The first Jethro Tull album Ian Anderson considered prog rock: “Very apt”
While it might seem difficult to pinpoint exactly what turns straightforward ‘rock’ into ‘progressive rock’, it’s easy to say that it wasn’t much of a phenomenon until the late 1960s.
Rock was only beginning to find its feet in the early part of the decade, but by the end of it, it had branched out in so many different directions and incorporated many other styles that it almost feels like it could all have been described as progressive rock in some way or another.
The very nature of progression is to take an idea and stretch it further than it previously had been, so by this definition, anything that was steering away from tradition could feasibly have been progressive rock. That being said, there were a handful of artists emerging who seemed hell-bent on stretching the parameters of the genre, and who used their love and knowledge of jazz, folk and classical music to create sprawling and complex masterpieces.
Largely stemming from the UK, acts like The Nice, Family and Soft Machine were considered to be among the first to begin operating in this fashion, but Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson would personally like to dispute them being the bands that the term was coined as a result of.
Having formed in 1967, the band initially began as a blues rock group who delivered a reasonable deal of experimentation on their debut album, This Was, when it was released the following year. To be considered a blues rock outfit while delving into jazz fusion and folk was unusual for the time, but due to the lack of terminology, they were stuck with the more traditional descriptors being applied to them at the time.
However, once they began to hone their sound a little more, and were garnering significantly more attention, the British press seemed to have a tough time finding the appropriate way to describe their uniqueness, and so when their second album, Stand Up, was released in 1969, critics had to find a new way of labelling this pioneering sound that they’d come up with.
Anderson, in a 2018 interview with Vintage Rock, claimed that the release of this record was when the term ‘progressive rock’ first came into use. “By the summer of ’68, once Jethro Tull had been in action for four or five months, I was writing the music that became the material on the Stand Up album, which was a big change in as much as it didn’t abandon blues-based music completely, but it certainly reduced it to appearing in the context of a song or two,” he declared.
Adding, “The rest of the music on Stand Up was described by the British press as being ‘progressive rock’ music. That was the first time I heard that term coined by a music journalist in the UK. That seemed to me a very apt description.”
While other albums may have already been made in this vein prior to Stand Up’s release, they’ve only been retroactively given this label. Therefore, while its origins can be debated, Jethro Tull have a reasonable argument as to why they made the first official ‘progressive rock’ album.
