Lets reclaim "progressive"...

I bought a large collection of Jazz CDs recently. You'll hear more about them shortly, but one of the popular artists with the original owner was Stan Kenton. Kenton was a big band leader and pianist. To be honest I don't like his music much, but he was very popular at a certain point in the late 40s. In 1947 he formed a new, larger band than his previous on to present "Concerts in Progressive Jazz". The album that resulted from this was called 'A Presentation of Progressive Jazz'. Reviews included "jerry-built jumble of effects and counter-effects" and "this album presents very little that can justifiably be called either jazz or progressive. "Billboard said it was "as mumbo-jumbo a collection of cacophony as has ever been loosed on an unsuspecting public.”

Now in fairness Kenton’s music can best be described as bombastic at best. And this got me thinking, again, about the use of the word “progressive” in music. Google “what is progressive rock” and you get; “a style of rock music popular especially in the 1970s and characterised by classical influences, the use of keyboard instruments, and lengthy compositions.”

Google “progressive music” and you land on a Wikipedia entry that talks about “progressive music which  “usually synthesizes influences from various cultural domains, such as European art music, Celtic folk, West Indian, or African. It is rooted in the idea of a cultural alternative and may also be associated with auteur-stars and concept albums, considered traditional structures of the music industry.” Ok so once you’ve picked your way through that lot you may be fairly confused, I certainly am, and be no closer to a definition of what progressive means. When it comes to Jazz the article decides that Progressive Jazz “originated in the 1940s with arrangers who drew from modernist composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. Its "progressive" features were replete with dissonance, atonality, and brash effects. “ By now you may be starting to get tired of the rather pompous style of the Wikipedia author, I certainly am, and be thinking that Progressive Jazz probably should be more about Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra – who all came along rather later and whose innovations belong to the late 50s and 60s. 

Now I started avoiding Prog magazine’s mostly quite interesting Facebook group because of the interminable question, is XXXX prog? Looking now I find that the site rules now include “Please do not post "Is XXXX prog?" questions, lets focus on interesting discussions.” Great I can follow it again. Prog Magazine itself does include a good bit of music that follows the definition of ”progressive music” we saw above. Now of course they include the old guard, ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd, they want to sell magazines to old folks. But they go far enough off piste to include music that stretches genre boundaries pretty close to breaking point. Which is great. If you assume (as I do) that the first proper progressive rock album was ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ and then step off in to Van Der Graaf Generator and thence into outer space then very little of what is called “Prog” is actually progressive, any more than Stan Kenton was ”progressive” when it came to Jazz.

In the citations for the Wikipedia entry mentioned earlier there is a note that quotes  - Willis 2014, p. 219, “'Progressive' music can be seen as an experimentation with alternative routes"; Moore 2004, p. 22, "What was so revolutionary about this post-hippie music that came to be called 'progressive' ... was that ... the umbilical link between idiolect and style had been broken."; Macan 1997, p. 246, "the progressive rock of the 1970s had been 'progressive' only as long as it pushed the stylistic and conceptual boundaries of rock outwards" As all the references circle back to the article they are quoted in I can’t tell you anything about the books the quotes come from. But I think we can start to get a definition of what the word “progressive” means to those who ask the “is it Prog?” question on Facebook. It doesn’t in fact mean progressive at all, and we should probably use “prog” to distinguish the music that derives from 70s artists like ELP, Yes, and lesser mortals, and we can lump Mr Kenton in with the as Prog Jazz, with the distinguishing feature that the music is loud, grandiose, and bombastic. We can then reserve the “progressive” for music that stretches boundaries, Coltrane, Miles or Cecil Taylor in Jazz, and King Crimson, Tool, Frank Zappa, and maybe even The Velvet Underground in rock. Thoughts on properly progressive rock acts happily received.