Chick Corea’s romantic warriors

RETURN TO FOREVER - "Romantic Warrior"

Truly outstanding album.  And Lucas is entirely correct, it's jazz.  It was considered jazz when it was released and it's still considered jazz.

If you archive this album then you have to archive MILES DAVIS' "Bitches Brew" album and then pretty soon you are archiving "Live at Birdland" and "Glenn Miller Orchestra's Greatest Hits".

Where do you want to stop?

lucas wrote: And as I said previously, if this album has to be included in the archives, so all of the post-Davis bands : Weather Report, Tony Williams'Lifetime, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and many others have to be included.

Exactly correct. 

Well,
good thread here -- about jazz and fusion and their importance in the PROG era !

Here is an answer to the Stormcrow question: "

If you archive this album then you have to archive MILES DAVIS' "Bitches Brew" album and then pretty soon you are archiving "Live at Birdland" and "Glenn Miller Orchestra's Greatest Hits".

Where do you want to stop?

- Stormcrow

We will stop when we feel it's too far (any genre related). Band's that does not influence prog music  will not be added. To be more precise, I know that Miles Davis is important and will probably be the deeper we will go on this sub-genre.

Now, I know it is a subject of endless discussions ..
Let's hear it from the boys ..

 

Edited by philippe

lucas wrote: And as I said previously, if this album has to be included in the archives, so all of the post-Davis bands : Weather Report, Tony Williams'Lifetime, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and many others have to be included.

That is what I said!!!!

If a musician is considered as a jazz-musician, it doesn't mean that he/she only plays jazz-music. Chick Corea is considered as a jazz-musician, but I can't believe that you call Romantic Warrior a pure jazz-album. It has more similarities to Mahavishnu's "inner mounting flame" (fusion!) than Duke Ellington or Count Basie (as an example). Would you consider Genesis as a purely pop-band because they have produced more pop-albums???? Fusion has more in common with prog than both jazz and hard-rock.

National health, Hatfield & the north and Egg are defenitely Canterbury bands, not only because the majority of the musicians have their origin there, but also because you clearly can hear elements from the distinctive Canterbury sound (Caravan as the best example). As mentioned, Happy the Man, can be called a Canterbury band because of the similarities in the music (!). Picchio Dal Pozzo with their self-titled album as well. They made the third Hatfield & the North album in my opinion and the album is also dedicated to Robert Wyatt.

"RTF belongs to the jazz-rock section, not jazz-fusion, therefore not prog." 

You are joking, aren't you? Especially in reference to RTF's "Romantic Warrior", often said to be RTF album  influenced by Yes? But of course we are back to debating the meaning of progressive rock. The definitions posted here are most useful in sub-categorising the genre, however, they post date by some decades, the original 'progressive music' (the original term used), musical movement in the UK (and elsewhere). Without the benefits of hindsight in the late 60's progressive music, we saw various music genres as somewhat isolated islands; so you had classical, jazz,  folk, world, pop, rock, etc. some what isolated from each other. Therefore you could say that when Dylan went electric there was a hybridisation of folk with rock, then you have the west coast movement rock with folk (e.g. Jefferon Airplane) or Indian/Arabic (e.g. Great Society). Vanilla Fudge talked about symphonic rock in the mid 60's but how much of that was a tease, with their loose marriage of pop with classical - which also appears have influenced the development heavy rock according to Jeff Beck? There was the British marriage of rock with blues.  And then there was the marriage of rock with jazz in the UK - especially through Soft Machine and to a less extent Caravan. In the States it was the other way round as jazz picking up rock.  [As point of information: possibly the first jazz fusion album was by the Indo-Jazz Fusion group in 1965, which was the then modern jazz married to  classical Indian music - alas its founder John Mayer was killed in a car crash this February]. All these forms were originally accepted as progressing popular music, and so "progressive music". And jazz rock (as opposed to much else in the jazz fusion world) was accepted as a sub-variant of progressive rock - (BTW why can I find reference to Mahavishnu Orchestra here? )

Eventually those islands of musical genre had the spaces filled in between and as a result it became increasingly difficult to produce progressive music that didn't owe something to a previous prog band (hence for instance the emergence of the  neo-prog movement).

Finally, what is your evidence for saying Soft Machine isn't Canterbury - you are really challenging most other people's definitions here?

 

 

I agree that if Return for Forever has roughly as much of a prog claim as Mahavishnu Orchestra and definitely as much of a claim to prog as Billy Cobham's solo work. At times RTF reminds me of ELP, Yes and Zappa (It was more prog than a lot of stuff on Grand Wazoo). A helluva lot of prog is more jazz-influenced than many other rock genres so, as many here have said, the lines are blurry.

Having said that, I love RTF's eponymous debut album (especially the title track) which is gorgeous, ethereal jazz that has little to do with prog, and prefer it to their heavy prog-ish Romantic Warrior period with Al Di Meola.