10 Piece Ensemble 'Troot'

[winkersnufs]

And a sunny Good Morning ~

Thanks to Alan Benjamin (Advent) for this heads up! I am listening to my first run through of (and I sense MANY) of the ensemble 'TROOT' All I can muster, at this time, is that this has QUITE caught my attention... Please give a listen over at
Bandcamp!

Carry On
Chris Buckley

[Mascodagama]

This is very good indeed. Thanks.

https://troot.bandcamp.com/releases

[Baribrotzer]

Good stuff, somewhere in-between avant and mainstream prog. It's always melodic, even when harmonically advanced and "difficult", and echoes all sorts of things: Italian prog, Crimson (some of the ensemble passages), ELP (some of the piano parts), Kansas (some of the violin lines), and certain modern classical compositions. Once in a while, it sounds a bit like Yugen.

The lineup is:

• Tim Root: Piano, Keyboards, and Compositions
• Nora Germain: Violin
• Beth Fleenor: Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, and Voice
• Amy Denio: Alto Saxophone and Accordion
• Alex Anthony Faide: Electric Guitar
• Steve Ball: Acoustic Guitar
• Bill Horist: Guitar and Prepared Guitar
• Marco Machera: Bass
• Julie Slick: Bass
• Alessandro Inolti: Drums

I'm not sure if all ten of them play on every track, or even all at the same time - it can be very dense, but that wouldn't necessarily require all ten of them playing.

[Baribrotzer]

Bump.

And: I saw them at Seaprog, greatly enjoyed them, bought the record, listened to it quite a bit, and greatly enjoyed it.

Also: Here's an interesting write-up on them, from Marcello Nardi's blog Music for Watermelons:

http://www.musicforwatermelons.com/2...ing-2018-pt-1/
http://www.musicforwatermelons.com/2...ing-2018-pt-2/

It's in both (presumably good) Italian and (slightly shaky) English. The article goes, at some length, into the recruitment and formation of the band, Tim Root's musical influences, and their working methods, which are quite unusual: There were no formal written arrangements except for the piano parts, everybody had a copy of those but worked primarily by ear, and they put the whole thing together in three or four days.

[Guntrip]

I only found out about these guys yesterday (thanks to Baribrotzer for posting them in the prog hook thread) and I absolute love them already. This is the kind of music that just clicks with me right away. It has just enough edge to be spicy but still completely welcoming and familiar.

[Baribrotzer]

It has just enough edge to be spicy but still completely welcoming and familiar.

One point that many, I think, miss about Seventies symph prog, even musicians: It could be more harmonically advanced than quite a few of them realize. Everybody cites Gentle Giant for their contrapuntal textures and harmonic complexity, but other bands were definitely looking into the 20th Century, too. Keith Emerson often worked in Bartokian polytonality, as did Crimson, Yes and Genesis used somewhat milder versions, FZ a more difficult approach sometimes derived from Varese and Stravinsky - the list could go on. Many bands also adopted a parallel tendency toward constant modulation, which spread the complexity out over time rather than presenting it in piled-up blocks. And I think that many or most current bands who emulate the Seventies bands don't realize that, and produce considerably blander music because of it; that, in fact, mild polytonality or constant modulation might be the "secret sauce" that gives genuine Seventies symph prog its tangy flavor, a flavor usually missing in modern imitations.

In addition to this, you could say that prog split in two during the late Seventies and Eighties: The neo-proggers still used proggy sounds, but otherwise simplified their music drastically, moved closer to pop and New Wave, and almost completely abandoned that "secret sauce". Meanwhile the avant crowd poured in a double dose of 20th-Century musical vocabulary, abandoned obvious pop references and hooks, tried to work entirely within the musically-advanced world, and produced material that sometimes came quite close to straight-up modern classical music. Then, a few years further on, the Nineties 3rd-wave bands re-complicated the music with respect to length and structure, but mostly kept the milder neo- musical vocabulary. And as a result, harmonic textures that might not be a whole lot more "difficult" than ELP got characterized as the stuff of Henry Cow, and other music that required a whole lot of dedicated listening to absorb and make sense of.

So I think that music like Troot's doesn't go nearly as far down the RIO rabbit-hole as some believe. It's a whole lot more tonal and conventionally "melodic" than Henry Cow, or Univers Zero, or Thinking Plague, to give a few examples. Indeed, a lot of it doesn't seem any further outside than ELP or Gentle Giant. I'd say that most avant- feature of it is constant modulation, and even that loses its harshness by repetition: to give an example, a chord change like CM to F#M is aggressively dissonant and can't be found within any single diatonic scale - but repeat it several times, and it becomes a build-up of tension that can either lead to a really strong resolution, or can be halfway-resolved sideways and used as an engine of motion. Anyway, my point is that if you look at the whole tradition and consider the way it actually sounded, Troot don't make all that big a break with it, and don't belong in the RIO camp so much as slightly left of mainstream.

[thedunno]

It's excellent. Accessible, but with enough teeth, complexity and surprise to keep me engaged.