What Ingredients do you NEED in your Prog?

As for "you can't play prog without drums", pshaw and tish, says I.

There's a famous Sonny Rollins gig where someone is playing jazz on bagpipes. 

Davesax1965 wrote: There's a famous Sonny Rollins gig where someone is playing jazz on bagpipes.  I play sax, which is pretty much an accepted instrument for prog, and flute, ditto. I also used to play EWI - electronic wind instrument, ie wind synth.  Bagpipes, which I can also play (just not very well !!! ) are just a wind instrument with a drone note. It's not the instrument which produces music, but the music which is played which defines what it is. If I played a sax solo over a drone note background, would you say "That's wrong ? " Nope, so it's all contextual. ;-) I work with two geniuses who tell me all about playing the sax. They know about music, you see, from listening to it. One was telling me about "the great sax solo in Karma Chameleon" - I said, Linda, that's a harmonica - the other one was telling me how some hold music sounded "like Baker Street" - well, if you'd played it in a major key on a modern Yani or Yam sax, alto instead of tenor, in a completely different style, time and key........... yes......... And there are several different kind of bagpipes, Exit, not just "great Highland pipes". Bet I could work a set of Northumberland pipes into a prog tune. ;-)

Point taken re wind instruments but as is the norm, my tongue was in the region of my bare faced cheek

Davesax1965 wrote: There's a famous Sonny Rollins gig where someone is playing jazz on bagpipes.

I've been thinking that prog is more a state of mind or a way of thinking about music than it is a specific genre.  I have never heard of more disagreements or arguments about what is genre acceptable etc.

Weirdness. Unpredictability. Something that will take you to another world with the help of guitars, drums and vocals. There's no single formula but still imo prog should contain many instruments, not only traditional ones, interesting song writing with no verse-chorsus-verse structure.

Skullhead wrote: NOT following what one is supposed to do.  Long pieces, using more complexity than might be required, applauding virtuosity to some extent and so on.

Coming from a jazz/classical semi-background (father is a music professor; I've had lessons for various instruments and composition and theory with several professors), I can tell you that is exactly what musical academia wants and expects from you i.e. exactly what you're supposed to do. You're simply extolling the long-held values of the Western "high art" institution. Not a terrible thing to extol, but nothing so progressive or forward-thinking either. As far as the rules of Western theory go, classical and jazz had already broken all of them before progressive rock showed up. Rock has always been "post-rules,"— forward-thinking because it doesn't even give a thought to the rules of classical theory, not because it breaks them directly. So prog was innovative from a rock standpoint because it did incorporate western theory, but rock is inclusive. It has no physical rules to break, although it had social rules to break, and, at the time, prog was breaking them with good ol' pretension. But pay in mind, that prog also had surprisingly short (Frank Zappa's Apostrophe, or "Five Per Cent for Nothing" and similar tracks), compositionally simple (Can's repetitious "Halleluwah"), and/or unvirtuousic pieces (Tangerine Dream anybody?). Neither rock nor prog have ever been about being your theory teacher's wet dream, nor your music's critic's wet dream. Rock has always been about expression. For me, it is precisely the artists who create long, complex, virtuosic pieces that seemingly aren't guided first and foremost by a desire to express that bother me the most.