With the growing popularity of rock music in the mid-to-late Sixties, a great many young up-and-coming musicians were inspired—and encouraged—to push the limits of the musical form beyond...
With the growing popularity of rock music in the mid-to-late Sixties, a great many young up-and-coming musicians were inspired—and encouraged—to push the limits of the musical form beyond anything that had come before.
The very roots of what was to become known as the progressive rock movement may be hard to pin down, but no doubt the musical experimentation of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan encouraged an ever-widening musical palette, inviting the musical creativity of early progressive bands like Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, Soft Machine, Procol Harum and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.
Since the Sixties, each passing decade has seen further development of the progressive rock movement.
The music reached its peak popularity in the Seventies, and the Eighties and Nineties brought to the fore such bands as Styx, Rush, Marillion, Dream Theater, Queensrÿche, Porcupine Tree, Tool and Opeth. More recent arrivals include Coheed and Cambria, the Mars Volta and new-breed bands like Periphery and Animals As Leaders.
In this edition of In Deep, we’ll examine the envelope-pushing sounds of some of the essential prog-rock bands of the Sixties/early Seventies era, especially Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Rush, the Dixie Dregs, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. In its earliest incarnation, progressive rock built from the aggressive sounds of blues-rock and psychedelic rock, spearheaded by bands such as Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin, by incorporating classical-inspired themes and instrumentation. This was exemplified by British bands such as Deep Purple, the Moody Blues and Yes.
The brilliant Yes guitarist Steve Howe infused his classical and jazz guitar interests with a rock approach, yielding the cutting-edge guitar work heard on essential Yes releases, The Yes Album, Fragile and