Earliest born prog musician? - Progressive Rock Music Forum

The earliest I have found is Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster, born 1934. Anyone know of any prog musicians that were born earlier than that? It seems like the majority of the most prominent prog musicians were born in the mid-to-late 40s.

Yeah, I know of a few cases like that. Mal Waldron (born 1925) played with Embryo, Pierre Henry (born 1927) collaborated with Spooky Tooth on 'Ceremony' a prog album from 1969, you even have Timothy Leary (born 1920) who collaborated with Ash Ra Tempel in the early 70s, though he presumably wasn't involved with the musical aspect. As an extreme example, you have Jean Dubuffet (born 1901) creating the cover art for Jasun Martz's 'The Pillory' in 1978!

However, I'm more interested in full-fledged prog musicians who actually composed prog music and were heavily involved in the prog scene. You can find a lot of weird examples of avant-garde and jazz musicians dipping their toes in when prog was big in the 70s but full-fledged prog musicians seem to have almost exclusively been people under the age of 30 (with exceptions like Roedelius, which is what I'm looking for) when it was in its heyday.

Ooh, I missed the part about him being a sound engineer for those krautrock albums, that's pretty interesting! I guess sound engineers/producers would be interesting to hear about too, though I'm mainly interested in musicians.

Edited by nevertoomuch - October 06 2018 at 07:42

Easy Money wrote:

The drummer for Spirit was older than most everyone else, forget his name and don't know his age, I just recall him being from a previous generation.

Ah yes, Ed Cassidy, how could I forget? It's debatable whether or not Spirit is prog but his drumming style that mixed jazz and psychedelic rock was pretty ahead of its time. Still, to my knowledge, he didn't compose any of Spirit's stuff.

Ed Cassidy was born in 1923 and he did indeed co-write many songs with Randy California.

PROGMATIC

Manuel wrote:

There were other great musicians who were composing great music that's not considered "prog', like Master Robert Heningam, whom I knew personally, whose music (he is considered a classic composer) was quite outstanding and expressed his appreciation for the progressive music of that era, but I guess that not what you are looking for.

Well it's not what the thread was intended to be about but I definitely find stuff like this interesting, i.e. people from before the Baby Boomers appreciating progressive music (or modern music in general).

Papa John Creach (Jefferson Airplane) was born in 1917. But I raise a yet higher bid in terms of ancientry, from the RPI realm: Charles Tiring of Jacula fame was born in 1903.

Gilli Smith from Gong was born in June of 1933.

Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - October 06 2018 at 21:28

I never learned math, and only judge by my eyes, so Steve Howe.

The Dark Elf wrote:

Gronk the Neanderthal, who stretched an animal skin over a wood hoop and began to bang on the contraption with a stick whilst playing a bone nose flute. His conservative fellow-tribesmen kicked him out of the cave, and prog was born.

Has this Gronk already been included in the Krautrock subgenre?

This only counts if Gronk was playing in 17/8 time.