Progressive Rock

Introduction

It used to also be called romantic rock, baroque rock, symphonic rock, classic rock, art rock. All misleading terms, some of them frankly ridiculous, imprecise, incomplete, childish. Still, all better than 'progressive'.

Every reader with even a passing interest in rock music knows what this genre is, one that reached its peak in the first half of the 70s; they may not love it, but they've presumably heard a few records by the major bands and can probably tell, or think they can tell, whether a track belongs to progressive or not.

Perhaps, though, things aren't so clear-cut. What exactly defines the stylistic and aesthetic boundaries of progressive? In recent years, more recent forms of musical expression not primarily linked to the genre have, probably beyond their authors' intentions, been partly attributed to it. And so, for bands like Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Tarentel, Tortoise, The Gathering, Cerberus Schoal, Aloha, Muse, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, the word 'progressive' has come up again.

The term has thus taken on very blurred connotations - so blurred that there's even been a retrospective attempt to attribute earlier musical forms to the genre, forms usually linked to rock-blues, psychedelia, folk-rock, or hard rock. So, with the utmost nonchalance, early Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall, Led Zeppelin, Pentangle, Cream and the like have all been cited as progressive.

Let's say this right away: the writer completely disagrees. But why has this critical stance been adopted in recent years both by those who don't like progressive - in its most classic sense, let's say - and by its fans? Hard to say for certain, but a few factors are worth highlighting: progressive fans, perhaps including fans of contemporary prog too, have for decades been bombarded by a music criticism that shows a hostility toward the genre at times frankly bordering on the pathological - criticism itself born from the entrenchment of certain musical-anthropological myths: the rejection of overstructuring and self-indulgence experienced as intellectual onanism, the rejection of pretentiousness seen as coldness (the famous 'rock of true feeling', one of the biggest pieces of nonsense ever written), the rejection of form seen as an absence of substance (as if there were anything else in music beyond form). All this has left its mark, and most prog fans, whenever the chance arose to break the siege by folding more critically accepted music into the genre, jumped at it. Prog's detractors, for their part, unable to ignore the movement's historical importance and influence, gladly agreed to promote it by widening its boundaries until the genre was reduced to something less defined and therefore more dialectically malleable. Both sides then exploited the very term 'progressive' - hence the opening of this piece - ultimately basing the definition of the genre not on the fixed nature of a style, however elusive, but on the dynamics of an intention: progressive became anything that 'progresses' toward other forms of musical aesthetics, and what was once considered progressive was so in its own time, but that 'style' is no longer considered as such now (and above all, the genre's latter-day followers are no longer considered progressive). A rather ambiguous operation.

Defining an object in dynamic terms ultimately means not defining it at all, laying the groundwork for total arbitrariness. Using any term at all presupposes a general agreement on the boundaries of what that object is; no term can be defined by relating it to an observer's personal experience or subjective view. No one would accept a definition of an airplane as 'a thing that stays in the air and whose noise annoys me', nor would they accept defining a train as 'an innovative means of moving people and goods'. In the late 19th century it was innovative; now it isn't. It's still a train, regardless. Furthermore, if we were to stick to this dialectical definition, we'd have to write not only about Yes and Genesis, but also about Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Ligeti, Zappa, Tangerine Dream, Black Sabbath, Burt Bacharach... I believe everyone, without exception, would find that ridiculous.

Defining progressive as a style, then, mapping out its aesthetic boundaries, its emotional humus. It's not so simple. Very different bands have been placed under the progressive umbrella, in my view rightly so, from the symphonic grandeur of Renaissance to the experimentalism of Henry Cow. Progressive Rock has far wider borders than blues or heavy metal. But it does have borders. Let's try to pin down a few points.

- The programmatic rejection of the "song form", the refusal to reduce rock's expressive forms to the structural rigidity of the chorus as the fulcrum of musical invention.

- The possibility, within the unfolding of such invention, of creating very long pieces, sometimes split into sub-sections, with widely different musical moods alternating within the same track.

- The heavy use of tempo changes within the rhythm, often in odd time signatures.

- The use of much broader instrumentation that goes beyond the guitar-bass-drums triangulation, with extensive use of keyboards (in particular two legendary instruments, the Hammond organ and the Mellotron), a true "trademark" for countless progressive bands, but also of wind instruments and sometimes entire string sections or orchestras.

- Very rich, redundant arrangements, often with celebratory, epic tones.

- The use of structures that are often rhythmically and melodically complex, drawing heavily on harmonic ideas borrowed from classical music (both Baroque and Romantic), but often from jazz too, partially moving beyond the blues roots that had until then been essential to rock.

- Generally speaking, unhooking the music from its social and/or political context; progressive doesn't reflect reality but, at most, dissolves it into the fantastical; it carries no hidden message, only aestheticism as an end in itself, pure, uncontaminated, crystalline. Progressive is rock born and bred within the bourgeoisie - regardless, of course, of the individual musicians' social or political views.

- A very limited use of improvisation.

- The use of lyrics, artwork, and, let's say, "look" in general, tending toward the metaphorical, cryptic, fantastical.

- A largely virtuosic instrumental approach, with an almost epic relationship between the musician and their instrument.

Clearly, in progressive music these elements are often not all present at once, and some of them turn up in other genres too, especially psychedelia, which indeed shares several points of contact and transitional forms with progressive - but the synthesis of many of these elements is what defines the genre.

Progressive music boasts masterpieces just as it does horrendous, laughable records; the common denominator, in any case, is the attempt - partly successful - to experience rock as an art form in itself, with no other purpose attached (fun, energy, aggression, dancing, getting high, message, relaxation).

In this sense, progressive - which one critic rightly called the mature, post-adolescent form of rock - was, in its golden years, at the centre of a Copernican revolution in which "young people's music" was no longer young but simply music, and in which rock took on an artistic dignity previously unknown.

"My deliberate assertion, in 1969, that it was possible in rock to appeal to the head as well as the feet caused a kind of passionate explosion and was considered heretical," said Robert Fripp, and in that sentence lies the whole lucid design of the man and the developmental lines of the entire genre.

The Origins

Does progressive have a birth date? Yes and no. We'll see why. First of all, before setting temporal coordinates, we need to establish spatial ones. Progressive is a mainly European phenomenon, and an English one in particular. Progressive bands have existed at every latitude, from Eastern Europe to Armenia, from South America to Bahrain, from Japan (where the genre had, and still has, a certain following) to Australia, but in its fullest expression and in its origins, progressive is an English phenomenon. In the United States, the other great focal centre of rock music, progressive had limited expression and diffusion. It's not hard to understand why: a music that is programmatically anti-spontaneous, pretentious, and in every sense far removed from the "black" roots of rock, one that attempts to tie itself — sometimes rather artificially — to the classical tradition, is about as far as you can get from the aesthetic and emotional forms of American rock.

But is there a first progressive record? In this writer's opinion, there are unexpressed, embryonic seeds of progressive within certain expressions tied to pop, psychedelia or rock-blues; some examples? The Beatles of "Sgt. Pepper's" (1967) or even "Abbey Road" (though we're already in 1969), the baroque rock-blues of Colosseum ("Those Who Are About To Die" but above all the masterpiece "Valentyne Suite" from 1969, as well as the splendid John Mayall album "Bare Wires" from 1968, which incidentally features almost the whole of Colosseum), the sharp (American) psychedelia of Love's "Forever Changes", the Pretty Things' "S.F. Sorrow"; and back in England, it's hard not to spot progressive seeds in the atypical rock of Family's debut "Music In A Doll's House" (1968) and the following "Family Entertainment". Naturally, in the late-60s scene, the debut works of Caravan, Soft Machine, and the earliest Pink Floyd should also be flagged as proto-prog, though all these groups deserve separate treatment. In most cases it's certainly not progressive yet, but you can sense an ambition and a musical tension expressing itself through clear superstructural attempts; there's a complete absence of any crystallised style in the compositional and performative act, yet a primitive potential and intent is already present. It isn't progressive, but you can grasp its preconditions.

More properly tied to the genre in its initial gestation — and critics tend to agree on this — are the offerings of three bands: the Nice, the Moody Blues and Procol Harum.

The Nice are the band in which Keith Emerson served, later of Emerson Lake and Palmer, for better or worse the keyboardist-symbol of an era, and they debuted in 1967 with "The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack", a naive blend of embryonic symphonic-rock ideas and psychedelia, before following up in 1969 with the two most significant records of their discography, "Ars Longa Vita Brevis" and "The Nice", in which Emerson's talent begins to fully emerge and overflow, contaminating rock with extroverted classical ideas, revisiting some classics (Rachmaninov, Sibelius) in ways both naive and fascinating.

Symphonism is also attempted by the Moody Blues, who in 1967, with their debut "Days Of Future Passed", employed a full symphony orchestra alongside an overabundance of keyboards (they were among the first bands to use the mellotron) to over-arrange their songs. This formula would be repeated on later records too, though it's actually a somewhat artificial operation, given that the songs remained firmly tied to pop and to the lesson of the Beatles.

More convincing is the offering of Procol Harum, a band famous for a handful of generational hits ("A Whiter Shade Of Pale" above all, but also "Homburg" and "A Salty Dog"), yet in reality often unknown beyond those songs even to progressive fans, who struggle to recognise in their output an important forerunner of the genre in its fully realised form. And yet their 1968 debut is thoroughly enjoyable, combining a pop melodic framework — never banal — with rich, at times redundant arrangements dominated by leader Gary Brooker's organ. "Shine On Brightly", the following year, does even better, with more complex songs and even a suite ("In Held 'Twas In I"), which structurally brings the band even closer to a fully realised progressive sound.

So is there a first progressive record after all? Is there a beginning? Partly no, given the antecedents we've just seen; partly yes, there is a starting date: 10 October 1969, the release date of the debut work by King Crimson, the celebrated "In The Court Of The Crimson King", a record among the masterpieces of progressive and of rock as a whole. A detailed description is superfluous; suffice it to say that the record's extreme pretentiousness, the grand, bombastic, epic sound — dominated and stretched out by an overuse of the mellotron — the metaphorical lyrics, and the extraordinary melodic impact, built up and decompressed through redundant, dramatic arrangements, make this album the paradigm for much of the progressive that followed.

The Golden Age (1969-1976)

After "In The Court Of The Crimson King" progressive exploded, and until the mid-1970s it was rock's leading and fastest-growing genre. There were many bands, and a huge number of approaches with very different nuances, making it hard to draw a single, unambiguous boundary around the genre; but essentially, artistically, commercially and historically, progressive rests on the work of a few great trailblazing bands who form its focal point.

First and foremost, of course, King Crimson, who within progressive are the most refined and ambitious band, as well as the most elusive and chameleonic. Their undisputed leader, especially after the debut "In The Court Of The Crimson King", is guitarist Robert Fripp: refined, often verbose, ironic, detached, intellectual language — the very antithesis of the rock-musician iconography in vogue up to that point. He doesn't drink or take drugs, or at least such things stay private; his actions, words and music have nothing spontaneous or visceral about them, and on stage he often plays seated, cold and distant. In this sense he is the paradigm of the progressive musician, the embodiment of a programme and an idea.

After the debut, the following year saw the release of "In The Wake Of Poseidon", a transitional though fascinating album that echoes the first masterpiece; Fripp then breaks down and reassembles the increasingly unstable band, and from that instability come two gems, "Lizard" (1970) and "Island" (1971). Records of an almost surreal refinement, just a touch mannered, they boast a wonderfully accomplished, highly cultured songwriting full of classical and jazz references (the great jazz pianist Keith Tippett even plays on them), with a most delicate abstraction. Fripp's ambition here operates at the highest level, a real challenge: the term art-rock reaches its fullest meaning in this phase of the band's career.

With "Island" the band's first phase ends and it splits up, but Fripp still has plans and reforms the band with an extraordinarily powerful rhythm section made up of Bill Bruford (ex-Yes), John Wetton (ex-Family) and, though only in the early days, percussionist Jamie Muir, with violinist David Cross replacing Mel Collins's sax as second lead voice. Over 1973-'74 the band releases three albums, "Lark's Tongues In Aspic", "Starless And Bible Black" and, with the band already disbanded, "Red". These are powerful records, worlds away from the earlier symphonism and cross-pollinations, at times harsh, still remarkably modern today (and much imitated) in their nervous unfolding and in the dry, cutting guitar work of a razor-sharp Fripp. The live documents of this line-up, mostly released posthumously, are unmissable, far superior in their higher degree of chaos and improvisation compared to the studio output. Years of silence follow. The band reappears after seven years, in 1981, with yet another line-up, and the result is the splendid "Discipline", with a thoroughly modern sound built around the dialogue between the guitars of Fripp and Belew.

The band would go on to this day, held in the highest critical esteem, never letting its sound calcify but always keeping a dynamic outlook, and even inspiring contemporary bands such as Tool, Muse and Don Caballero.

The true symbol of progressive itself, however, is not Crimson but Genesis, the most famous band and the one most immediately identifiable with the genre in its most romantic, fairy-tale-like guise. The band's hallmarks are a rock-solid compositional structure, strongly articulated songs, keyboard flights of fancy (Tony Banks), guitar parts — both arpeggiated and soloing — of an almost painterly evocative power (Steve Hackett), and a voice that isn't especially powerful but is deeply theatrical and evocative (how could it be anyone but Peter Gabriel?). After a debut as naive as it was promising ("From Genesis To Revelation", 1969) and a subsequent record that was much more mature, very beautiful but still somewhat unfocused ("Trespass", 1970), the band strings together a series of masterpieces from 1971 to 1974 ("Nursery Cryme", "Foxtrot", "Selling England By The Pound" and "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway"). The last of these in particular, a concept album in the truest sense of the term, can be considered — for the quality of the music and the cohesiveness of the whole — one of the peaks, if not the peak, of progressive as a whole. Unlike its predecessors, "The Lamb" is also underpinned by a subterranean tension, a subtle roughness, an urban epic quality; hidden in its grooves is an idea of progressive already partly different from the band's beginnings, and partly connected to what would later become Gabriel's solo work. After "The Lamb", indeed, Gabriel leaves, surprisingly replaced by drummer Phil Collins, but it is still Tony Banks who musically steers the band, and there follow records of excellent quality ("A Trick Of The Tail" but above all "Wind And Wuthering" and "And Then There Were Three"); then Collins begins to carve out more compositional space for himself, and the Genesis of the '80s swing decisively towards pop — at times of real quality and enormous success, but far removed from their progressive beginnings, which surface ever more rarely and residually in their records. Then Collins leaves too, and fans hope for a return to old fires, blaming the successful solo drummer for the commercial drift, but "Calling All Stations" (1997), with the near-unknown Ray Wilson on vocals, adds nothing to the band's body of work and instead marks its artistic and commercial end.

Another “totem” of progressive rock, and in hindsight the band most torn apart by critics, Emerson Lake And Palmer rose from the ashes of the Nice and were built around keyboardist Keith Emerson as their linchpin. The band's progressive rock centred on the leader's keyboard work: dazzling, narcissistic to the point of parody, pompous and triumphalist, paradigmatically kitsch in its ostentatious nods to classical models. Critics would have an easy time pointing to the band as the ultimate embodiment of everything considered degenerate about progressive rock itself.

In truth, Elp were excellent musicians, and Emerson in particular was anything but lacking in sophistication when it came to blending rock, classical and jazz. The first two albums alone, the self-titled debut and "Tarkus" (1970 and 1971) — which pack in enough music to fill entire careers for many contemporary bands — are enough to place the group among the finest of the era. What follows is a questionable pastiche of Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition" — that one, yes, deserves the criticism — an inconclusive album ("Trilogy"), and a swan song in the redundant but gorgeous "Brain Salad Surgery" (1973), the band's last great record.

Yes would meet a similar critical fate. They arrived somewhat late to progressive rock, after two albums of para-progressive pop (the self-titled debut and "Time And A Word"), with "Yes Album", before going on to two genre classics, "Fragile" (1971) and "Close To The Edge" (1972). If Genesis are the imaginative soul of progressive rock and King Crimson its cultural and experimental soul — allowing for the crudeness of such simplifications — then Yes, even more than Elp and Gentle Giant (whom we'll discuss later), are its technical soul: at their best, their music is instrumental storytelling, a dialectic between soloists heroically bound to their instruments, a whirlwind of different voices. Returning to the start of this profile, if Genesis's music is romantic rock and King Crimson's is art rock, then Yes's is baroque rock. Perhaps a somewhat cold band, it's true, but it's hard not to be captivated by the relentless work of Steve Howe's guitar, the creative rhythm section of Chris Squire on bass and Bill Bruford (later, as we know, in Crimson) on drums, the keyboard rhetoric of Rick Wakeman (Emerson's only recognised rival), and Jon Anderson's falsetto voice.

In 1973, with Bruford out and Alan White in, came the ambitious double album (four tracks, one per side) "Tales From Topographic Oceans" (recently named by an Italian magazine as one of the 100 rock albums to avoid), a record that was controversial even at the time, but which, for at least three of its four sides, contains some of the best music the band ever wrote. Then, in 1974, Wakeman also left (he would return later, then leave again, then come back, and so on) replaced by Swiss musician Patrick Moraz (the resulting album being "Relayer"), followed in 1976 by Yes's last great album, "Going For The One". After that came constant line-up changes, records ranging from modest to decent to baffling, and a brief flash of mainstream success (remember "Owner Of A Lonely Heart"?) that carries through to the present day.

Among the giants of progressive rock, two bands stand out — utterly different from one another but both hugely famous — who are progressive, or rather became progressive, perhaps more out of cultural empathy than genuine conviction, more through parallel evolution than conscious choice: Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd.

Jethro Tull started out as an eclectic folk-blues-rock outfit (worth remembering is 1969's "Stand Up"); with 1971's "Aqualung" their progressive leanings became more pronounced, but it's only with the following two albums ("Thick As A Brick" in 1972 and "A Passion Play" the year after) that Jethro Tull unmistakably plunge into the progressive-rock melting pot, right at its peak. And they do so in the best possible way: "Thick As A Brick" is a timeless classic, a single track spread across two sides with keyboards more prominent than ever, riffs and melodic eclecticism run wild, and certain excesses kept safely at bay. Even better is "A Passion Play", which this writer (and not only this writer) considers a masterpiece, far darker, more serious and more intricate than its predecessor; many regard it as Jethro Tull's finest album (though it too, incidentally, made that list of 100 albums to avoid mentioned above). After 1973, the band partly stepped away from progressive rock, at least in its most orthodox form, still producing a handful of notable albums (chief among them 1975's "Minstrel In The Gallery") and plenty of decent ones right up to today, building a body of work that has few equals in rock music, in terms of both quality and quantity. Among the old "dinosaurs" of progressive rock, Jethro Tull are, without doubt, the band that has aged best, with the most consistency and dignity — a title that should really belong to King Crimson, if only King Crimson had actually aged...

Another curious journey is that of Pink Floyd, who in their early days — both in the Barrett era and afterward — championed a psychedelia that was dazed yet highly self-aware and rational, worlds away from the visceral psychedelia of California, still tethered to blues and folk, full of erudite references, disorienting and off-kilter, lysergic yet lucid and intellectual. Pink Floyd's psychedelic phase closes with two masterpieces, the double album "Ummagumma" and the underrated soundtrack to the film "More". Then, with the grandiose suite "Atom Heart Mother", the band firmly established itself within the progressive-rock stream; from there came "Meddle" and the global successes of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" (1973), "Wish You Were Here" (1975), "Animals" (1977) and "The Wall" (1979). A band of enormous personality and charisma, free of narcissism and showing-off, they interpreted progressive rock in a way that was, on closer inspection, far simpler than many of the other bands mentioned here, yet paired it with an immense evocative power, standing as a paradigm of progressive rock as both avant-garde music and popular culture, as the sublimation of art within mainstream music. Almost all of Pink Floyd's music is pervaded, to borrow a line from one of their own lyrics, by "a quiet desperation", by a cosmic pessimism that is silent and ultimately cathartic in its sublime absence of rage and tension.

These are the best-known and most commercially successful bands, but the greatness of progressive rock is measured just as much, if not more, by the work of less visible, less immediately accessible groups.

Among all of these, standing out in importance are Van Der Graaf Generator, led by Peter Hammill — a band held in the highest regard by critics even after the punk and new-wave storm, who during the golden age of progressive rock produced some gems of musical existentialism, taut and vibrant, chief among them "H To He, Who Am The Only One" (1971) and "Pawn Hearts" (1972), before reinventing themselves in the second half of the '70s along paths leading from progressive rock toward new wave — a scene in which several bands, Bauhaus among them, owe a considerable debt to Van Der Graaf Generator of that period. Hammill and co.'s progressive rock is, in fact, among the most dramatic and intense of its era, far removed from the bombast and self-indulgence the genre would later be accused of; lyrical and deep, it stands in hindsight as one of the movement's most modern expressions.

Another act of tremendous interest is Gentle Giant, a highly technical band made up of great musicians but, above all, extraordinary arrangers, purveyors of a progressive rock sometimes blended with folk, marked by an icy coolness and an almost algebraic precision in its trademark, intricate instrumental and vocal interlockings. A game of Chinese boxes of immense charm and intelligence. Of all the Gentle Giant records, their early works can be recommended unreservedly across the board, particularly the second ("Acquiring The Taste", 1971) and the fourth ("Octopus", 1973).

Certainly not a band of overwhelming commercial success, but one with a solid and devoted following nonetheless, Camel — led by Andrew Latimer and Peter Bardens — came to progressive rock relatively late (their self-titled debut dates from 1972, followed by the notable "Mirage", "The Snow Goose" and "Moonmadness") and interpreted it in a simple, relatively straightforward way, building their sound around the dialogue between Latimer's guitar and Bardens's Hammond organ, and producing music that was often relaxed, delicate, florid, elaborately structured yet free of rhetoric or self-celebration — so much so that many critics have, with good reason, linked the band's music to the so-called "Canterbury Scene", which we'll discuss later. Incidentally, after a run of underwhelming albums in the '80s, Camel have, over the last ten years, produced some of the best records of their career, chief among them 1991's "Dust And Dream".

But is progressive rock an all-male affair? Almost — though perhaps the finest voice in all of prog belongs to Annie Haslam, singer of Renaissance, unquestionably the most symphonic band in the entire genre, and literally so, since they often accompany their songs with a full symphony orchestra, as on their finest work, "Sheherazade And Other Stories" (1975).

Far from being a kitsch band, as one might assume, Renaissance boast, at their best, delightful songwriting, richly melodic and romantic, with a well-judged use of the orchestra to underline their harmonic lines.

Renaissance, while by no means lacking in sophistication, represent the most directly and popularly romantic soul of progressive rock, its most explicit and outward-facing side — symphonic rock in the most literal sense.

I'd like to continue this survey of the leading progressive rock bands with a group that is usually not considered part of the genre, not even by devoted fans, and one that risks being unjustly forgotten (and often is): Traffic.

Of course, with them we're talking psychedelia, rock, folk, but it's no heresy to point to "John Barleycorn Must Die" as a great example of folk-prog, and even in the albums that followed (worth noting "The Low Sparks Of High Heeled Boys" and the splendid live album "On The Road") the warm voice and Hammond organ of Steve Winwood operate in territory that isn't exactly far from progressive.

Obviously it's impossible to talk about progressive without mentioning an unshakeable critical myth, a jumble of bands made up of a small pool of musicians who crossed paths in various combinations, born in the Canterbury area: the "Canterbury Scene", precisely.

First of all, is there something, beyond geographical origin, that unites all these bands — some of them genuinely important — which apparently have quite different approaches to progressive music and to music in general? More than twenty years ago, in the pages of Rockstar, critic Giampiero Vigorito, reviewing a Caravan album (for the record, "Back To Front"), compared the band's music to the scent of camellias. There you have a certain structural finesse and lightness, a faint aftertaste more of cannabis than of anything lysergic, a determination to steer clear of any tackiness, heaviness or vulgarity, an anti-rhetorical, unheroic, feminine, floral undercurrent, engaged yet relaxed and a bit over the top: this could be the lowest common denominator of a scene that encompasses very different bands, from the elegant, graceful progressive rock of Caravan to the jazz-rock of Soft Machine.

Caravan are the most accessible and pop-leaning soul of the Canterbury scene, and essentially the band most closely tied to progressive in its most common sense. They debuted with their self-titled album in 1968, and while it may not quite be a masterpiece, it comes close: with tracks dominated by David Sinclair's soaring Hammond organ, the band sways between romanticism and underground sensibility, with melodically solid songs and passages of real breadth. They did even better in 1970 with "If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do All Over You" and the following year with "In The Land Of Grey And Pink", two already-mature albums with a defined style and personality, featuring suites ("For Richard", "Nine Feet Underground") streaked with an oblique elegy and lyricism, aided by the flute of Jimmy Hastings, brother of guitarist Pye, and the voice of Richard Sinclair, already one of the finest in the scene. Then came various lineup changes, a few still very good albums ("Waterloo Lily" and "For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night"), followed by a slow, if dignified, drift toward overproduced pop, with the occasional unexpected high point ("Back To Front" in 1982).

The other pivotal band is Soft Machine, whose first two albums ("Vol 1" and "Vol 2", from 1968 and 1969) belong to progressive more by temporal and creative association than by real intent, being two small and highly original gems of deformed psychedelia — mildly acidic but also cold and intellectualized, Mitteleuropean, dreamy and futurist. With the following double third volume, one track per side, past and future are fused together: the celebrated "Moon In June" by Robert Wyatt represents the past, while the future arrives via a decisive turn toward excellent Davis-derived jazz-rock (Miles Davis had just begun his electric period with "Bitches Brew", and it's no surprise that such an upheaval found immediate followers in Europe rather than in the States). This trend would stabilize in Soft Machine's subsequent albums, many of them excellent, in which jazz-rock is expressed admirably as an unresolved tension between order and chaos, structure and improvisation. This shift, however, didn't convince Robert Wyatt, who left to form Matching Mole (two albums to their name, both from 1972, the self-titled one — the better of the two — and "Little Red Record"), a fine band in which, however, the jazz the composer had tried to show out the door ended up creeping back in through the window, alternating with tracks dominated by the leader/drummer's alien vocal style. Then, for him, an accident, the wheelchair, and a masterpiece like "Rock Bottom".

Linked to Caravan and partly derived from them are Hatfield And The North, essentially the authors of two albums ("Hatfield And The North" from 1973 and "Rotters' Club" from 1975) which, in this writer's view, are two masterpieces of the Canterbury sound and of rock tout court. Hatfield are a perfect synthesis of the two souls of Canterbury: the melodic, lyrical, slightly playful side of Caravan and the side more steeped in undramatic existentialism and strongly tied to jazz found in Soft Machine and Matching Mole. Their music is a dazzling example of creativity and balance, complex and emotional, of an almost unreal elegance.

From the ashes of Hatfield rose National Health (worth noting their 1978 self-titled album), decidedly oriented toward more jazz-inflected territory.

Among other Canterbury acts worth mentioning are several minor bands that nonetheless produced music that was at times excellent. How can one not mention Egg, oscillating between classicism and experimentalism, Gilgamesh, Soft Heap (later Soft Head — if that name rings a bell, you're on the right track), and Khan.

Finally, a few bands that could be called para-Canterbury, meaning musically linked to the scene in some way but geographically outside it: Camel, Gong, Henry Cow. We've already discussed the first, somewhat close to Caravan and the only truly progressive band among the three. Gong, in my view far more celebrated than their actual merits warrant, formed around the hippie figure of Daevid Allen and offered a psychedelia that was at times hypnotic, often childish, where beneath the surface eccentricity and a somewhat over-the-top, adolescent-stoner tone, one can detect creative gaps papered over with cunning. Worth mentioning, for the record, is their famous trilogy ("Flying Teapot", "Angel's Egg" and "You", the latter decidedly the best of the three). As with Soft Machine, Gong too continued their career with decent jazz-rock after Allen's welcome departure.

A different story applies to Henry Cow, a decidedly avant-garde and at times forbidding band, as well as a seminal one, in their daring experiments with avant-jazz structures. But here we are truly at the borders — and I'd say beyond — of progressive.

These are the main players, the best known, the ones to whom the success and the very definition of the term progressive are tied. Behind these few big names lies a myriad of bands, some of them, let's be honest, forgettable, at times imitators of imitators, almost always clear commercial failures, almost always authors of just one or a handful of albums. But there are hidden gems too. Let's say it upfront, though: in the extensive digging that has been done into this undergrowth, especially in recent years, works have emerged that deserve a better fate, but no true masterpiece. In short, there's no hidden "In The Court Of The Crimson King" or "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" waiting to be discovered.

Some bands, however, truly deserve a mention: staying in England, we should note Gracious, Cressida, Web, Catapilla, Cirkus, Fruup, Samurai, Greenslade, Spring, Quatermass, Ton Ton Macoute, Gnidrolog, and Druid.

Within so-called minor prog, one can also identify sub-currents, such as the folk-prog of Trees, Spyro Gyra, Comus and Tudor Lodge; the hard-prog (organ, complex tracks and hard-leaning guitars) of Steel Mill, T2 and Clear Blue Sky; the prog with dark undertones of Dr Z and Still Life; and the jazz-rock — not only of Canterbury lineage — of Ben, Nucleus and other continental bands such as the French Zao and the Italian Perigeo. In short, hundreds of bands, currents, sub-currents and offshoots make up the nebula of progressive music in the first half of the Seventies, an unwieldy mass with all-too-blurred edges, given that the progressive cauldron ends up containing Renaissance alongside works of frank avant-garde jazz such as Septober Energy by Keith Tippett's Centipede, not to mention the already-mentioned Henry Cow.

So far we've limited ourselves to the English scene, but progressive produced an enormous quantity of albums in every corner of the globe, often with slavish imitations and glaring naiveties, but also with remarkable works of great depth and originality.

We'll limit our brief overview to three countries where the output was, at least in terms of quality, better and more significant, in my view: Germany, France and — why not — Italy.

In Germany, the music scene of the period is exceptionally fertile, but not thanks to a progressive wave. Instead, two currents of great impact and originality develop during this time: that particular form of sharp, disillusioned psychedelia known as kraut-rock (Can, Amon Duul, Faust, Neu!) and the seminal cosmic and electronic music of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. These are two hugely important moments, true cornerstones: just think how much bands like Sonic Youth and a certain strain of noise-rock owe to kraut-rock, and the influence of Tangerine Dream and Schulze on new age, ambient and all subsequent electronic music, from chill-out to the most radical avant-garde.

But alongside these trends, a prog scene of real substance also develops, one with exactly the traits you'd expect from German bands: a certain underlying seriousness, an atmosphere at times faintly decadent and literary, an emotionality held back and compressed.

Among the many examples, certainly worth mentioning are Eloy, very Pink Floyd-esque, along with Wallenstein, Novalis, Anyone Daugther and the more experimental Agitation Free.

More original is the French scene, which revolves around two great names: Ange and Magma. The former, perhaps somewhat overrated by specialist critics, are a kind of French Pfm, with a bit less technique and a lot more theatricality, typically French, thrown in. Ange spawned many followers (Analyse Grande Espoir), often better than the original, such as Atoll, Pentacle, Carpe Diem, Aracniod...

Far more important, arguably one of the most significant bands in all of prog, are instead Magma, revolving around the figure of Christian Vander and champions of a unique, wholly original music built on rhythmic and melodic cells that at times repeat obsessively, punctuated by sudden epic, choral openings and passages of the most refined, erudite psychedelia. A band that fuses Carmina Burana with jazz and classical music, blending it all with rock of explosive power, Magma remain one of the most significant phenomena of the era, so much so that they created an entire genre: zeuhl, and they would deserve far more extensive treatment. Here it will suffice to mention essentials such as "Kontharkosz" from 1974, "Mekanik Destruktiv Kommando" from the year before, and "Magma Live" from 1975.

Last but not least, the Italian scene, built around three main bands, hugely famous at home: Pfm, Banco and Le Orme. Pfm is decidedly the band most tied to Anglo-Saxon prog (almost too much so: just compare the guitar parts of "La Carrozza Di Hans" and King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man") and consequently the most successful at home and abroad (their brief success in the United States has become the stuff of legend); their first three albums are nonetheless of great value ("Storia Di Un Minuto", "Per Un Amico", "L'Isola di Niente"). Different is the approach of Banco, a less spectacular but more elaborate and in some ways more erudite band. Among their work, worth noting are "Darwin", "Io Sono Nato Libero" and a fine piece of contemporary rock chamber music such as "Di Terra".

Less considered, Le Orme start out at the end of the '60s as a beat-pop band, before their progressive turn with "Collage". The pop matrix always remains in the background nonetheless; still, "Uomo Di Pezza", "Felona E Sorona" and the ambitious "Contrappunti" are all remarkable.

Behind these three bands lies a crowd of often derivative and clumsy releases, with the occasional small gem amid so much mediocrity: among them, worth flagging at least "Forse Le Lucciole Non Si Amano Più" by Locanda Delle Fate.

But the Italian scene is in fact much richer and more original. One cannot fail to mention the jazz- and experimentation-tinged progressive of Area, fronted by singer Demetrio Stratos, the quasi-Canterbury prog of Picchio Dal Pozzo, the jazz-rock of Perigeo, the avant-garde of Opus Avantra and Pierrot Lunaire, the distorted, dark and "drugged" progressive of Balletto Di Bronzo, the vocal experiments of early Alan Sorrenti (following in the footsteps of earlier ones by Tim Buckley) and the borderline aleatory-avant-garde noise experiments of early Franco Battiato, only marginally linked to the genre ("Sulle Corde Di Aries", 1973), the catacomb-like prog, naive but unique in its own way, of Jacula, and a work unique within the Italian scene like the synthesis of psychedelia, noise and experimentation found on the sole, self-titled album by Stelle Di Mario Schifano, certainly not a prog record but a forerunner of a certain stylistic approach.

Crisis and the Wasteland (1977-1983)

Progressive remains the dominant genre of rock through the mid-1970s, so much so that it can be considered the very matrix of an entire decade's musical expression, that particular aura you sense when listening to a record "from the Seventies".

In the second half of the '70s, the genre starts to show a little wear: good albums still come out, but signs of stagnation begin to creep in.

King Crimson disband (they'll resurface in 1981); Genesis, now without Peter Gabriel, release two classics in 1976-1977, "A Trick Of The Tail" and "Wind And Wuthering", but by '78 comes "...And Then There Were Three", an excellent and still fully progressive record, yet already infected by the pop-drift virus ("Follow You Follow Me" and "Many Too Many" as singles) that would become fully evident in the following decade; Yes put out the excellent "Going For The One" in '76, but leave everyone puzzled in '78 with "Tormato"; Elp churn out mammoth tours and albums that don't live up to their name; Vdgg pull the plug on themselves in '78, leaving behind a record with a clearly new-wave imprint, the double live album "Vital"; Jethro Tull carry on at a rate of about one album a year, certainly nothing shameful but with no great peaks either; many other bands are struggling or breaking up, and overall the output is a notch below what it was just three or four years earlier. Against this backdrop, the punk phenomenon explodes, alongside new wave, two moments of clear discontinuity with the recent past: punk almost a nihilistic catharsis that will last "l'espace d'un matin", new wave almost a conscious retreat in the face of a shattered illusion. Among the two emerging genres of the late '70s comes the success of disco music, the flip side of the punk coin: the same total disengagement, the same channeling of raw impulse, the same underlying intent, the same ties to marketing. What changes is the human target being manipulated and the skill of the musicians involved (an enormous gap in disco music's favor).

For rock, it's a regression into the reassuring womb of 1950s dance halls and a postcard-perfect rebellion, harmless, cardboard-thin, naive. Punk's famous return to two chords is not a revolution, it's not a return to rock's primal meaning, it's not a return to a more vivid and sincere musical expressiveness — quite the opposite, in fact: it's the reassuring return to an already-digested, already-metabolized form, it's the return to musical value measured by the effect it has on listeners, it's a regression into the manipulation of young minds, it's the anesthesia of thought, it's a return to music as sociality, an insatiable Leviathan devouring every art form. Punk, in this writer's view, is the restoration.

Beyond a drop in quality and the success of other genres, another factor as inevitable as it is banal and predictable lies at the root of prog's crisis, more than any other: the unavoidable turning of fashion's wheel, that obscure yet utterly visible mechanism that brings every human expression to birth, apogee and decline.

Now, in the second half of the '70s, progressive is in decline. Almost dead. The genre dissolves, most of the bands straddling the two decades have either split up or changed style, new bands can only be found in basements, there's practically nothing left, a total wasteland — the press only mentions progressive to retrospectively attack the genre. Great music still comes out, make no mistake, but it's no longer progressive. It would seem to end there. Instead, no.

An Underground Rebirth

In 1983 a record appears in the shops. It's called “Script For A Jester Tears”. The band is called Marillion. And it's a shamelessly progressive record — shamelessly Genesis-esque, I'd say. Everything about it is progressive: the music, the lyrics, the logo, the name, the singer's voice that's blatantly Gabriel-like. But that in itself wouldn't be news. The news is that the record, certainly very pleasant but not exceptional, achieves real sales success across Europe. Marillion will carry on with mixed fortunes to this day; their third album (a suite spread across two sides and a concept record), “Misplaced Childhood”, will be their biggest hit, but by then the spark has already caught: other bands start appearing in their wake, almost all rooted in the Yes/Genesis tradition — IQ, Pendragon and Twelfth Night chief among them; something reappears in the press, fans start finding a few points of reference in the odd fanzine, over the years output keeps growing, and small specialist labels and shops even spring up. Progressive becomes a niche genre, underground, barely visible but far from scarce.

But what does the music actually sound like? Well, new-prog (as it will come to be called) spends the whole of the '80s taking the Yes and Genesis mainstream as its reference point, though with one major shift in instrumentation thanks to the rise of electronic keyboards, which give the songs a more modern mood; there's also a certain simplification of the material at play — often catchy and hook-laden, but with real expressive impact and reasonably solid structure. There's no shortage of amateurish naivety, and often a sense of precariousness — no masterpieces emerge, granted — but amid the mediocre output you can also spot good records and the odd talent. Then, in the early '90s, output starts becoming enormous: plenty of throwaway material still comes out, but the material begins to differentiate itself, rising in quality and professionalism — and above all, something perhaps unforeseeable happens: the English scene is no longer the leading one; in fact English new-prog seems to lack real drive, stagnant and a bit dull. Truly excellent things instead come from Scandinavia, and Sweden in particular (Anekdoten, Anglagard, Landberk, Isildurs Bane chief among them), from the USA (Echolyn), from Italy (Finisterre, Deus Ex Machina), even from Hungary (After Crying). The reference points are no longer limited to Genesis (what will be labelled symphonic prog): people now start citing King Crimson and Gentle Giant too. This is by no means to suggest slavish imitation across the board (though that's certainly not lacking either) — there are reference points, sure, but also originality, inventiveness, intelligence.

Between the late '80s and early '90s, progressive turns out to be a genre of little commercial relevance — aside from the Marillion interlude (though not zero relevance: even the most popular records still shift pressings numbering in the tens of thousands) — with a following that may be low-profile but is consolidated and generally knowledgeable. Above all, there's a huge quantity of output, however poorly distributed, a sign of real vitality. Progressive would therefore seem destined to survive only in the passion of old nostalgics and a handful of new converts — a residual genre, niche however broad that niche might be, with little to no influence. But maybe not.

The New Millennium

From the mid-'90s onward, the term progressive increasingly starts popping up in the mainstream and general music press, and among rock fans in general; the genre emerges a little from the realm of nostalgic forgetting and enjoys a brief phase of greater exposure. Let's look at some of the reasons why.

– A subgenre of progressive takes hold and enjoys considerable success: progressive metal, that is, the union of progressive-style song structuring with the sounds, heaviness, epic scope and instrumentation typical of metal. In truth, this subgenre isn't born in the '90s at all — it has at least one important, if sometimes overlooked, precedent in the '70s: the Canadian band Rush, who through seminal, weighty works like “2112”, “A Farewell To Kings”, “Hemispheres”, “Permanent Waves” and “Moving Pictures” laid the groundwork for a contamination between hard rock and progressive sounds well before the success of Queensrÿche and, above all, Dream Theater, not to mention all their followers (Symphony X, Stratovarius, etc.). Progressive metal is popular, it's fiercely attacked by certain critics, but it undoubtedly enjoys growing success both among progressive fans and metal fans — who are far more numerous and follow a genre that gets kicked around but never goes away. Someday, someone in the critical establishment will have to take notice.

Prog-metal output is considerable; most of the records can't help but leave old-fashioned progsters a little perplexed, given a certain glib, coarse-grained epic quality, steeped in a somewhat banal, juvenile muscular technicality. What's certain, though, is that at least a few Dream Theater records (“Awake”) and Queensrÿche records (“Operation: Mindcrime”) shine with a light of their own, and that in a musical world full of gloom, it's perhaps healthy every now and then to listen to a John Petrucci solo — the last of the guitar heroes.

– Out of the pack of progressive bands, one English outfit emerges and gains a certain resonance (relatively speaking, of course), especially in Italy: Porcupine Tree. They're no better than plenty of others (if anything, the opposite), but they cleverly blend a sprawling, Floyd-derived progressive sound with catchy, hook-laden melodic frameworks that have solid commercial appeal.

– The term progressive gets attached to a range of avant-rock proposals, often linked to the American label Cuneiform.

These are bands (Muffins, Miriodor, Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic and others), often formed in the second half of the '70s, that blend rock with a certain avant-garde jazz or contemporary classical music with extreme ease. These are marginal musical concerns, but ones viewed and judged — rightly — with the utmost respect by the press, and therefore relevant in their own way. This melting pot of high-brow rock certainly includes bands like Univers Zero and Art Zoyd, forefathers of what's commonly termed “Rock In Opposition” (RIO). Whether such proposals can rightly be counted fully within the progressive genre is debatable; on one hand, the richness and complexity of the work is hardly at odds with the progressive utopia; on the other, at times the starting point doesn't seem to be rock at all, but rather something traceable to other 20th-century musical forms.

– Last but not least: in recent years, people have increasingly spoken of (new) progressive in relation to a range of musical proposals — some tied to a new dramaturgical vein that has emerged in rock (Radiohead, Muse), some tied to a certain hyper-structural post-rock (Tortoise) or psychedelic-ambient sound (Sigur Ròs, Tarentel), some to the return of a certain experimental ambition (Cerberus Shoal), and some to new proposals in epic minimalism (Godspeed You Black Emperor!). These are works and bands that are, in some cases, genuinely valid and interesting, but which on average enjoy a level of critical esteem that's frankly excessive. They do, however, win great approval among progressive fans too, as we saw at the start of this brief study. Going case by case here would be excessive: the term progressive generally fits well enough as regards ambition and artistic/musical aspiration, and, though not always, as regards the lyrical-dramatic aspects and the elaboration of the material; the parallel seems less fitting, however, when it comes to the more properly formal aspects.

At the dawn of the new millennium, then, progressive appears split between revivalism and innovation, between formalism and evolution, and from a certain angle looks like anything but a minor genre. Unless, that is, one considers the cure (the formal dissolution of the genre) worse than the disease (ghettoization within a cage of musical parameters now tied to the past).

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18/02/2026