Beyond and Before, Updated and Expanded Edition

Progressive Rock Across Time and Genre

Paul Hegarty, Martin Halliwell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501370823
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The original edition of Beyond and Before extends an understanding of "progressive rock" by providing a fuller definition of what progressive rock is, was and can be. Called by Record Collector "the most accomplished critical overview yet" of progressive rock and one of their 2011 books of the year, Beyond and Before moves away from the limited consensus that prog rock is exclusively English in origin and that it was destroyed by the advent of punk in 1976. Instead, by tracing its multiple origins and complex transitions, it argues for the integration of jazz and folk into progressive rock and the extension of prog in Kate Bush, Radiohead, Porcupine Tree and many more. This 10-year anniversary revised edition continues to further unpack definitions of progressive rock and includes a brand new chapter focusing on post-conceptual trends in the 2010s through to the contemporary moment. The new edition discusses the complex creativity of progressive metal and folk in greater depth, as well as new fusions of genre that move across global cultures and that rework the extended form and mission of progressive rock, including in recent pop concept albums. All chapters are revised to keep the process of rethinking progressive rock alive and vibrant as a hybrid, open form.

Part I

Before and During

1

Extended Form

Progressive rock needs time: time to arrive, time to develop, time in which specific pieces of its music can work through musical content and form. This is no different from any form of music on one level; music is a sequence of time defined by organized sounds occurring within it. But progressive rock is acutely aware of this status, unlike rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, surf music and pop of the 1960s, with their more or less uniform sense of how long a piece of music should be and predictably structured sequences of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, break or bridge, chorus. The relation of progressive rock to the time and history of popular music is to be its avant-garde, to look to the future even as it looks to the past to mobilize traditional forms such as folk music. If progressive rock loses this impetus, it becomes a defined ‘style’, arguably the exact opposite of ‘progressive’. Even here, in this book, we would concede that progressive rock had just such a loss of self-awareness for much of the period between the mid- to late 1970s and the mid-1990s. But we will also go on to argue that, even so, the spirit of prog rock moved into other musical forms.

Chapter 2 discusses the specific moment of arrival of progressive rock between 1965 and 1970, but this gestation can be seen in the following features: the extension of rock songs into longer pieces; the linking of these pieces into song suites and concept albums; and the increased use of the studio as an integral part of the creative process of music-making, rather than being a mechanical and ancillary part of it. For critics and advocates alike, this combination of elements demonstrated not only the individual maturity of performers such as The Beatles in the mid-1960s but also the maturing of rock as a genre. By the end of the late 1960s, the idea that rock was capable of replicating earlier forms of Western classical music seemed not only feasible but desirable. David Weigel offers an interesting take on this idea by identifying moments where classical composers sought avant-garde and fusional stylistic changes.¹ Virtuosity and the value accorded to ‘classically trained’ musicians in the 1970s would seem to support this and lent credence to the attempts of mid-1970s journalists to retrieve an authenticity that had been lost in rock music. However, while musical authenticity was contested in the mid-1970s when punk aggressively pitted itself against all established forms of rock music, creativity was at the heart of progressive rock, particularly in the creative use of the studio, extended forms that enhanced the possibilities of ‘the album’, and aesthetic connections with earlier attempts to develop sustained album-length concepts.

The album goes back further than we might suspect – to 1909, in fact. But in its recognizable form, the term was not much used until the late 1940s. This is principally because the 78 rpm shellac discs that were the industry standard could hold about only three minutes of sound. So an album would have to be made of several discs, with a twenty-minute sonata needing at least three. Apart from some recordings of classical music, albums were mainly compilations of children’s songs and collections of highlights of either several artists or, less often, one artist. The gradual shift to vinyl records as the norm meant there was a clear distinction between 45 rpm, 7-inch singles, which contained a similar amount of music to 78s, and albums that played at 33 rpm and came in either 10- or 12-inch forms. In between was the ‘extended play’ 7-inch record, usually featuring four pieces. Rock music discovered in the mid-1960s that an album could be more than a collection of unconnected songs, or songs arranged according to quality (with the singles or better tracks on the A-side of an album), but jazz musicians were already there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably on albums by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Frank Sinatra and Max Roach.

The use of the studio increasingly became a key part in developing the album through multitracking, inserts, different takes, effects and recording strategies such as positioning of microphones or players. But of equal material significance was the vinyl form itself, which from 1948 (after a false start in the early 1930s) allowed up to forty minutes’ play, with twenty minutes per side. That records were somehow treated naturalistically prior to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), often taken to be the first concept album (see Chapter 2), is an interesting but fundamentally flawed myth. Similarly, the idea of ‘extended form’ was not restricted to classical music or to live performance. Extended form is not just about length but specifically the extension of form beyond the industry standard. For example, jazz composer Duke Ellington made a series of thematically linked albums from the late 1950s, but he had already dispensed with the conventional meeting of content and form on the 78 rpm record with his Reminiscing in Tempo (1935). This release extended over two 78 records and is thirteen minutes long; the title and its music perform a self-referential awareness of time and its constraints enacted through sound recording.² Like Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and other writers of musicals, Ellington thought that music has the power to convey social meaning through experimentation with both content and form. It could do so by inflecting lyrical and musical themes with popular or hybrid idioms, as he did in his visionary extended releases Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and New World A-Coming (1945).

In 1943, Ellington played his musical rendering of the African American historical experience, Black, Brown and Beige, to a not particularly receptive crowd. After a few nights’ performance at the Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, it was shelved for fifteen years, although selections were played as part of concerts. In 1958, Ellington revisited the piece, cutting and refocusing it, notably on variations of the theme song ‘Come Sunday’ that alternates with the theme of ‘The Work Song’ (Sunday being the only time that some imported African slaves received respite from their labour), and it concludes with a recital of Psalm 23. The whole is a piece in six numbered parts, three per side of the vinyl album.³ There is a clear divide between the two sides, with only side two featuring the voice of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. This movement suggests the coming to being through a Hegelian dialectic awareness of oppression. Hegel’s famous master–slave dialectic is rendered material via the institution of slavery, but the central part of Hegelian thought involves the internal struggle that is a coming to consciousness either of the individual, the group, or humanity as a whole, thereby combining the metaphysical with the material and historical.⁴

Side two of Black, Brown and Beige illustrates the transition from total oppression to active freedom (still only aspirational in 1958, even after the Brown v. the Board of Education ruling by the US Supreme Court four years earlier made segregation unconstitutional) without minimizing the suffering that black people still had to endure (hence the ‘and though I walk in the shadow of death’ line of Psalm 23). Parts one to three on side one are highly thematic and almost repetitive, whereas side two (parts four to six) offers more direct content, including Mahalia Jackson’s two sung sections. But the abstraction of side one plays a formal strategy beyond its harmoniousness, with Ellington shifting from a situation where African Americans exist only as abstraction towards an awareness of tangible being on side two. In a 1957 essay, ‘The Race for Space’, Ellington argued that the extended jazz form was not just an expression of creative freedom but the key to racial harmony. He asserted that ‘music is bigger’ than race, skin colour and language, and that the ensemble jazz band functions by combining sounds and harmonies out of ‘a polyglot of racial elements’. The extended form finds full expression in this 1957 essay and its universalist clarion call for ‘a new sound’ to pave the way for ‘harmony, brotherly love, common respect and consideration for the dignity and freedom of men’.⁵

In Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington produces a clear example of modernist narration, where form becomes expression and content beyond the notes themselves. In between the original performance of 1943 and its appearance on record in 1958, Ellington continued to work on lengthy pieces that paralleled the European symphonic tradition, and in A Drum Is a Woman (1957) he produced an album that replicated in its form the history of jazz.⁶ A Drum Is a Woman was conceived as a TV special including dance, performance and narration – a multimedia yet populist work. At one level, it tells the story of jazz, but it is how this is enacted that makes it part of conscious avant-gardism; its aim is not to relate but to be ‘a tone parallel to the history of jazz’.⁷ In fact, what makes this album worthy of reference here is not its contribution to avant-gardism as such, but how its structure prefigures that of progressive rock concept albums. It features two protagonists, Carribee Joe and Madam Zajj (the reversal of ‘jazz’ foreshadows Peter Gabriel’s ‘Rael’ on Genesis’ 1975 concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), and, as we move from Africa into the twentieth-century American South, the two figures reappear allegorically through the album, either being narrated or narrating themselves. The whole is structured into four parts with recurrent motifs, each then subdivided; the principal narrator’s parts eventually meld the work into a structured piece, the musical narration emerging only gradually over time.

It might seem less evident that Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (recorded 1960, released 1961) works as a pre-empting of progressive rock, but it is important insofar that it is a purposive attempt to rethink the form of the genre within the form of the piece itself. Ellington replicates the European classical tradition by other means, using clearly defined movements, reprises and thematic connectivity in lyrics and music, but he does so without parroting that tradition. Instead, he moves on from it, and thereby moves jazz on, just as progressive rock bands would do with rock music a few years later. Ellington’s effort to narrate through form in a way that is socially constructive is not only modernist; it was echoed in folk revivals of the early to mid-1960s and the utopianism of late 1960s rock. Both Ellington and Coleman consciously attempted to extend the vocabulary and performance of jazz, in line with music critic William Cameron’s argument in ‘Is Jazz a Folk Art?’ (1958) that jazz ‘thrives on invention and change’, driven not only by urban energies but also by folk melodies ‘constructed from bits and snatches of previous ones’, and by licks and riffs that ‘add sparkle and continuity to . . . personal ideas’.⁸ This can be seen in Coleman’s music, which extends jazz – and experimental music in general – through improvised synchronous invention. The interplay between improvisation and orchestration had characterized jazz from its early days at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Free Jazz was a programmatic statement, one that had greater import than jazz cornetist Don Cherry’s and saxophonist John Coltrane’s take on Coleman in The Avant-Garde (1960).

There were earlier experiments with free improvisation feeding into what was later identified as the ‘free jazz’ of Lennie Tristano or bebop, but Coleman’s Free Jazz was thirty-seven minutes of ensemble improvisation. Although solos are allocate d to wind instruments, the other members of the double quartet (one quartet recorded in each channel) are not supposed to tread water, making the solo a group effort and not just an individual run. Within this structure, the solo deviates from being a personal expression (in which one of the stars of the band has their moment) to being about expression itself: the content of free jazz is its production and the expression is at group level. Because it is not possible for one performer to be expressive while others supported, for Ellington the jazz ensemble modelled ‘a new sound’ and a utopian social formation rather than replicating race and class divisions. Crucial in its own right for rethinking developments in jazz, we can also see in this model the embryonic purpose and role for group composition and improvisation in prog.

Max Roach was working on a show to commemorate a hundred years of black emancipation in the United States (the Emancipation Declaration having come into force on 1 January 1863) and he turned that work into an album-length release with We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, recorded and released in 1960. Like Duke Ellington, and also like the conceptual prog albums of the 1970s, Roach’s album combines a lyrical thematic focus with purposeful formal structures to add up to a whole piece. Side one begins with ‘Driva Man’, with voice and tambourine slowly ceding to mournful band music, and Abbey Lincoln sings of the slave drivers’ brutality towards slaves, and their lives of enforced labour. ‘Freedom Day’ refers directly to emancipation but also to a sense of suspended disbelief and hope: in other words, the situation in 1960 did not suggest that emancipation was complete, and this uncertainty, amid hope, is presented as a premonition of the civil rights struggle just beginning. ‘Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace’ returns to the combination of Roach’s percussion and Lincoln’s voice, moving through the phases of plaintive song to cathartic and violent expression, before closing in slower, exhausted calmness: there will be peace, but it will come only after protest. Side two shows the growing sense of African inheritance in African American art, combining musical styles and players from the two continents with African cultural lyrical references (these are very broad but their presenc...