Losing interest in prog

Originally posted by ProgEpics The problem is most prog bands try to sound like others so you never hear anything new, and a lot of prog bands are afraid to use good melody writing at the risk of people think they are sell outs. Also progressive music can be any style that does something that isn't common. I know a lot of people don't consider the beach boys to be progressive but pet sounds was a huge breakthrough in making progressive music in the mid 60s. Brian wilson managed to combine creepy melancholic jazzy chords with pop music while using every instrument you can imagine. To me that's what progressive is, doing something new or combining elements from a lot of styles.

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Originally posted by rogerthat Originally posted by dennismoore   Jazz in fact uses a lot of whole tone scales that allow playing together withought "interval clashing".  This is how a jazz bass player can play a repetitive scale and let the piano or horn player do whatever they like with freedom.  It is not a criticism, it is a fact.  Classical is written from the ground up where every note counts in how it interacts with all the other harmonic lines in compsition.  Western classical music(lets stick to that for simplicity) uses pretty much every scale in the book and as a composer there would be an infinite ways to sound really horrible whilst one composes multi-voice music.   You can jump & scream all you want, jazz has a built in safeguard with the simple scales most jazz artists use, that let them really express themselves, yet it is a very monophonic thing going on.  All the jazz greats from Coltrane on down the line, have worked within that constrain.   Jazz is great yes, does jazz have anywhere near the harmonic interaction of classical???  You are joking, right???   I should have said, jazz has much less harmony, than classical, now I need to type all these silly replies. I am not sure how much all of these observations would apply to ALL jazz music.  But there are two ways of looking at harmony...either at all the layers or at the chord progressions.  Jazz is not about layers but about unpredictable chord progressions.  I am not going to judge which is harder to compose or harder to play but as a listener, both the things are important to me.  Layers create different shades of timbre while chord progressions create excitement.  If you are into ELP, you would certainly be aware that jazz was as much an influence on Emerson as classical music.  So...not as many harmonic layers as classical music?  Sure! But harmony is fundamentally important to jazz, as it is to many Western music forms, I should say.

Jazz is all about harmony and Mianly (would you believ playing in 4/4 just so it's relativley easy to moveback into a verse! The harmony is expressing music often outside the normal octave range. Just listen to Joe Pass for master lessons on guitar harmony all by himself. The compex worlks of Ornette Coleman and Charlie Mingues,standards from the Great American Songbook are rich and driupping with harmonic depth(even if you don't want to hear Moon River ever again!)

Jazz Harmony can be amazingly complex (which was why Miles wanted to move in a 1 chord pedal tone at times, much easier to express his ideas (Think Bitches Brew to Agharta, Pangea and the Dark Magus albums).

Limited harmony might be say, rapor noise  experimentalists (not being snobby - just saying that standard msuc harmony is not apparent in all musc but absolutely full of jazz.).

oh yeah, as FZ fans.

We'll tell you the same Wazoo...

The way I see it, it's just music. I don't listen to the music I used to listen to when I was in middle school too often at all... my interests have changed as I have changed.