of society are grasped when a significant part of society is compelled to expand its understanding of these forces. Then this understanding becomes a real force in the lives of many people. As the late sixties gave way to the seventies, many people were prepared by their social experience to be open to experimental, visionary, and utopian music that was brilliantly crafted and performed.
Perhaps the key preparation for this possibility was made starting about ten years earlier, by John Coltrane. He and a number of other post-boppers expanded the frontiers of jazz; they were popular, at least among a significant and international public, and their music had to be understood against the background of both the oppression and struggle of Black people, the Civil Rights Movement, and the emergence of Black Power. (This is not to say that I advocate any kind of crude reduction of this music to particular aspects of social movements or upheavals. More on this general question in a moment.) John Coltrane, certainly one of the greatest visionary and virtuoso musicians of any time period or genre, was always pushing the limits. Indeed, as any avant-garde composer or musician must do, he placed into question the very nature and possibility of music itself—for which some critics called his music “anti-jazz” or “nihilistic.”
There came a moment, perhaps best captured by the Concert in Japan album, when Coltrane seemed to take a leap into the stratosphere, and many of his admirers had great difficulty following him. Perhaps as long as only two of the basic elements of music were stretched to the limit, or perhaps somewhat beyond the limit, and the other four elements were relatively restrained, then Coltrane was able to take many people along on the journey. (I’m taking the “basic elements” to be melody, harmony, rhythm or meter, timbre, duration, and dynamics.) But, as soon as the figure no longer seemed to have a ground, there was a sense of complete suspension and fragmentation, and fewer people were ready for it. The jazz that continued to go down this road (or up into this space), for instance that of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, or Anthony Braxton, no longer had a mass following. From this time, serious jazz increasingly became the province of intellectuals (many of them white, male, and middle class); this Black music became separated from the masses of Black people.
An instructive counterexample is provided by the late-sixties music of Miles Davis. This is the Miles who had heard Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and the Byrds—and his music from this time, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Miles Davis at Fillmore (where Miles and group opened for the Byrds, in fact), was a part of the general crossing of musical and social barriers of this time. Whereas the time was not entirely ripe for a popular avant-garde just a few years earlier (John Coltrane died in 1967 at the age of forty-one), by the time Miles Davis played the Fillmore East, in June 1970, dramatic changes had taken place. Not that the critics necessarily liked these changes; for instance, in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz for 1978, authors Brian Case and Stan Britt argue that, prior to Bitches Brew, “Miles cut what, from the jazz fan’s viewpoint, was to be his last album (In a Silent Way)” (p. 59). “Although labels are arbitrary, Miles Davis’ subsequent output is of little interest to the jazz record collector” (p. 59). So much the worse, then, for the “jazz record collector”—but what of those who saw that music was taking an adventurous turn along with culture and politics more generally? An account by Morgan Ames, from the liner notes to Fillmore, is instructive:
I went to see Miles at the Hollywood Bowl recently, in concert opposite The Band. At least half the audience was young rock fans. There were also jazz people of all categories—middling executives with their tolerant wives, boppers, suede-covered mods who like both rock and jazz. There was black pride, in vivid African shirts and robes. And young girls with young children. There were celebrities, particularly from the music world. Most had come to see what Miles was up to now. The night was warm and the air was laced with waiting: Miles Davis and The Band? What does that mean?
Miles opened the show. He and his group played for about 45 minutes without pause. The critics wiped him out in the paper the following morning. But the audience loved him. In amphitheaters as large as the Hollywood Bowl, a roaring ovation can sound like a polite coming-together-of-hands, unless you listen closely and look around you. I did. Hippies were on one side of us, non-descripts were behind, a black couple was on the other side. Front-to-back it was a happily received evening. People liked what Miles was about, even if they couldn’t grasp the free-form display. They felt his honest effort, his adventure, his openness, and they took him in without asking why. For Miles Davis has the hunger and the ability to entertain through exploration.
Of course, another thing that had changed in the years 1967–1970 is that, by the latter year, electricity permeated everything. Arguably, this was not the best thing for jazz in the long run, and perhaps not for anything. At the time, however, there was certainly a feeling of “electric freedom” (as in “Sound Chaser” by Yes) that crossed all boundaries and was perhaps a necessary component of a culture and politics where “the whole world’s watching.”
Throughout the short history of rock music up to that point, there had been, along with more commercial and mainstream efforts, an adventurous trend—going right back to Chuck Berry and Little Richard and, someone I’ve come to appreciate more and more in this respect, Bo Diddley. Into the 1960s we see harmonic and timbral innovation, especially on the part of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. With the latter, we see an increasing drive toward a global synthesis of music. Rock music begins to develop an avant-garde, and a subgeneration of musicians emerge who have tremendous instrumental, lyrical, and compositional skills. And millions of people are into it.
My aim in this book is to explore this very uncommon period. I hope, in the case of those of us who were around during the time of progressive rock, to recapture the feeling that what happened in music in that period was important, significant. I want to provide the philosophical, aesthetic, and social theoretical terms that would allow us to see that this period not only was significant but, indeed, still is and should be. For those of us who are new to this period (either we weren’t around then, or we didn’t pick up on what was happening at the time), I want to provide some access. We live in a time when it is very hard for anything to be significant or important, a time of an immense cultural machinery of pure distraction. Between 1968 and now, there lies an effort, which might especially be associated with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to blame the sixties for all sorts of things, and to attempt to make sure that, apart from superficial aspects of fashion, something like that doesn’t happen again. Progressive rock might seem to be a relatively minor part of the truly major social and cultural upheavals of that time. After all, 1968 saw the largest general strike to ever occur in a Western, industrialized country (the “events of May,” in France), and mass strikes in Mexico City, Chicago, Prague, Shanghai (there with the actual encouragement of a revolutionary government), and many other places. So, yes, it is the case that, from one valid perspective, the progressive rock chapter of this immense volume called “the sixties” would be relatively short. But there is something in that chapter that should not be lost, something that we need today, and it is toward the possibility of seizing again this moment that I write.
The reader will more than likely have figured out that I am writing not only from a perspective that is sympathetic to the sixties, but indeed from a perspective that is radical and, yes, somewhat Marxist. I feel that I need to say some things about this, “up front,” as it were.
Of course, this is not my first extended foray into these questions. I have written other books that explore various dimensions of radical social theory, as well as a book that readers of the present text may be familiar with, music of Yes: structure and vision in progressive rock. This book, about the music of what I regard as one of the essential pillars of progressive rock, argues not that the music of Yes is “Marxist,” in any sense, but that it instead partakes of the radical spirit of the sixties and carries this forward in a utopian and radically affirmative way. One thing that can be said about Yes is that there is not a trace of cynicism in their music—and this is an extraordinarily rare thing, even in progressive rock. Indeed, the music of Yes is something of an antidote for cynicism, and therefore is especially despised by “critics” who believe that a cynical attitude is the height of hip.
Edward Macan ends his interesting and important book on English progressive rock, Rocking the Classics,