EMERSON LAKE & PALMER

One of the most defining exponents of progressive rock was Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a British supergroup from the 1970s known for its elaborate stage antics and its distinctive sound. In combining melodies and structures from classical music with rock & roll energy and instrumentation, they successfully brought together the European and North-American traditions of Western music and created a completely unique kind of music.

Keith Emerson, the band's driving force who was nicknamed the Hendrix of the Hammond organ, originally rose to fame as keyboard player of The Nice, which can be seen as a "proto-ELP" of sorts. It was an innovative rock band characterized by the prevalence of Emerson's keyboards and his bizarre antics on stage. Live performances of The Nice contained lengthy, virtuosic organ solos in which Emerson would stab knives into his instrument to hold down notes, or jump over his organ to play Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor? while standing behind his instrument.

While The Nice's sound already contained a prototype of the rock/jazz/classical fusion that would become ELP's trademark, Emerson envisioned a far more ambitious project and left the band in 1970 before forming a new group with singer/guitarist Greg Lake and drummer Carl Palmer. Greg Lake had been an unknown until he provided lead vocals and bass guitar for King Crimson's widely acclaimed 1969 debut album In The Court Of The Crimson King. His unique voice contributed to the celestial atmosphere of that album and would become a staple in ELP's sound. Carl Palmer on the other hand had previously made a name for himself as drummer in Arthur Brown's band, and later in the hard rock band Atomic Rooster. Aside from his skills at beating the hell out of his drum kit, he would also become known for his extensive arsenal of additional percussion, including a set of timpanis, tubular bells, two giant gongs and a bell that he could play with his mouth. The trio quickly acquired a record contract and kick-started their career by firing three cannons on stage at the Isle Of Wight Festival in August, 1970. Two months later, they released their first, eponymous, album, with which they wanted to smack their audience in the face and show them all that they were capable of at once. The album starts off right away with an example of the kind of rock/classical fusion the band would become known for: "The Barbarian". It's a cover of Béla Bartók's "Allegro Barbaro" which is a piano solo piece, but you know you're in for something of an entirely different nature when you first hear the ominous fuzzy bass notes that open the album. Bartók's original piece has been transformed into a roaring apocalyptic tune, dominated by Emerson's furious organ barrage that more than compensates for the absence of guitars, before giving way to the relatively quiet piano-driven midsection, which follows the original more closely. But the tension keeps building up until the introduction is reprised again, and afterwards the song ends with a "call-and-answer" duel between the screaming organ and Palmer's impeccable drum blasts.

Too rough for you? Don't worry, cause the boys try to create a number of different moods on this album, and the next song couldn't be more different from its predecessor. "Take A Pebble" starts off as a beautiful piano ballad on which Greg Lake gets to shine with his heavenly vocals. However, the song is extended to no less than twelve minutes with some acoustic guitar plucking by Lake and a prolonged piano improvisation from Emerson. This might be one of the best showcases of Emerson's amazing keyboard talent: for several minutes, he plays the same eight-note ostinato with his left hand while playing masterful licks with his right hand, seamlessly varying between classically influenced chops and typically jazzy note sequences.

"Knife-Edge" is much more straight-forward, as it actually has a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure (more or less). The instrumentation is also much closer to conventional rock music, despite the fact that Emerson's organ is once again the dominant instrument. The main melody is borrowed from Janáček's Sinfonietta, but it's presented in such a way that it becomes its own thing entirely. It rocks!

Now, while the first three tracks perfectly capture the trio's strength as a group, the next three tracks are rather meant to display the individual talents of each musician. If you're an Emerson fan, you're in luck because he's the only band member who's present on the first two parts of "The Three Fates". This starts off as a purely classical composition, beginning with an introduction on organ before moving to another beautiful piano passage, less ethereal than the one on "Take A Pebble", but more complex and engaging. While the piece shows influence from composers such as Chopin and Ravel, Emerson refrains from directly quoting other compositions, plus he again incorporates chromatic jazz scales to avoid it sounding too derivative. Then, in the final part, Lake and Palmer finally join in to bring the piece to a chaotic ending.

"Tank" puts Palmer in the spotlight, but it's sadly not as interesting as what came before. The focus of the song is his drum solo, which he uses in part to show off his aforementioned percussion set, but for the most part it's just an erratic collection of kicks and snares without much rhyme or reason. The song was mainly meant for live performances where the effect could indeed be impressive, and its inclusion on this album would be rather pointless if it weren't for the catchy, jazzy clavinet and synth solos that bookend it and turn it into a memorable composition in its own right.

Finally, "Lucky Man" is an acoustic folksy song written by Lake when he was twelve years old. It's probably the most normal song on the album. Emerson doesn't show up at all until the last minute when he throws in a solo with the undiluted square wave oscillator of his newly acquired Moog Synthesizer. It doesn't fit with the rest of the song at all but it gives a pretty hilarious effect. "Lucky Man" was the band's first single and its most well-known song to this day, which is unfortunate because it does not represent the band's style very well. I even happened to hear it on the radio the day after Keith Emerson's death in 2016, and the station was nice enough to cut out the synth solo in its entirety, thus completely removing his contribution to the song. Maybe it was meant to be symbolic?...

In all, the album as a whole feels a little unfocused, but the individual songs are just so strong. All of these weird rhythms and song structures will probably take some time to get used to, and I realize that many may shake their head at the prospect of listening to a twelve-minute song (look out, by the way: "Take A Pebble" is far from the longest track ELP ever recorded?), but if you allow it to sink in you can't help but be enthralled by it in the end. At the very least you have to acknowledge the talent and the ambition of the musicians and songwriters at work.