Prog Rock vs Free Jazz: Who Came Out Better?

Just to insert another dimension to this nexus (can a nexus have dimensions?): the AMM/Cardew/Scratch Orc/Eno/Manzanera/ Jobson/Asia line... (At Eno, you could also turn the line Fripp/Bowie/Tin Machine- wards)

One of the ideas I had — which I could not explore in that B.Guy review (it had to be cut down a little as it was) — was that the early 70s Ray Coleman-era Melody Maker (which for a while very comfortably and successfully featured pop/rock/prog upfront, Val Wilmer, Steve Lake et al in the "jazz" regions, and a tech-talk section at the back), was a forum for a kind of extended community (community perhaps obviously doomed to fail — but all communities fail). Punk — at least as shaped by NME — helped wreck this, and disperse it.

This story is not remotely told (because we'd have to argue that punk was a mistake?)

Incidentally, the original starting point, in re the Barry Guy review, was this question:< BR> Which — looking back — is more pretentious? ELP's Works Vol.1 or Cardew's Maoist phase?

PS That's Eddie Jobson of Nash Bridges themetune fame, not his smarter kid brother Richard.

PPS Excellent Richard Jobson anecdote, as told by P.Morley to B*ba K*pf, and thus on down to me. Morley is interviewing Jobson, who is still in pop, not yet TV. At Jobson's home. Where stands a big book-case full of the most highbrow books. Unprompted, RJ looks proudly at the bookcase, and says, "I've read the FIRST PAGE of every one of those books."

I *challenge* not to find you like him more, now. I do.

Sorry, Marcello.

But was punk a "mistake"? Ian Dury? The Slits/Pop Group/Don Cherry nexus? Lol Coxhill with the Damned? Captain Sensible begging Elton Dean for his autograph at a petrol station? "Metal Box"? The Morley/Penman sexus? The leyline between "Escalator over the Hill" and "Reality Asylum"? The Toop/Beresford axis? I saw a hell of a lot of Gang of Four/Au Pairs/etc. Better Badges at Ornette/Prime Time at Bracknell 1980? Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie banging and wailing in my mate Storky McGurk's garage circa 1979? But of course most of this was "post-punk" and thus more interesting. And there was Alternative TV! With guest appearance by Jools Holland on boogie- woogie piano and dodgy Air-like synth! Cf. Good Missionaries "Fire from Heaven" and Tippett's "Ovary Lodge" - visually and sonically, almost soulmates.

And NO WAVE! Chance! Lunch! Ikue Mori! Bit more complex than that, Mark.

Sorry, didn't see the second part. Prefer the Denholm Elliott method, i.e. reading the middle pages of a book. "It's like being in a pub - you soon know whether you'd like to hang around with these people or not."

ELP and Cardew? Apart from the fact that Cornelius was in his youth a dead ringer for Joe Strummer (and Keith Rowe for Arto Lindsay), I'd say the latter was more so, but again that depends on whether you see "pretentious" as a pejorative. It just seems to me that whenever Britfree tries to take on the populus schtick, it makes a mess of it (witness the unsingable late Cardew oeuvre; worse even than B Bragg, but not that far from him). Of course the Wyatt/Tippett/Fripp thread can come down via Eno/Bowie (and even Daryl Hall: see "Exposure"). And then of course the South Africans didn't give a toss about any of this and were happy to play with anyone - remember Dudu Pukwana's Assegai on Top of the Pops with Feza, Moholo and Harry M? Also King Crimson on TOTP doing "Cat Food" with KT on the piano and GREG LAKE on vocals! Howzabout that for a loop?

Was punk a mistake? No. But still, very hard to draw the line without [sudden cut-out] from the post-punker Slits/Toop/Zorn terrain back to e.g. Gentle Giant/Jethro Tull. Why? Because all explainers/historians want to wrap themselves in some bit of the mantle of year-zero stalinism?

cf for example B.Watson's unending war with Beresford: because he regards SB as some kind of counter-revolutionary traitor to the pure improv cause? (when clearly the improv community DON'T thin any such thing...)

Not that Watson has ever understood punk, of course...! (That's *my* job.)

While I haven't been exposed to many examples of Brit-free guys trying to go pop, I would say that based on the experience of hearing other jazz guys moving in a more pop direction, they have a much harder time of it than prog rockers because the essential DNA of most jazzers post 1950 is to be anti-populist. We're talking about people who heard rock and roll and actively rejected it. On the other hand, prog rockers had to embrace rock to some degree from the start, and thus pop to some degree as well. Note Marcello's noting of prog's seeming acceptance of punk. And as we've all discussed, pop can absorb just about any sound, whereas most attempts to bring other elements to jazz sound stupid to my ears(see fusion). Henry Cow absorbed free in a successful way, but I've rarely heard a great record made by free guys that worked with pop. Take Elliot Sharp's new Terraplane disc (not brit, I know, but merely an example to flesh out my point). Some free blowing, funky grooves too. I'd still rather listen to James Brown and New York Eye And Ear Control back to back. No New York, on the other hand, is much more of a success, because the people involved come at such out sounds from a rock perspective. But perhaps this is far from what you two are actually discussing.

Dave: UK "modern" jazzers suffered a double public humiliation at the hands first of Brian Jones (in the letters-pages of Jazz News in 1962): "It would be ludicrous if the same type of pseudo-intellectual snobbery that one unfrotnately finds contaminating the jazz scene would be appled to anything as basid andc vital as Rhythm and Blues." (Result: an irrecoverable split in the "jazz scene", which had till then somewhat uneasily umbrella'd everything from Ornette fans to Leadbelly fans)
On national TV in 65 (66?), the Beatles gave out a prize to the lucky young man who'd won a design-a-Beatles sleeve comp (he was maybe 20, looked like Jarvis Cocker with fair hair). Lennon asked him abotu his favourite music — "Shostakovich and Charles Mingus" — and Lennon, with a leer and a sentence *destroys* him. Result: modern jazz reduced to a mere joke past, in the minds of Brave Young Fab Fans, curators of the emergent pop canon.
Point being, UK jazzers were sent into goofy exiled nowhere before they themselves had the chance to Choose to Walk, I believe.
Free foax, however, were not only (some of them) v.hostile to pre-free Jazz (Bailey wd destroy you if you called what he does "jazz"), but also [crucially] emerged into possibility on exactly the same underground circuit that arrived AS A RESULT of the rock underground. (AMM's early shows supporting eg Pink Floyd — who also had a freeform tendency...) US dynamic clearly difft: but Prog is a UK invention, after all. "Free" isn't; but the Bailey-AMM wing of it is not remotely subsumable into simple copyist jazz.

Ouch. I guess the UK scene was significantly different in that respect - jazzers hate rock and roll in the US, not really the other way around. And it's funny that Bailey doesn't consider himself a jazz guy - everyone else does.

hey mark - what did lennon say to the mingus/shostakovitch fan?

Duane: I forget exactly. It's years since I saw the clip. Not much more elaborate than, "Oh, very posh," I think — but with a look and an inflection that said everything (and got the audience laugh, of course).

Dave: "Everyone else"? Well, not eg Wynton et al, but also probably not a fair reach of the UK Incus/Company/LMC crowd. In the 70s this particular name-distinction was very political and important: now it's more habit than not, probably.

I just asked a question about the New York Dolls that I think brings up some of these issues but more simplistically, and since I don't own any free jazz records I shouldn't really be contributing here, but I really wanted to add something about prog rock that 'deeply affected me'

- I saw a tv show (Rock Family Trees) about prog, and one of the prog guys said that in the late 70s post punk, they couldn't get any shows any more - 'even in tiny pubs' - but they kept slogging on and in the 80s suddenly it was - stadiums again! Honestly you could practically see the edges of the television screen darkening and hear the music becoming more subdued as he described the mid/late 70s. It sounded as if punk had literally baffled and broken him - he was like King Lear when all the kids betrayed him! That's what he was like! A king who suddenly realises that material power cannot protect him from the all too human machinations of his underlings. And even when he regained his power, it was with a new uncertainty.

This didn't make me like punk more - it seemed tragic. It reminds me of how the uber-cynicism of Ali G can so easily destroy the stupid humanism of a cleric. All that stuff about how punk was a 'necessary antidote' to the 'bloated decadence' of prog rock - but what characterises the last two decades more than an ultra decadent decline into complete cynicism? Anyway I'm sure that these are issues that you've been over and over and I really oughtn't write more.

I know what you mean, Maryann, I always figured prog meant Roger Dean covers and goblin rock, whereas punk meant Johnny Rotten giving the finger and had to be much cooler. This is the problem with having learned most of your music history from that "Rock And Roll" TV series. It was only when I talked to an older person who worked at my radio station through the 70s that I realized prog could be interesting and not necessarily any more "bloated" than the jazz I had been listening to for years. Proving once again that there are no bad genres - only bad people.

(Bailey wd destroy you if you called what he does "jazz")

Was told that Bailey used to go into the jazz dept. at Tower in central London and INSIST that his records be taken out of the jazz section and be put just abt ANYWHERE else.

Maryann, would be interested in who that was, because something tells me it was one of the many UK proggers who turned AOR as a career- saving device for the 80s (the whole Collins / Gabriel / Genesis / Mike & Mechanics axis, Asia, Yes's "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow"). Indeed one could create a compilation tape of 80s AOR-pop restricting your choice to old prog warhorses, and pretty much define the genre. I wouldn't recommend it, of course.

I totally agree with you about present-day cynicism, incidentally.

Who was it? When I tried really hard to remember I think it was somebody from Wizzard. Who are pomp rock not prog rock. But I don't see why there is such a strict distinction - just because bands use pop, I think that if they also make paradigmatic prog rock moves like classical pastiche it is pedantic to say that they have no prog rock in them. That's my defense against Mr Logic anyway (you know who you are). I feel slightly ill after having written this stuff about 'the definition of pomp rock'!

Someone mentions the Beatles having a go on TV programme Ready steady Go at a young prizewinner for saying he liked Shostakovich and Mingus. Someone else in this thread mentioned Crass's anarchopunk record Reality Asylum. The art student prizewinner mocked by Lennon on TV was Penny Rimbaud, Crass's leading light. He describes it in his autobiography Shibboleth (AK Press 1998), pp. 40-41.

HA HA HA...that's just beautiful. Thanks.

this fact = too good to be true x a bazillion!!!

if true it is surely the core anecdote in any history of the aesthetics of rock!!

i am SO psyched i cd spit!!

Oi back 2 xenakis u slackah!

i'm allowing myself 20 mins lunchbreak!! (also earbreak: sheesh wot a racket)

Way back there in the mists of the thread, surely the free-jazzers who did manage pop were pig-bag and the bristol crowd - I have always considered free jazz to be a necessary element of post-punk funk [I remember in about '72 going up to someone in a Tippett/Dean group at that famous club in Oxford Street (whose name escapes me) and saying it would be really great if they funked it up a bit and a few years later someone else did! [althoug doesn't it all start with Arthur Brown's "The Lord Don't Want You" - and they were big fans of Keith Tippett.
Also, how could, say, punk destroy prog rock, when many prog rockers also became punks. I started with the Soft Machine and the free jazz spin-offs, spending my schooldays at gigs populated by about 2 people apart from the band. But I loved, and still love, that and the Softs/Henry Cow and the Damned and Sex pistols and This Heat and Arthur Brown and The Nice and (early) ELP, and Second Hand and ACR and (not so much loved) Bristol post-punk funk [not forgetting Norwich - The Higsons].
What punk did was what prog-rock had stopped doing, and it just started a new cycle, which itself died, and the thing is that free jazz tends to hold up the torch for whatever it is for patient people (which the new generation aren't) because not that many free jazz gigs actually hit the spot, whereas, whilst Wyatt was still there, the Softs rarely missed.
But free jazz is never going to be popular, although some of its exponenets might want to be rich and famous (even Karl Marx was hoping to become rich and famous from writing Das Kapital!). But this is nothing to do with free jazz, more to do with the fact that neither punk nor any other brand of music with any penetration has had any effect on the anodyne lives we are all forced to lead.
The problem with free jazz now is that everyone is still playing the same notes as they did 30 years ago (I can certainly recognise them)so even that's not going anywhere.
LOVE (penetrating) ANDY!

Prog rock was way better. Because it had tunes.

there are three quite good snapshots of ILM here aren't there

Brit jazz into pop = library music a certain amount of the time? Jazz musos playing tv cues in the style of pop 3 years previously (and creating something retrospectively good, but at the time if heard at all by pop fans (in background of Are You Being Served or whatever?) it must have seemed out-of-time-and-place and fake and a betrayal of pop?)

If we see brit (free) jazz crossover through prog and post punk when does it end? When proggers come back as 80s AOR do jazzers become confined to a fenced in jazz garden?

What are the more modern examples? That guy from Spring Heel Jack appearing on records by Evan Parker and Girls Aloud, but what else? Did rave kill the free jazz?

(The Penny Rimbaud/John Lennon anecdote above is GOLDEN!)