Modern drummers

It would be hard to overstate how much of a thrill it was to speak at length with one of my musical heroes, Bill Bruford, or to be in the room while Dave Grohl and Ringo Starr — two icons I admire hugely — conversed for an hour-plus about drums and life. I hope you enjoy the results!

Prog's pop soul: Goodbye, John Wetton

King Crimson often seemed to want to be faceless: a forbidding, shadowy, even superhuman factory of what would later be termed sheer Discipline. But almost despite the group's inscrutable facade, John Wetton, during his justly legendary early-'70s tenure with the band, gave them not only a voice, but a soul. Even when singing words that weren't his:



The swagger of "Easy Money," the reverie of "Starless," the abandon of "One More Red Nightmare" — his husky crooning, refined in that English way but still brimming with palpable pathos, added warm feeling to match the band's sharp angles, their thunder and noise and muscle.

Not surprising that later, he was the one who helped transmute prog into pop. I'm always happy to rock out to Asia, but for me, who loves songs as much as musical math, the short-lived U.K. was some kind of holy happy medium.


As a bass player too — and, yes, improviser on par with the more widely celebrated Bill Bruford — he was filthy and ruthless.

His bands' names will likely always outshine his own, but they should never be mentioned henceforth without a moment of silence for this great and inimitable talent.

Snarl and snap: Goodbye, Chris Squire

There is the air of classic prog, the songs' ornate, easily caricatured latticework—in Yes terms, the Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman element. And there is the earth, their harsh, wiry skeleton—in Yes terms, the element of the late, great Chris Squire, along with Alan White and before him Bill Bruford. Anyone playing hard-hitting, compositionally daring rock music (math rock, tech metal, a million other microstyles) is, or ought to be, planting their ideas in the Squire soil.

The girth, the clarity, the metallic thwack of his bass tone. The bridge between, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra, where the bass typically took a backseat, and Rush, where it essentially became a lead instrument. For me, when Chris Squire's bass started to snarl and snap is the eureka moment when so-called prog became electrifying and essential, when geek brain met cyborg muscle. I'm not a Yes completist, but in the classic ’70s material, whenever the rhythm section starts to kick (and/or the Steve Howe visionary-shred roller coaster starts zooming around the track), it's a drop-everything moment for me.

Zero in on the riff that starts at about 6:04 in "Close to the Edge," the one with those thrilling syncopated Squire/Bruford stabs. It's all there. Props also to the monster mutant-funk groove at 6:51, with those grotesque melodic outbursts and chasm-like rests. Thank you, Chris Squire—you harnessed the low end, sacrificing none of its primal power, and made it dance and sing.

The fleeting snarl: King Crimson live in 2014

This past Thursday, I saw King Crimson perform (as part of a four-show NYC run that continues tonight and tomorrow). I wasn't sure I'd ever type that. The band had toured as recently as 2008, but I was a relatively late-blooming fan, and after I heard that bandleader Robert Fripp, pictured, announced his retirement from music in 2012, I figured I'd never have the chance to see them.

The concert was frequently fascinating, but it kept me at arm's length, and I've been trying to figure out why. By way of context, I should mention that I have a complex relationship with the idea of progressive rock. (I delved into that in my math-rock mixtape a couple years back, and in various other posts.) I distrust all genres, pretty much as a rule, and prog is no different. My view is always, show me the music, not its traits or trappings. Is it worthy? Is it great? Cool, then—I'm on board.

With King Crimson, the music frequently is great. Partially by following my own nose, and partially with help from KC expert/completist/megafan Steve Smith (who put together a great preview of the Crimson show in Boston), I made my way to the classic early-’70s band featuring Fripp, John Wetton and Bill Bruford, and dove pretty deep into their ever-expanding (thanks to the indefatigable DGM Live) archive. Where to start with this monster group? I doubt I'll be able to express my love for them more deeply than I did here, when I was first in the throes of my ’70s-Crimson obsession. This period of Crimson speaks to me so clearly, pushes so many of my musical pleasure buttons through its combination of virtuosity and fierceness. I don't care about prog; I care about music that lights me up, and when this incarnation of King Crimson (or, say, Rush…) gets going, such as on this ungodly-great 1974 Pittsburgh show (if you don't own this, please, for the love of God, remedy that), I'm straight-up glowing.

When it comes to the rest of the Crimson oeuvre, I'm no expert. I know and like 1981's Discipline, as well as the live material I've heard featuring that version of the band; I've got a special fondness for the poppier Adrien Belew–driven material such as the outstanding "Frame by Frame." But in my consumption of proggish rock/metal, I'm always looking for the edge, the bite, and King Crimson was at this later point a much cleaner, more streamlined band. From the bits and pieces I've heard of ’90s and 2000s–era Crimson, my sense is that some of that visceral quality returned, but in a more "state of the art," high-tech guise—not in the ratty, ugly form you hear all over the Bruford/Wetton material.

So going into the show, I understood that I would be encountering a completely different band than any of the Crimsons that I knew. The current edition is a hodgepodge of various eras: bassist / Chapman Stick dude Tony Levin, a member on and off since the Discipline era; saxist-flutist Mel Collins, who worked with the band during the strange transitional period between 1969's In the Court of the Crimson King and 1973's Larks' Tongues in Aspic (the recorded debut of the Bruford/Wetton band); ’90s and 2000s drumming mainstay Pat Mastelotto; drummers Bill Rieflin and Gavin Harrison, a new and newish recruit, respectively; and new singer-guitarist Jakko Jakszyk—all joining Robert Fripp, of course. I'd heard rumblings about how the band would be playing a lot of vintage material, but as is my custom, I didn't do a whole lot of set-list research beforehand.

The production was pretty stagy. Long clips of recorded voiceovers, both before the set and between songs. Beforehand, we got, over the PA, a long rambling message from Fripp and various other members about the virtues of turning of your phones and other devices and experiencing the show in real time. Fair enough. Then, between songs, there were frequent, humorously edited clips of conversations between Fripp and various stereotypically "clueless" (though maybe they were, God forbid, merely curious, or simply doing their jobs?) journalists. I remember one exchange when a writer asked something to the effect of "What's the main difference between this and that version of King Crimson?" In that inimitable dry, British way of his, Fripp deadpanned something like, "Well, I think the main difference is that there are different men in the group." That definitely got a laugh, probably because that attitude—the visionary's arch impatience with the follies of the sticklers and record keepers—seems to prevail among the Crimson fan base. I don't mean to generalize; only to say that it's my impression that in the Crimson universe, fans fetishize Fripp's eccentricity, his difficult-ness, and the notion that they, as devotees, are somehow in on a joke that fans of, God forbid, less willfully esoteric music, have no way of understanding or even accessing.

(If it's not already clear, this attitude turns me off. I love plenty of obscure music, but I'm not really into the idea of fixating on its obscurity or eccentricity. I love it because I like the way it sounds, period. I also love the way plenty of way more "straightforward" music sounds. In both cases, it's gut reaction, and nothing more.)

These contextual elements, the recorded dialogue and such, set a certain tone that ran through the show as a whole. I mentioned "stagy" above, and the other aspect of what I was getting at was that the band appeared onstage as participants in a sort of pageant: the three drummers in front, and the other four in back, standing side-by-side on a riser (except for the perpetually seated Fripp), with a backdrop made to look like a forest, and little identifying signs in front of each man that represented his name in the style of the periodic table. As a spectacle, it almost suggested an Epcot Center rendering of a prog concert.

The set list was surprisingly crowd-pleasing. The band drew heavily on the Bruford/Wetton repertoire (all the jams you know and love: "One More Red Nightmare," "Starless," the first two installments in the "Larks' Tongues" saga, "Red," etc.), as well as on the early Mel Collins years (I don't know those records well, but I did recognize the stately and eerie "The Letters" from ’71's Islands). My friend and TONY colleague Josh Rothkopf pointed out a Thrak track in the set, and there were a couple songs I didn't recognize that I'm guessing were from other ’90s or aughts-era releases. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure that the Discipline era was barely touched on. (Spoiler alert, in case you have plans to see another show on this tour: The encore was, yes, a long, flashy, drum-heavy version of "21st Century Schizoid Man.")

One thing that struck me throughout the show was that, despite the three-drummer lineup, the band lacked a certain oomph. The parts of King Crimson that, on record, move me the most—the dark, crunchy, clattering grooves, such as the classic 7/8 stomp in "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part I," which came right near the beginning of the set—were the parts that, at this show, moved me the least. With all due respect to the drummers, all clearly fine technical players (there was a lot of cool/complex interlocking drum arrangement going on, with Mastelotto, Rieflin and Harrison acting as cogs in a larger percussion section rather than simply as three adjacent trap-set players) and imaginative texturalists, I didn't feel a lot of fire from any of them. Precision, yes, and density and volume, some of the time, but not a lot of sweat or brutality. I understand here that I may be engaging in classic apples-to-orange-isms here, and unfairly stacking up this Crimson, an entirely different band, against the one I know and love the best. But given the fact that the focus was on repertoire from that earlier era, it was hard not to notice the contrast with Bruford—such a daring, crafty and surprising, not to mention straight-up nasty when he wants to be, player. When the grooves would kick in, I tended to feel that they "rocked" rather than rocked. With music like this, I want to be punished; at Thursday night's show, I often felt more like I was being addressed, in a sober, straightforward manner.

All the classic knocks against prog, yes? And that's what disheartened me a bit. I'm always the guy who's arguing against that kind of reductionist thinking, i.e., the absurd idea that virtuosity and passion are always mutually exclusive (or that a lack of virtuosity is somehow inherently, you know, virtuous). But watching this show, I often felt that a non-Crimson-sympathetic listener would have all the ammo he or she needed to dismiss it in the most clichéd and uninformed of ways. Given that, in my opinion, Bruford/Wetton Crimson flies in the face of all that tired anti-prog propaganda, I found this troubling.

There were plenty of moments and elements that flew in the face of my overall characterization, though. Jakszyk, in particular, deserves a lot of credit—he did an excellent job of inhabiting the Wetton role, in particular, belting with plenty of grain and poignancy. Levin, too, played with muscle and heart, especially when he traded the Stick for either acoustic or electric bass. In some ways, Mel Collins was the star of the group. He's got a really bluesy, soulful style, and he seemed to have clearance to blow pretty much whatever he wanted during a good 75 percent of the set. I'd never really felt like "Red," for example, was lacking an ongoing free-form sax commentary, but Collins won me over. His contributions went a long way toward humanizing and lightening a presentation that often felt sterile and plodding to me, getting the blood pumping through the heart of the music.

Robert Fripp was resolutely in the background for the majority of the set. But there was one tantalizingly brief moment where he stepped forward. I'm pretty sure the bit I'm talking about came in the middle or at the end of "Sailor's Tale," another track from Islands. What I remember is that the rest of the band cut out entirely, leaving the maestro to play solo for what couldn't have been longer than two or three minutes. This episode was technically a "guitar solo," but it was entirely free of bravado. It was halting, ugly and fractured. Tough, fuzzed-out chords that elicited and completely transcended all the usual clichés: "metallic," "angular," "jagged," "clanking." But none of those descriptors were adequate for what this was. It was only Fripp, being Fripp, serenading the chaos that at one point was a major component in this shapeshifting art-rock odyssey of his. You felt at that moment completely wired into the twisted heart of King Crimson, the mad eccentricity that has powered it for all these years. I felt here like I was witnessing what I'd had hoped to witness, which was the snarl behind the band's poker-faced facade. It was fleeting and it was glorious, and I wish I could hear it back right now.


Though I might not have fully connected with the show as a whole, I'm so glad I got to witness that ornery mini tantrum, delivered in classic undemonstrative Fripp style. With this tour, he's clearly taking King Crimson in a relatively cozy direction. Familiar repertoire, plenty of crowd-pleasing musical pyrotechnics, the prerecorded in-jokes between songs. It all felt like the KC version of a hug or a high-five to fans—a King Crimson revue, almost. Which is totally fine! We're talking about a nearly 50-year-old band here, led by a nearly 70-year-old man. If he's choosing to put on a good, long, retrospective-oriented show, a sort of digest version of all this band has been over the years, filled with tightness and looseness, riffing and texture, familiar faces and new ones—the whole bit—that is certainly his right.

But being the kind of listener I am, I'm always looking for the edge, the bite, the snarl. And following certain musicians into their elder years, it's always fascinating to see where you find it. (Scanning my brain for a shining example of the former case, I settle on Lindsey Buckingham, a Fripp contemporary, and, the more I learn about him, a musician whose core impulses, his prickliness and perversity—not to mention his caustic, almost sadistic virtuosity and stubborn originality as a guitarist—aren't all that far removed from Fripp's.) Having witnessed those glorious few minutes recounted above, I know that Fripp still has all this in him; the beast is there, should he choose to pay it a visit. And I'll be paying close attention to see if he does, not to mention digging back through the discography to find those isolated forays of pure mania. Forget "prog"; what I'm looking for is wildness, electricity. And, as he's demonstrated countless times in the past, Robert Fripp, captain of the weird, winding, unwieldy endeavor that is King Crimson, knows the way there.

Recently

*A review of the new second installment of the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, via Pitchfork. The infinitely drawn-out MD archival endeavor—it's reached near-absurd proportions, but I never get tired of it. I'm always grateful for the excuse to view a particular micro-phase, in this case that of the Lost Quintet, under the microscope. I'd heard the Antibes sets here years ago, but how wonderful that they're now on the official record, and that Live in Europe 1969 paves the way for new music from Wayne Shorter, who plays at Carnegie Hall tonight—here's my TONY preview.

*The ninth Heavy Metal Be-Bop interview, with once and apparently future Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, via Invisible Oranges (abridged) and heavymetalbebop.com (full-on). I'd like to thank Greg for making the time and new IO editor Fred Pessaro for helping me get this monster transcribed. I hope to have HMB No. 10 live before too, too long.

*Speaking of jazz and metal, or proto-jazz/metal, I can't recommend Bill Bruford's autobiography—which I finally made time for over the holidays—highly enough. A good-humored, but also sobering treatise on how to live a self-indulgent artistic life and stay afloat, barely. Jammed with golden anecdotes and wry wisdom; an idiosyncratic, yet hyper-meticulous reflection on a career punctuated by landmark music-making.

*David Virelles and Continuum are at the Vanguard through this Sunday, 2/3. Anyone catch last night's late set, with the Threadgill guest appearance? Dying to know how that went.

*Lastly: Thank you to the awesome Buke and Gase for helping my band realize a longtime dream.

Shapeshifter: In praise of Bruford/Wetton/Fripp King Crimson

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time self-educating re: rock from the ’70s. We always hear about the ’60s, specifically the end of the ’60s, as a rock heyday, but the next decade seems to me to be the One, when all the warning shots had been fired and the premier bands were all just, to use a term coined by Damión Reid, showing up to crush. As usual, I speak only for myself, oriented according to my inescapable biases, biases that go by names like Black Sabbath (who started out strong but attained some kind of exalted state of fried-mind excess around the time of 1975's Sabotage), Thin Lizzy (who issued their own fireball of a record that same year, just one of at least five all-time-great LPs they'd release throughout the decade) and Led Zeppelin (let's stick with the ’75 theme, and take a moment to reflect on two of the sickest grooves ever recorded: exhibits A and B).

I will love all of these bands/records for as long as I am on Earth, but at this point, they are like comfort food to me: known quantities with a predictable, though not commonplace effect, i.e., they yield ecstasy the way great coffee yields a buzz. But much of my RLT (recreational listening time) over the past week has been spent chasing down a different kind of feeling, furnished by a band that thrived contemporaneously to the woolly rock mammoths enumerated above, but was on, as they say, a whole different trip.

I'm speaking about King Crimson, specifically the version of King Crimson that existed—with more or less stable personnel, give or take percussionist Jamie Muir and violinist David Cross—from (I think I've got this right) the summer of 1972 through the fall of ’74. Aside from perennial KC mastermind Robert Fripp, this lineup was all about bassist-vocalist John Wetton and—I feel like I need to cross myself while typing this, so large does this musician currently loom in my personal pantheon—drummer Bill Bruford, who reported for Crimson duty as soon as he had finished laying down tracks for this prog monster.

If this specific version of King Crimson occupies a different galaxy than the Rock Gods I mentioned above, the Sabbaths, Zeppelins and Lizzys, it also has surprisingly little to do with what I think of as capital-p Prog. I love much of the output of the aforelinked Yes, as well as that of Rush, who really came into full flower later in the ’70s on albums like Hemispheres (some will point to 2112 as the Rush landmark from that period, but that was just the icebreaker), but at this point, those bands too are known quantities, both to me and the World of Rock. They really do exemplify most of the traits they're said to exemplify: long-ass songs, foregrounded virtuosity, helium-voiced vox, etc. (Those descriptions aren't loaded in any way; they're simply neutral catalogs of what those bands sounded like at that time.)

But BWFC (Bruford, Wetton, Fripp Crimson) is, again, something other, and I've spent the last week or so trying to get to the bottom of exactly what that is, or at least observe the full range of its behaviors. I'm finding those tasks extremely daunting but at the same time, I'm enjoying myself immensely. This is not a band you comprehend right away, and that is primarily because BWFC is a shapeshifter. You cannot get your head and heart around it via conventional means, i.e., albums; you have to experience it, live with it, in the wild—that is to say onstage. For several years now, I have really enjoyed the BWFC studio output, namely Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red. (I included the first chapter of the two-part Larks' title track in a math-rock mix I compiled a couple years back.) But to be honest, at this point, I'm considering this trilogy as little more than a digest version of BWFC. I feel like I never knew the band until very recently, when I started digging into the band's own immaculately maintained live archives, known as DGM—i.e., Discipline Global Mobile—Live. (Search 1973 and 1974 here to get a sense of what a treasure trove this is.)

So far, I've picked up three shows: 10/23/73 in Glasgow; 3/30/74 in Mainz, Germany; and 6/28/74 in Asbury Park—the latter of which is heard, in edited/meddled-with form, on the USA live album. (It's funny to think about how in June of ’74, Asbury Park's most famous musical export, Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. prog's antithesis, was in the process of becoming a star.) My knowledge of these official bootlegs is no means encyclopedic—Steve Smith, the most avid/learned Crimsophile I know, is your man—but I can vouch for every one of these shows, and more specifically, for the way they complement each other. Yes, there are song overlaps—I'm starting to sound like a Deadhead here, and though I'm no die-hard there either, I do love me some cherry-picked live Dead—but these are three completely different concerts: different energies, different trajectories, different purposes. I was hoping I'd purchase three of these boots and feel like that was enough, but sadly (for my bank account, i.e.), I think I'm just getting started.

So what is it about BWFC? What's the big deal? I really wanted to link the Glasgow version of "Easy Money," one of BWFC's signature jams, here, so the music could do the talking, but it isn't on YouTube. I just put on a snippet of said track, to get the scent back in my nose. What is it? It's ear-bleeding art-funk, primed for maximum timbral abrasion, gritted-teeth extremity, with harsh and peculiar textures protruding from every strata of the sonic spectrum. That latter point is key for me. One of the chief joys I derive from BWFC is how strange and utterly distinct each sound you hear is. The timbres of the various instruments don't comfortably jell, as is the case in, say, Sabbath or Zeppelin; they war and clash. You've got the flopping, distorted, ungainly beast that is Wetton's bass tone in the low register—like the grotesquely exposed metal skeleton of a sci-fi cyborg—then you have Fripp's merciless high-end fuzz, scratching at your right ear like steel wool; and then there's Bruford's multifaceted soundmaker—I hesitate to call it something so mundane as a drum kit: the ugly wash of the hi-hat; those way-tight toms, which sound like crude timbales; and that piercing snare, softening often into a Tony Williams–y press-roll caress.

The band does kick and slam as one but what makes BWFC special is the way they elude and toy with the groove—each player off on his own orbit like a planet in a solar system—as though no one member wants to be caught playing it straight. Bruford in particular seems to love the delicious tension that comes from hinting at a metallic stomp; he could easily Bonham (to coin a verb) his way through the grooves—"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" comes to mind—but so often chooses to keep the beach ball in the air, so to speak, giving the band the low-end kick it needs but satisfying his own improvisational drive with destabilizing fills and other purposeful inconsistencies. He is not exactly a busy drummer; it's more that he's a restless one. The lumbering doomgroove in the middle of the Red track "Starless"—the definition of a musical slow burn—is a great place to hear what I'm talking about. During the Mainz show, the band draws out the off-kilter riff for more than two ominous minutes, with Bruford limiting himself to minute cymbal taps, before kicking in. But even when Fripp and Wetton near their crescendo, the drummer is still strutting and stuttering along, totally unperturbed; he increases his volume and power, but rarely goes two measures without throwing in some sort of ungainly fill or daring syncopation. In this section, Bruford makes me think of a train-jumper who toys with a slow-moving freighter for miles, flamboyantly hopping on and off as he pleases, never content to simply pick a car and ride. (You get a sense of what I mean around 6:30 in this 1974 TV clip, though the out-of-sync-ness of the audio and video bums me out sufficiently that I held off on an embed. You can view the full four-song performance in excellent fidelity on the 2009 CD/DVD reissue of Red.)

All the band members' performances during this period—my apologies for short-shrifting the often-breathtaking David Cross, whose keening violin is a key feature of these gigs I've been checking out—tend toward the same controlled-chaos brilliance, to the extent that it's easy to forget just how special the material itself is. The variety is simply awesome. Yesterday I marveled at the four-song run at the end of the Mainz show: After "Starless," you've got the relatively concise "Lament," maybe the single strangest piece in BWFC's repertoire. It starts off exemplifying one of the band's key song types, i.e., the brief, ballad-like, almost stagy ditty (I wish I could think of a more dignified word), in which Wetton—whom I've begun to regard as quite possibly the most compelling singer in so-called progressive rock, and one of the most underrated in rock, period—plays the husky yet tender straight man to lyricist Richard Palmer-James's wry satirist. Then, much like in "Starless" itself, the scene changes completely: after a brief instrumental interlude, the band explodes in a deranged art-funk riff fest, with Wetton sounding like he's coming completely unglued. Next up is "Improv Trio," one of the many impromptu interludes that marks this period of Crimson; these pieces take all different shapes (there are four very different ones in the Mainz show alone), but this one is like a pastoral bit of drumless soundtrack music, on which I believe Fripp and Cross are both playing sparkly Mellotron while Wetton lays down a chilled-out bass skeleton. The piece leads into the grandaddy of BWFC's many balls-out jams, the aforementioned "Easy Money," rendered here as stumbling, seething, drunken death funk, with Wetton's signature scat episode at the beginning coming off as a burlesque of airheaded rock & roll. "Easy Money" is always a set highlight, but this version is particularly dire and ragged—a noisy morass. And this very punk element of BWFC is part of what sets them apart from any other contemporary band that you might be tempted to label prog: BWFC understands the value of pure amplified slop, and how effective it can be when juxtaposed with a very British kind of proper-ness and refinement (I think of other brief, chill tracks of the "ditty" variety," such as "The Night Watch"). And there are so many other elements and imperatives at play in the BWFC repertoire: quirky, riffy, Woodstocky blues-rock (see "Cat Food," a track from the pre-BWFC Crimson album In the Wake of Poseidon, which closes the Glasgow show) sits next to obsessive-compulsive epics like "Fracture" and "Larks' Tongues… Part Two." Anyone with even a passing interest in math rock needs get familiar with the former (the Glasgow version is tremendous); the juxtaposition in moods—from notey geekery to flailing violence—is something later exponents of the style have rarely been able to capture in such an organic way. And I'm still getting my brain around the many improvisations that dot these set lists.

There's something very unusual going on in these performances—a marriage of prog's grandeur and virtuosic flash with an almost proto–mid-’80s–Black Flag live-wire scrappiness—that I'm not sure you hear in any other band of the period. Mahavishnu does skew "punk" on their first two records, but they never let themselves sound as frenetic, as hungry, as wild (or on the other hand, as unmoored or abstract) as BWFC do in these performances. This version of Crimson seems to embody the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—each one pushed to the limit—in a single uncanny unit. I've yet to really get to know Crimson before or after this period, but from what little I do know, BWFC was a unique episode in the history of the band, and maybe of music, period, at least the Western styles I know and love best (rock and jazz).

BWFC was a meteor shower, smashing the airlocks that separated the proto-metal space station from the fusion one and the postbop ones and setting all those impulses free. Pretty much everything I love about music from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s is here somehow: the mercurial looseness of the Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, the bombed-out bash of early Sabbath, the D&D-presaging sweep of Yes, the white-hot shred of Mahavishnu and even an undercurrent of especially grimy funk. It didn't last, of course, but for that glorious moment, BWFC had it all, and we are extremely fortunate that the fossil record is so complete. If you need me, I'll be in the DGM archives…

/////

P.S. Speaking of archives, a mammoth new Larks' Tongues in Aspic box set—bulging with extra live audio and video—is coming 10/15. Scroll down a bit here for details.

Come and live with us: Magma live

"Definitely you can come and live with us
…
All you gotta do is help out with the chores…"
—Dirty Projectors, "Temecula Sunrise"

I thought of the line above while watching Magma at Highline Ballroom last night. The impression I kept getting, over and over, from this most idiosyncratic of old-guard progressive-rock bands (check the eye-popping facts if you haven't heard of them: French, around since ’69, built around an invented mythology and language, etc.) was of a commune: a self-sustaining civilization based on a shared commitment to beauty and, just as important, industriousness. "Definitely you can come and live with us," the furiously intricate yet highly supple jazz-rock epics (ranging in mood from the eerie to the imperious to the flat-out goofy) churned out by bandleader Christian Vander & Co. seemed to say, "but please understand that we're going to put you to work." You know those often absurd-seeming, state-sanctioned images of Communist life from China or the former Soviet Union, where everyone's happy and busy and also pretty much anonymous? That was how this incarnation of Magma—Vander (at left in the pic above) on drums and his wife, Stella (to his right), on vocals, along with a vibraphonist, a keyboardist, a guitarist, a bassist and two more singers (one male and one female)—felt to me.

But the X-factor, the thing that made it joyous and wonderful instead of creepy, was the passion of the playing. Prior to seeing this show, Magma had always seemed merely like the coolest idea to me. Anyone who spends any time digging for information about progressive rock, as I have for a good while now, eventually runs up against Magma, like some weird, impenetrable bedrock. Those lean, proggy riffs and vaguely musty fusion-isms always sounded like an appealing throwback, but the Kobaïan chant and the fact that Magma never seemed to rock in as balls-out a manner as, say, Yes, always ended up leaving me a little numb.

Live, though, you get volume, and also, crucially, you get Vander. A hulking, sweaty and frequently smiling man, he is an utter thrill to watch. Cymbals positioned high and at precarious angles, their faces nearly perpendicular to the stage. I wrote a little while back about the Vaz drummer Jeff Mooridian, and how his native position on the kit was playing snare, bass and some furious 16th-note pattern on the high hat. Vander's native territory is that perpetual staple of prog drumming, the steely, syncopated groove smashed out on the China cymbal and bass drum simultaneously, with the snare filling in the space. You really hear, in this man, the grand lineage of jazz-rock: Despite Vander's constant professions of love for Elvin Jones, what I heard was a lot of Bruford, a lot of Cobham and on the quieter passages, a lot of Tony Williams. (I've often opined that the same drummer can't really play both rock and jazz convincingly, but Vander comes about as close as anyone I've ever heard, bringing the requisite bombast for the former and a very genuine sense of touch and buoyancy, as demanded by the latter.) But, one wonders, given Magma's 1969 vintage, who was it that influenced whom?

The band played for about two hours, and yes, it was exhausting at times and hammy at others. But I was consoled by the notion of witnessing something absolutely singular. To nod to the great Rick Astley ("You wouldn't get this from any other guy"), you wouldn't get this from any other band, namely such a deep, committed demonstration of what PROG means, entirely unobscured by pop and for that matter, "classic rock." Sure you could go see the latter-day Yes (I've never had the pleasure—I'm sure it's amazing), but this is something much more grassroots, much more cult, something closer to the sublime, Zenned-out nerddom at the core of prog. It's nothing less than motivational speech in musical form: an overwhelming pageant of human achievement, i.e., "You too can accomplish such brilliance if you eat your Wheaties and practice every day." Definitely you can come and live with us, say the Vanders and their cohorts, busy erecting their otherworldly architecture—it won't be easy, but the sacrifices just might be worth it.

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Some background: a great 2002 interview with Christian Vander.