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 Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence

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S.D.
The Subhuman
S.D.


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PostSubject: Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence   Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence I_icon_minitimeTue Oct 02, 2012 12:08 am

From a long and detailed interview with Steven Wilson on the All About Jazz website.

""The whole idea of the band was to try and bring back this idea of the influence of jazz on progressive music," says Wilson. "The reason I say this is because I've felt, for many years, that it's part of the history of progressive rock that's been written out. If you go back to the original wave of progressive rock and the so-called progressive musicians (though they never called themselves progressive musicians), you see the influence of two forms of music—jazz and classical music—basically instigating that whole generation of musicians. And, of course, it makes perfect sense because there was no precedent for musicians of that caliber going into what was then pop music, throughout the 1960s. Of course, you have to look at Brian Wilson, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon, all aspiring to be great artists, but they didn't necessarily have the caliber of musicianship that you suddenly had come '68, '69 and '70.

"Suddenly, you had people who had been trained as jazz and classical musicians deciding that they were going to be pop musicians," Wilson continues. "That was a point in time that will never be repeated, because we all grow up now—even jazz or classical musicians— knowing the Led Zeppelin catalog, The Beatles' catalog. So this was a once-in-a-generation moment when musicians who had little understanding or knowledge of pop music decided they were going to experiment with electric music. I always felt that the post-'70s generation of progressive music kind of forgot that whole thing—forgot that whole aspect of jazz music being a very important influence, particularly on bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Magma and the whole Canterbury thing. But if you look at the post-'70s progressive-rock bands, bands whether it's a band like Opeth or a band like Marillion, it's just not there. It's not there, and one of the things that really came home to me when I was working on the Crimson catalog was, 'Wow, this is jazz music, in a way.' This is obviously musicians who've grown up completely enamored with and immersed, not in the world of pop music, but in the world of jazz music. And that's part of what makes that explosion of creativity and ambition so powerful and potent.

"The reason I say all this is that my idea, with this band, was to have musicians from both worlds," Wilson concludes. "I wanted to try and bring back that fusion....

....I think one of the things that I love about jazz is the spiritual quality that this kind of sensibility brings to rock music. I've always loved it; I don't think I was necessarily acknowledging it so much until I started working on the Crimson albums. Suddenly it all came home to me again that, other than in the very beginning, when it was more psychedelic, and there was a little bit of improvisation going on, Porcupine Tree had become quite regimented, quite clinical. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. That's the sound of the band. But I realized that I was missing something in my own music, which made me fall in love with a lot of these bands. And not just progressive bands, but some of the Kraut Rock bands, for example, with that spiritual quality—the improvisation, the living for the moment."

full article here:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=42991&pg=2&page=1#.UGpnsfl24bJ

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chewie

chewie


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PostSubject: Re: Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence   Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence I_icon_minitimeTue Oct 02, 2012 11:27 am

THAT is an excellent interview.

This is my favorite quote:

"...but there aren't a lot of things like this around for musicians of this caliber these days. One of the problems for great players is they do get stuck in this kind of, for want of a better term, 'jazz-fusion-guitar/drum-clinic ghetto.' And I think it's truer now than it was, certainly in the '70s. There were a lot more gigs where great players could play good material, also showing their own chops. There aren't many things like that around these days; maybe guys like Peter Gabriel, the kind of artist that musicians would love to play with. For years, Frank Zappa was, of course, the guy that everyone wanted to play with, but he's no longer around."


It's so true!
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S.D.
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S.D.


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PostSubject: Re: Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence   Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence I_icon_minitimeTue Oct 02, 2012 12:30 pm

Steven talking about the organic quality of early 70s instrumentation completely nailed how I feel about the instruments of that era...and why I tend to gravitate toward newer bands that embrace them.

"It is bizarre. I think of the whole musical palette from that era [1970s] as very organic, and a whole load of instruments which are electric instruments that sound— and I know it sounds like an oxymoron—organic to me. The mellotron, for me, is an incredibly organic-sounding instrument—the kind of scratching sound of the tape heads going down on a piece of analog tape—these things for me, at least in my terms, are very, very organic. In a way, they're not electric even though they are. They're not synthetic; I think that's a better word. They're kind of anti-synthetic, so they really feel like flesh and blood: living, breathing instruments. And they don't date, for me. In fact, those instruments sound timeless to me. I would put Hammond organ, mellotron and Fender Rhodes alongside the grand piano as kinds of instruments of sound that don't seem to date at all; they have a certain golden quality."
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chewie

chewie


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PostSubject: Re: Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence   Modern progressive rock...bringing back the jazz influence I_icon_minitimeWed Oct 03, 2012 1:06 am

When he started talking about the sound of a Fender Rhodes with a ring modulator on it. I was like........yea............
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