for sporadic projects, Phil Collins (alongside Brand X on the 1976 album "Marscape"), Focus's dazzling guitarist Jan Akkerman, and fellow former Genesis member Steve Hackett.

The jazz-rock/jazz fusion field too, whose borders with progressive rock were blurred at best on both sides of the Atlantic, made a fundamental contribution to the genre. Jan Hammer of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jean-Luc Ponty, Shadowfax, Pat Metheny, Terje Rypdal and, further down the line, David Torn and Mark Isham and Terry Bozzio's Group 87 all made albums with a hybrid sound, clearly continuous with both prog's fervor and new age's subtler shades. To identify the key names of this continuum, as well as to navigate the vast pantheon of "native" artists of progressive new age, it's worth turning to Bradley Smith's "The Billboard Guide To Progressive Music," published in 1997. It's a hard-to-find book, but thanks to its unconventional approach to the concept of progressive music, it can be illuminating in tracing post-1977 connections among the genre's successors.

Among the other artists extensively discussed in the book's pages are violinist Vicki Richards (also involved with Black Tape For A Blue Girl), the wind-and-synthesizer duo Emerald Web, acoustic guitarist Steve Tibbetts, and the hyper-prolific flautist and guitarist Georg Deuter. They don't feature in Smith's selection, but a few of the most prominent names in new age music are still worth adding to broaden the picture: the two virtuosos of bass and acoustic guitar Michael Manring and Michael Hedges (both signed - like Isham and Shadowfax - to Windham Hill, the genre's leading label), Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider (winner of the first-ever new age Grammy in 1987), keyboardist and guitarist David Arkenstone, and synth heroes Kitaro and Yanni, Japanese and Greek respectively.

Rounding out the picture are two more recent artists, both French, both capable of drawing simultaneously on the neo-prog field and on new age: solo artist Jean-Pascal Boffo and the ensemble XII Alfonso.

Everything changed in the Eighties. [...] Progressive music split into small, very different groups. The emergence of a calmer music, less oriented toward rock and bands - what had come to be called 'new age music' - further challenged established notions of what progressive music meant to many people. [...] Under the 'new age' umbrella, progressive music carried on with its goals and its abstract forms (seriously-toned instrumental music, long pieces), even as the development of the more rock-oriented factions remained in limbo or led to dead ends.

(Bradley Smith, “The Billboard Guide To Progressive Music”, 1996)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

09/01/2026