Making Progress...

The other night, I was listening to the album "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" by the ineffable Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, released in 1970; a year after his masterpiece "Trout Mask Replica". Either album is a challenge to modern mainstream sensibilities, well over fifty years on: in themselves the very definition of 'progressive', and I don't mean that in the sense of 'prog rock', which simply took some standard classical tropes and wrapped them up in a rock-based framework; but rather in the sense of actual, musical progression: the natural ethos of jazz in the twentieth century, when it sought at every turn to overthrow the musical sensibilities of the previous generation. Each sounded fresh at its inception and challenged the orthodoxies that had preceded it.

Somehow, however, its progress forward slowed and stopped altogether, just over fifty years ago: after the go-nowhere free jazz experiments, it just seemed to retrench into a post-bop continuum which exists to this day, as if the genre had simply run out of steam and decided to stick with what it knew for the duration. The extreme polyrhythms on the two ancient Beefheart albums - Decals particularly - are difficult to get to grips with, but rewarding once you 'get' it. Today, most of the new and challenging stuff still flows from that crossover between late jazz and rock, although the stuff that's out there at the moment - the band Animals as Leaders for example, will challenge your musical mind and sensibilities still further. You takes your choice and you're free to leave the stuff: just give it a fair audition, though, it deserves it...