Prog Progress: Before Progressive Rock

And so it begins. Or rather, so it almost begins. As promised, I'm devoting this first post not to progressive rock itself but to the various musical antecedents that made the genre possible. If you like reading about music history or are interested in learning about the early evolution of prog—rejoice! This is the post for you! For all the rest of you, it won't hurt my feelings if you just skip out on this one and wait for the actual beginning of the reviews in the next post, though of course I'd love for every and all of you to stick around.

And here we go.

With any history that attempts to find the "roots" of something, you've got to deal with the fact that human beings have been around for a long, long time and that the universe has been around for an incomprehensibly longer time. If we're dealing with the roots of the United States of America, do we start with 1776? With the British colonizers of the Americas? With the earlier Spanish settlements? With the Native American societies that predate the Spanish? With the most recent Ice Age that made it possible for those Natives to cross the Bering Strait from Asia to North America? Do we go back to the Cradle of Life in Mesopotamia and Africa? Do we start with the Big Bang?? You get the picture. It's the same deal with prog rock. For example, obviously, no music with the word "rock" in its name would exist without the artists in the late '40s and '50s who first innovated rock music, so I guess I could cite people like Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins as important figures in the history of prog. But rock music comes out of the blues tradition, so maybe I should mention some blues artists, too? And so on.

What I'm saying is, you've got to choose a "ground zero" for a history, and here's mine: I'm going to assume that rock and roll music as it appears in the late '50s and early '60s is the most basic building block of progressive rock, and that all the other qualities of the genre were innovations grafted onto that original sound—to "progress" that sound, you might even say. This isn't strictly accurate (and it's even kind of backwards in some ways—see the discussion on jazz and classical), but hey, you've got to start somewhere. Go listen to some Elvis or Chuck Berry and imagine that that's the basic foundation we're dealing with here.

And now, in roughly chronological order, the rest.

An important note: I have very little formal musical training (hey there, piano lessons in middle school!), which means that I may butcher a lot of the musical terminology here, especially when it comes to classical and jazz. Sorry!

Classical Music
Essential Pieces:
Johann Sebastian Bach—Fugue in G Minor; Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—Symphony No. 40 in G Minor
Ludwig Van Beethoven—Symphony No. 9
(I know these are obvious choices, y'all but... my classical music knowledge doesn't run too deep)

Okay, here's where you get what I mean about how it could be a little backwards to consider everything I'm discussing here as an innovation to rock 'n' roll, since clearly, classical music predates rock music by centuries and, as such, couldn't accurately be considered an "innovation." So yeah. Still, the existence of classical music is hugely influential to the formation of progressive rock for several reasons, not the least of which is that many of the original wave of prog musicians in the late '60s came from classically trained backgrounds. The innovation here was actually taking this earlier form of music and putting it in a rock context. A lot of people say that progressive rock is merely rock music that attempts to mimic the structure of classical music, and while that's a limited definition that I won't be sticking to, there's no denying that prog takes several cues from the classical canon (heck, it's not all that uncommon for early prog to outright cover classical pieces—for example, here's Yes including Brahms on their album Fragile and Emerson, Lake & Palmer mashing up Bach and Janáček on their self-titled debut).

Classical music's influence is all over the place in prog, but if I had boil it down to a more manageable point, I would say that prog mostly takes its cues from the Classical and Romantic eras, with those periods' elaborate arrangements, dramatic dynamics and timbre, and use of musical motifs over extended compositions. Mozart and Beethoven seem like the most popular ambassadors from these periods, prog artists taking a lot from their booming, melody-tinged-with-dissonance sounds—especially some of the more heavy-hitting pieces from both composers' later periods; I'm thinking specifically of the first movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and a few of his quartets, which seem to set the tone for the weightier, more metal touches of prog. The other big influence is Bach, whose work is more Baroque than purely Classical but still plays a major role in prog rock's sonic identity. In fact, prog rock probably quotes Bach more than it does any other single composer. A lot of this has to do with how many organ compositions Bach has. If you don't know this already, it's probably best that you learn now: progressive rock loves some keyboard arrangements, and the virtuosic layering of notes in Bach pieces do a lot to set the template for the kind of keyboard work people like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson would use.

Jazz
Essential Pieces:
Duke Ellington—Black, Brown and Beige (unfortunately, YouTube only has the "Black" part of the suite)
John Coltrane—A Love Supreme; "Sun Ship"; Ascension
Sun Ra—How do you even pick? I dunno, The Magic City?

Jazz is a less-often acknowledged influence on progressive rock, perhaps because prog doesn't tend to quote it explicitly or have artists trained in the genre. But I'd argue that it's at least equally important as a precedent for progressive rock, if not more so, if only on the significance of two qualities: improvisation and the treatment of the album as a unified whole.

The improvisation is pretty self-explanatory. Instrumental off-the-cuffness is one of the main things that defines jazz music, and prog is full of it. The general jazz-band structure of cooperative play among all the members punctuated by improvised solos by individual members is a form that prog resorts to even more often than classical modes. Eventually, jazz musicians like John Coltrane (first in small doses in albums like Sun Ship and later much more strongly in full-lengths like the Ascension experiments) took the improv to a whole new level with free jazz, which cuts music from the constraints of meter and structure and turns the entire piece into a sort of free-for-all of, as I understand is the technical terminology, "making it up as you go along." It's this kind of improvisation—heavy on the dissonance, slippery on the time signatures—that you actually see most often in prog: see, for example, the end of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" or Yes's "Sound Chaser."

The treatment of the album as a unified whole is maybe self-explanatory, too, except that it requires a bit of dismantling of the prevailing music criticism narrative that the Beatles popularized the idea with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. While it may be true that the Beatles popularized this technique for rock albums (although that's debatable—the idea was percolating all over the mid-'60s, and none other than Frank Zappa has a rock concept album that predates Sgt. Pepper), jazz beat rock music to the concept by decades. As early as the first half of the '50s, people like Duke Ellington were experimenting with the idea of using the LP for complete artistic statements (often involving longer-than-three-to-five-minute songs—hey, sound familiar?) rather than merely a collection of songs. Coltrane later took this idea to its arguable pinnacle with A Love Supreme, which is about as compelling an album-length statement that you'll find, in jazz or elsewhere. And if you count Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige (and I do), a "jazz symphony" that dates back to 1943, you've also got a jazz artist doing LP-length work to incorporate classical music ideas into a 50-minute, conceptually ambitious artistic statement. In fact, this is the first time to my knowledge that the idea of classical music was adapted into a distinctly non-classical context (a very important concept for prog, which is more about the abstract idea of classical music than the particulars of instrumentation), though of course I'm probably wrong about that. ANYway, sorry this is dragging on and on. I'm really fascinated by this sort of thing, but I guess I've got to cut it short sometime. The main point is: prog rock most often uses the album as its most basic artistic statement, shaping LPs around concepts and musical themes (i.e. a "concept album"), and jazz is the form that seems to have first innovated this idea.

Oh, also, just for WTF's sake, I included Sun Ra up there under the essential tracks, if only because he's just so far into left field that he might as well be a prog patriarch. One of the more fun (and sometimes more frustrating—but c'mon, it's still fun) aspects of prog is its complete lack of inhibitions regarding sounds, length, and coherency. This often means that prog borders on avant-garde and "outside" music in its willingness to explore spacey, out-there whims. And what better example of pre-prog exploration of spacey, out-there whims than Sun Ra? That dude is maybe the most out-there dude who's ever lived.

Psychedelia
Essential Pieces:
Pink Floyd—"Interstellar Overdrive" (live, 1966)  
The Byrds—"Eight Miles High" 
The Beatles—"Tomorrow Never Knows"; "A Day in the Life"
The Beach Boys—"Good Vibrations"

You know, honestly, I sort of feel like just classic and jazz are precedent enough, especially considering that a lot of prog bands were cutting their teeth in the live music scene at the same time as a bunch of these psychedelic bands. There's really this one condensed period of time (roughly 1965-66) where all these bands were just percolating together at places like the UFO Club. The cause and effect chain is a little hazy here. Just because a band has recorded an album before enough doesn't necessarily mean that the band got to that sound first—they just were the first to put it on a record.

But regardless, here we are with a handful of records in '66 and '67 that represent the first major, concerted attempt to expand the sounds of rock music beyond the traditional sonic, instrumental, and structural paradigms. The tracks I've listed above probably aren't the first examples of the kind of things they're innovating, but they're the most well-known, and with songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows," there's almost certainly something completely groundbreaking going on there. Literally thousands of words have already been written on these bands and even these specific tracks, so I'll just make a few brief comments.

The proggiest of the bunch is definitely Pink Floyd's live performance of "Interstellar Overdrive," not just because of its length (prog's tendency for long tracks almost certainly began with the extended jams that the freedom of live shows allowed—sorry, classical music, you were a secondary concern to giving all those hippie cats a really cool trip) but also because of the musical territory it treads. The spacier segments toward the middle third of the performance (which, by the way, didn't make the version PF included in their later album Piper at the Gates of Dawn) definitely anticipate some of the sounds prog music would shoot for.

"Eight Miles High" is awesome and trippy; I don't really have anything else to say about that.

Then there's "A Day in the Life," whose symphonic bridge and outro probably influenced the symphonic prog sounds of bands like the Moody Blues—though again, the timeline is hard to hammer out exactly, since Days of Future Passed (MB's first adventure in symphonic territory) came out only a few months on the heels of Sgt. Pepper.

The Beach Boys called "Good Vibrations" a "pocket symphony"—by now, I'm guessing that connection to prog is obvious. Whaddya need, a road map?

Oddities/Miscellaneous
Essential Pieces:
Joe Meek and the Blue Men—I Hear a New World 
Del Shannon—"Runaway" 
The Tornadoes—"Telstar"
The Mothers of Invention—Freak Out!

So, there's no unifying theme or style to these picks other than that they all broadly fall under the rock/pop spectrum but don't fit with the proper psych rock scene I discussed in the other section. So here they are.

I Hear a New World is a pretty dull piece of work, to be honest, but it's important for being an early example of a rock concept album with major studio effects. Lots of sound effects, lots of psychedelic stuff, lots of stereo-sound fiddling, lots of electronic keyboards. It's boilerplate late '60s rock; the only thing is, it came out in 1959, which is pretty incredible when you consider how ahead of the curve it was. I don't know if this album was widely known enough by the psychedelic and prog bands of the late '60s for me to say that prog and psych wouldn't have happened without it, but the timeline does certainly lend itself to that kind of conclusion.

"Runaway" probably belongs up with the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" in that it's a multi-movement pop song, although again, as with New World, it's significance is in how far it predates that other song. Also, is it just me, or does the organ/synth (or whatever that is) solo feels just the slightest bit proggy?

If prog can claim one instrument as its own, it's the Mellotron, a keyboard capable of electronically manipulating its notes into a distinctive variety of sounds. "Telstar" doesn't use a Mellotron, but it does use (probably—reports vary) a Jennings Univox, which is sort of the rickety old uncle of the Mellotron. Regardless, we've got a song that makes heavy use of electronically manipulated keyboard sounds, and if there's one thing prog loves more than keyboard arrangements, it's weird-sounding keyboard arrangements. Bonus trivia: the Joe Meek from I Hear a New World wrote this song, too!

And then we have Freak Out!, and on that subject, I really don't have much to say except that it's Frank Zappa in 1966 infusing rock music with a sustained level of avant-garde that wouldn't be replicated until prog truly took flight in '69 with In the Court of the Crimson King. It doesn't sound very proggy, admittedly, but the ethos here definitely shares prog's proclivities for the satirical and the bizarre in a way that nothing else from the era does.

***

Alright, and (finally) that wraps up this post! I've barely scratched the surface with all this proto-prog stuff, but I'm sure most of you are tired of hearing me ramble about it. And as for the rest of you, I'm sure you have plenty of suggestions for music I missed—feel free to state them loudly and proudly in the comments! I'm always up for learning new things.

Next time: 1967 and the proper beginning of progressive rock! Woot woot!

Until then!