Are Prog Musicians Just Failed "Jazzers"?

[aith01]

I doubt that most musicians would gravitate to a particular genre because it's easier to play than the one they really wanted to be involved in. And a "failed jazzer" is someone who just didn't put in the work and push themselves hard enough. If you want something bad enough, you're going to do whatever is necessary to get there.

Comparing jazz to prog is like comparing apples to oranges. Improvisation is the main ingredient of jazz while composition is at the center of prog, but the lines can and will blur. Some of King Crimson's music had more to do with improv that composition and some jazz artists' albums like Wayne Shorter's "Atlantis" is more about through composed pieces than improvisation.

I'm 64 years old and I'm glad that I came of age when I did; there was great groundbreaking music coming from a multitude of genres in the mid '60s through the mid '70s. Music wasn't segregated the way it is today and you could hear various styles on the same radio station. I was excited about so much of it and still am! I became a musician because of The Beatles, but my musical journey lead me to places far from pop. And lots of musicians from my generation are the same as me; they're into (and can play and write within) several different genres. I gravitate towards jazz as a player because I prefer to improvise over richer and more harmonically challenging chord progressions than most rock (and even prog) has to offer, but my composing has been something closer to prog/fusion than jazz, because... well, I don't even know why; maybe I just don't hear a bunch of ii/V sequences when I'm writing. One of my all time favorite bands is Bruford; for me they had the perfect balance of composition and improvisation.

Anyway (and before I ramble too much), it's not about what's easier and harder; it's about where your passion lies and how driven you are to be able to do what you love. I'm not so into genre categorization; for me, there's only music that I like/love and music that I dislike/hate. I play the latter often to make a living, but I stay involved in the former to keep my integrity and sanity.

Echoing what others have already said, but this is a very nice post man. Thanks for sharing.

[Trane]

6 pages in less than 24h??
Certainly no time to read it all, so I'll make a quick comment that will serve as a thread bookmarking.

A good friend of mine that is a great jazz keyboardist mentioned to me recently that he never was much into prog and got the impression that it was a genre full of musicians that hoped to play jazz, but just settled for prog because they didn't have what it took to do jazz well.

I told him as far as I could tell most of the prog musicians I know really didn't care much about jazz or wish to play it, that their playing of prog was because of their love of the genre, not just "settling".

A lot of proggers (not just the muzos, but the fans as well, and not just in my circle of "friends") have a fairly strong distate of jazz, at least in the first few years... especially those that prefer the "symphonic prog", so I'd say that a lot of the prog musicians are probably failed classical musicians before being any other type of musicians.

I'd say that most symphonic progheads came to jazz via the Canterbury or to a lesser extent via Mahavishnu, though I'm an example of other channels (Caravanserai and Tull's This Was)....

... but then again, I'm a failed musician (period), since I never persevered at any instruments I tried (piano, bass, flute, congas +/- in that order)

[proggy_jazzer]

6 pages in less than 24h??

Well, actually more like a page and a half, since the thread was started in April

But now that it's been bumped, I have to admit that each time I see the thread title, the question rankles me a bit more. I mean, seriously, folks, to pose the question is to suppose there's an answer - in this case a person one could point to and say "s/he failed at jazz and then became a prog musician". Even if there could be agreement on what defines "failure", can anyone actually think of a single person who would fit that particular bill?

However, I suspect that Sean intended the question more-or-less rhetorically, and put it out there to engender discussion, and mission accomplished on that front.

[Trane]

Well, actually more like a page and a half, since the thread was started in April .

04/09 =/= 09/04

wall.gif

[vmartell]

BTW - not sure if this has been posted in this thread:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bill-br...ord.php?page=1

Somewhere in there Bill writes: "I was always too rock for jazzers and too jazz for rockers" - the statement in the OP definitely confirms this and it is extremely sad that it worked against a wonderful musician like Bill Bruford...

v

[jkelman]

BTW - not sure if this has been posted in this thread:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bill-br...ord.php?page=1

Somewhere in there Bill writes: "I was always too rock for jazzers and too jazz for rockers" - the statement in the OP definitely confirms this and it is extremely sad that it worked against a wonderful musician like Bill Bruford...

v

It didn't exactly work against Bill as he suggests. If you read the autobiography, towards the time he retired he began to experience a bit of a crisis of confidence (hard though that may be to believe) because he was focusing exclusively on almost entirely acoustic jazz, but was competing against other drummers, many younger, who'd spent (and continued to spend) their entire careers focused on jazz, and Bruford felt he was (again, surprisingly) unable to play with the same veracity.

He did spend most of his career in rock/rock-informed music, and did pretty darn well, I'd say (retired at 60 being one indicator!). But while he was a jazz fan all his life, he'd not made the full commitment and so it meant that he (not exactly the right word) struggled to be as credible as those who had.

It's unfortunate. Whether or not he had the same facility in jazz never mattered to me; I loved both his original, more electric Earthworks band as well as his later acoustic Earthworks incarnations. But I can understand where he was coming from. I have loved jazz all my life, and studied it for a number of years in my teens/early 20s. But I was always playing in rock/prog bands and supporting singer/songwriters, and making the full commitment to jazz in Ottawa is, sadly, a tough thing (only a handful of guys i can think of who managed it), so I was a good guitarist but not a particularly good jazzer, and a lot of it was i realized, especially after I started writing, that I could hear the music in a deep way, but didn't have the facility to actually play what I could hear. And realizing this in my 50s kinda put the kibosh on making that full-on commitment to playing jazz, for many reasons.

So I remained a good guitarist in other genres (not on Bruford's level of course, but I did ok, working in studios as a session player in addition to a lot of gigging back when gigging was actually plentiful) and don't regret how things panned out. But while I could do some things that were jazz-like, i knew I could never be a credible jazz player. In that, I think my mindset was similar to Bruford's.