The “seminal” album Ian Anderson claimed introduced prog rock to England
If you don’t like prog, that’s fine, but you must still be able to appreciate why those who do like it are wholeheartedly fucking obsessed. When you listen to artists like Jethro Tull, Yes and Frank Zappa, you are listening to artists who truly know no limits.
Prog rock is a relatively difficult genre to pin down. When Frank Zappa was asked to define it, he admitted that it was tricky to do so and settled on describing it as any kind of rock music which doesn’t fit within the strict boundaries of mainstream rock.
You had the straightforward riffs, big choruses and face-melting solos, lovely, but you can only go so far with them. When people want to expand upon what rock sets up and incorporate different genres, styles and types of music from around the world, that’s when the genre strays slightly further into prog.
Someone who has spent their career taking full advantage of the limitlessness of prog rock is Ian Anderson. Both with solo endeavours and the work he did with Jethro Tull, Anderson has been able to create a mix of music which is well and truly spellbinding. You can listen to Aqualung and experience the band’s great use of folk music alongside cutting-edge rock, but they go much further than that in their musical conquests. Every style of music underneath this bold, blazing sun has been touched upon at some point by Anderson and Jethro Tull.
He credits his tour with Led Zeppelin as being truly goddamn eye-opening, saying that they helped show him how you can take forms of music from different countries and cultures and incorporate them into rock in a way which is exciting and does both styles of music justice. He learned a lot from them and built it into his own sound moving forward.
“I think what they showed to all their peer group as musicians was that there was, first of all, a very powerful and dramatic way to perform simple, direct rock music and also to introduce elements of more eclectic music,” said Anderson. “Because Zeppelin, near the beginning, there were a lot of elements of folk music, and Asian music, and African music that crept into their stuff.”
However, while Anderson was a big fan of Led Zeppelin and admits they certainly influenced him, he also recognises that they (and every prog rock band) probably wouldn’t exist without the music of The Graham Bond Organisation. Anderson was also a big fan of Cream, and this was the band both Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce played in before they teamed up with Eric Clapton.
Their album, The Sound of ‘65, despite flying under the radar somewhat as far as being a footnote in history is concerned, was an album that well and truly introduced prog rock to all those curious musical minds that had the ears to hear it. It wasn’t for everyone, but this was an album that well and truly sparked a sonic revolution.
“That was the seminal album for anyone in the UK nurturing early jazz-rock pretensions,” Anderson concluded. “Two pre-Cream members plus the renegade jazzman Bond give sturdy renditions of classic jazz, blues, and home-grown compositions which fired a generation of Brit bands of the late 1960s, early ‘70s.”
