Harold Budd Tribute

The OKTAF RECORDS label is putting out what looks to be a very promising tribute album to Harold Budd with people like Biosphere, Marsen Jules,  and several artists I’m less familiar with.

Here’s the Press Release:

With “Lost In The Humming Air – Music inspired by Harold Budd” oktaf records announces an amazing collection of thirteen exclusive tracks made by a selection of some of todays best known ambient music producers giving their tribute to the outstanding piano legend Harold Budd.

The playlists features names as: Deaf Center, Loscil, Martin Fuhs, Biosphere, Xela, Marsen Jules, Andrew Thomas, Mokira, Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Porn Sword Tobacco and bvdub feat. Criss Van Wey.

Well known for his spaceful piano playing and his early cooperations with Brian Eno, Harold Budd has inspired a whole generation of modern protagonists of ambient, jazz and especially the so called modern classical genre. With his recent releases on David Sylvians Samadhi Sound label as well as on Darla, he is still showing his outstanding musical genius to the world.

“Lost in the Humming Air (Music inspired by Harold Budd)” will be released on April 9th (March 26th digital) on oktaf records. Exclusively distributed by Kompakt.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Become a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news.

Oster/Manring/Weingarten in Echoes Living Room

They call themselves Blue Eternity now, but we know them as trumpeter Jeff Oster, bassist Michael Manring, and electric slide guitarist Carl Weingarten.  They are all familiar to listeners of Echoes.  Michael Manring was a founder of the group Montreux, recorded many solo albums and was the house bassist for Windham Hill Records in the 1980s and ’90s.   Carl Weingarten first came to renown with the progressive rock group, Delay Tactics before striking out from St. Louis to San Francisco where he immersed himself in the dobro, slide guitar and world music with a few other stops in between.  He’s been a fixture on Echoes for years.  Jeff Oster is the trumpet/flugelhorn playing investment specialist who also makes albums that hover between jazz and ambient music, including his Echoes CD of the Month Club selection, Surrender.

A couple of months ago they came into the original Echoes Living Room to perform a set of Oster’s music and then a set of improvisations they’ve been playing as an ensemble.  Oster’s set ran already.  The concert by the ensemble, now known as Blue Eternity, runs on January 17 on Echoes.

We don’t usually film Echoes performances, but they did and here’s a clip from one of the songs.  Footage includes their live performance and some shots of my neighborhood.

Hear Jeff Oster with Michael Manring and Carl Weingarten live  on Echoes 12/17 and the following weekend. Details.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

You get great CDs like Jeff Oster’s Surrender by becoming a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news.

John Diliberto’s Best of Sleepy Hollow 2011.

I’ve made my own Best of List, an Echoes Best of List, the Echoes Listener Poll and now, here’s the Best of Sleepy Hollow 2011. For those of you who don’t know, Sleepy Hollow is the long-lived weekend morning music show on WXPN in Philadelphia.   (It says 30 years on the website but it’s closer to 40 now.) It’s similar in tone to Echoes, only even mellower with a greater emphasis on singer-songwriters from Nick Drake to Norah Jones.    This Sunday, December 12, I’ll run my Best of Sleepy Hollow show from 6-8AM. That will be followed by Keith Brand with his favorite Sleepy Hollow tunes of the past year.  Looking at it, it’s not too dissimilar to the 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2011.  What a surprise.

ARTIST -  SONG  -  ALBUM

1 – Agnes Obel – Riverside – Philharmonics

2 – Skuli Sverrisson – Her Looking Back – Seria II

3 – Jeff Oster – Beautiful Silence – Surrender

4 – Olafur Arnalds – Pu Ert Joroin (You Are the Earth) – And They Have Escaped the Weight

5 – Winterlight – Suddenly Something Good – Hope Dies Last

6 – Moby – Rockets – Destroyed

7 – Iarla Ó Lionáird – Foxlight – Foxlight

8 – Lia Ices – Bag of Wind – Grown Unknown

9 – Thurston Moore – Benediction – Demolished Thoughts

10 – Royksopp – Forsaken Cowboy – Senior

11 – Arrica Rose – Sail Away – Let Alone Sea

12 – Shelby Lynne – I’ll Hold Your Head – Revelation Road

13 – Jonathan Wilson – Gentle Spirit – Gentle Spirit

14 – Dustin O’Halloran – We Move Lightly – Lumiere

15 – Keith Jarrett – Part Xiii – Rio

16 – Low Roar – Help Me – Low Roar

17 – Moya Brennan – Go Brach – Voices and Harps

18 – Marketa Irglova – Wings of Desire – Anar

19 – Patrick O’Hearn – Playground – Transitions

20 – Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse – Body & Soul – Duets II

21 – Pat Metheny – The Sound of Silence – What’s It All About

22 – Francis Lai – Emmanuelle II – The Essential Film Collection

23 – Emmy Lou Harris – My Name is Emmett Till – Hard Bargain

24 – Peter Gabriel – Mercy Street – New Blood

25 – St. Vincent – Champagne Year – Strange Mercy

John Diliberto ((( echoes ))) 

You get great CDs like these by becoming a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news.

Echoes September CD of the Month: Fernwood’s Sangita

Global Americana Chamber Music

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Fernwood‘s music, here.

Fernwood is the name of an acoustic band from southern California, but that’s about the only geographical data on this group that’s easy to nail down.  Consisting of  multi-instrumentalists, Gayle Ellett and Todd Montgomery, Fernwood’s music is an undefinable sound, a kind of Americana world chamber music.  Following up their debut, Almeria,  Fernwood’s new CD, Sangita continues their mix of banjo and bouzouki, sitar and mandolin into a soundscape that’s as sweet as a country fiddle tune and as beguiling as a raga.

Gayle Ellett plays pyrotechnic guitar solos with the progressive rock group, Djam Karet, but with Fernwood he’s looking for something different.

Gayle Ellett: We’re trying to make music that’s overtly beautiful and not be afraid of that and make music that doesn’t show off our technical skills or how fast we can play.  Which is hard to be mature enough to chill out and not turn it into a shredfest and look what I can do.

Todd Montgomery is a scholar of world instruments.

Todd Montgomery @ Echoes Session

Todd Montgomery: Over time I realized I was always learning another cultural style of music and I finally realized doing Fernwood, it wasn’t the culture I was interested in.  It was the instrument. So that’s really the main drive, to blend all these beautiful sounds and have everyone hear them.

Fernwood carve out an Americana world music full of sonic details and plaintive melodies. Indian ambiences, Appalachian picking and an elegant European nostalgia converge on “Cimarron.” It’s like a Nino Rota score for a Fellini film, played by a bluegrass band.

On both their album covers, Fernwood prints the statement:

All music played by hand, on instruments made out of wood.

Gayle Ellett: Our music just about loving the sound that comes out of the instruments and just trying to serve that, the instrument and the love of the tone. So it is kind of a manifesto.

Fernwood have the antique charm of a gentle but surreal music box cranked in the Ozarks on tines from India.  Their new album is Sangita and it’s the Echoes CD of the Month for September. I’ll be featuring it on Monday’s show.  This has been an Echo Location.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Ray Montford

Canadian Guitarist Ray Montford threads together country, new age and Pink Floyd

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Ray Montford’s music here.

Guitarist Ray Montford has garnered accolades from people like film director Atom Egoyan and Windham Hill Records founder Will Ackerman.  The Canadian musician is slowly being discovered by listeners who want their music to take them somewhere.   Ray Montford has played scores of sessions in Canada, ranging from work with gaelic singer Mary Jane Lamond to the Canadian country band, The Rankin Family.  He’s a little dismissive of that work.

RAY MONTFORD: I toured with them in the mid-nineties when they were at the top of their game. We went to the States a few times. I just basically put on a hat that they wanted me to wear, and I did that.

But that might account for some of the country inflections you hear in Ray Montford’s playing. He made his first recordings on acoustic guitar, inspired by Windham Hill players like the late-Michael Hedges.

RAY MONTFORD: I was really into exploring open tunings and that whole   Michael Hedges vibe. But then it took me a while to realize that’s not really where my heart is, and my form of expression is more with a rhythm section and creating textures with that kind of support behind them. So it’s too bad in a way, because if I had stuck to the solo thing I’d probably be getting more gigs. [laughs]

Ray Montford

But then he couldn’t have played those Pink Floyd inspired leads.  On Ray Montford’s latest CD, A Fragile Balance there’s a sense of pain and loss in the titles and music.  Ray had a few rough years that included being laid up with injuries.

RAY MONTFORD:  I had gone through a couple of serious injuries within two years, one of them involving a car accident. I was on a bicycle, so I felt very grateful that nothing worse had happened. So that changes the lens in how you see things. I think some of those titles are based on that.

Titles like when “Darkness Takes Flight.”

Ray Montford’s A Fragile Balance is an often haunting, but just as often triumphal statement.  It’s out on Softtail Records. I’ve got a more extended interview with Ray on Friday’s Echoes. This has been an Echo Location.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

10 Best Vangelis CDs

John Diliberto & Vangelis

In the 1970s and early 80s, Vangelis was synonymous with orchestral electronic music the way another Greek, Yanni, is synonymous with the New Age music.  Whether it’s his film soundtracks forChariots of Fire and Blade Runner, or his epic albums Albedo 0.39 and Voices, the sound of Vangelis has shaped much of Echoes‘ first 20 years.  Vangelis is the father of symphonic synthesis, that style that merges electronics with the expansive compositions and arrangements of a classical orchestra. But while most electronic musicians who employ symphonic textures wind up sounding pseudo-classical, when Vangelis does it, he just sounds like Vangelis.

Vangelis Papathanassiou has released over forty albums and soundtracks since his official debut, Earth in 1973.   His career spans psychedelic, progressive rock, electronic, new age and symphonic music.  While there is a distinct Vangelis sound, marked by sweeping orchestral strings, often bombastic dynamic shifts, and ostinato sequences, he has stretched, bent and mutated those characteristics into widely divergent compositions over the years.  Albums like Beaubourg and Invisible Connections are  electronic freakouts that could’ve come from the Columbia-Princeton Studios or Radio Cologne.  That sound is counterbalanced by his sweeter music like the score to Chariots of Fire or his pop work with Yes singer Jon Anderson.

On Wednesday, Jully 22, I’ll be airing a segment on Echoes called Vangelis Then & Now.  Due to DMCA restrictions, we can’t do the full Vangelis thing, but here’s a list of the Ten Essential Vangelis CDs I would’ve included.

TEN ESSENTIAL VANGELIS CDs

1-Albedo 0.39
This is Vangelis’ space music opus.  Along with its follow-up, Spiral, it’s his most sequencer driven album revealing the Zeitgeist of 1975, where Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre were releasing their space music journeys.  Albedo contains several of Vangelis’ best known themes, including the space explosion of “Pulstar.”

2-Mask
Mask is a dramatic choral work from Vangelis.  The choir is uncredited, but is likely the English Chamber Choir with lead tenor from Guy Protheroe.  Referencing Carl Orff and perhaps Magma, Vangelis orchestrates dramatic choral refrains that can sound like storm troopers on the march in “Movement 1″ or the imploring gothic voices from the heavens on “Movement 4″ with its marimba cycle and string bass groove.  I bought Mask on CD before I even had a CD player.

3-Heaven and Hell
Released in 1975, Heaven & Hell is a crowning achievement for Vangelis.  Composed with just a couple of synthesizers, a ton of percussion and the English Chamber Choir, it’s a dynamic and heroic work. From the opening synthesizer clarion, the choir calls out to the heavens, synthesizers spin in counterpoint to tuned percussion, and timpani and cymbals crash on the shores of Vangelis’ electronic orchestra.  And check out Vangelis’ uncharacteristically jazzy Fender Rhodes keyboard playing.  It also includes Jon Anderson‘s sweet interlude between movements, “So Long Ago, So Clear.”

4-Soil Festivities
This is the most “ambient” of Vangelis albums and his most underrated.  Inspired by life’s processes, Vangelis uses repetitive minimalist patterns, nature sounds as well as  flute and violin-like keyboard voices to create a seamless, contemplative journey that eschews his penchant for both sweetness and bombast.  Released in 1984, Soil Festivities isn’t a meditative piece but an evolving journey over its five movements.

5-China
China marked a real shift for Vangelis. Ethnic instruments had always been part of his palette, but he’d never delved as deeply as he did on this 1979 CD.  He plays Chinese flutes, the koto and other instruments mixing them in with his sweeping, cinematic synths for an east-west orchestra of the imagination.

6-Opera Sauvage
Released in 1979, Opera Sauvage is the score for a nature documentary by French filmmaker Frédéric Rossif.    It contains one of Vangelis’ best known songs, the poignant “L’enfant.” It’s a simple pentatonic theme with piano chirping out the sparse melody over a two note synthesizer ostinato, yet it remains remains powerfully evocative and hymn-like.  Used in the film, The Year of Living Dangerously, it stole the score from Maurice Jarre’s actual soundtrack.

7-Voices
Voices arrived in 1995 after a four-year hiatus from studio recordings.  It’s an instantly recognizable set full of his trademark sequencer rhythms and orchestral synthesis.  Voices reestablished Vangelis’ preeminence as a master of music drama and atmosphere as Voices teems with heroic synthesizer melodies and inventive choral arrangements.  In addition to Vangelis’s instrumentals, there are three vocals, one each from Paul Young, Caroline Lavelle and an ethereal lost-in-space track from Stina Nordenstam on “Ask the Mountains.”

8-Antarctica
This little seen 1983 film by Koreyoshi Kurahara about a failed Japanese mission to Antarctica in 1958 features an epic score from Vangelis that picks up on the white-on-white landscapes, vast ice formations and chilled environment.  The title theme is a heroic work, while other tracks like “Antarctic Echoes” are full of the quiet, sweet repose that Vangelis frequently explores.  Just before his digital transition, you can hear the subtlety that Vangelis gets from his keyboards with the Chinese flute-like line on “Song of White.”

9-Spiral
Spiral, released in 1977, is in the vein of  Albedo 0.39 but only contains five long compositions ranging from the sequencer driven title track to the quietly poignant “Ballad” with its vocoder voice sounding a lament from within Vangelis’s circuitry.  This is Vangelis in sequencer overdrive.  I always loved the cover with the headphone jack coming out of the sky to plug directly into your head.

10-Blade Runner
Following on the heels of his lush, romantic score to Chariots of Fire, Vangelis composed this darker, edgier soundtrack in 1982 for Ridley Scott‘s archetypal science fiction thriller. Vangelis couched his electro-symphonic score in percussive rhythms and shadowed timbres.  This is the album I hear cited most often as an influence by electronic musicians   It was reissued last year as a 3 CD set with lots of new music.

Those are my picks.  I’m sure you might have others.   Tune in Weds., July 22 for a Vangelis suite, Then & Now on Echoes.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Rhian Sheehan’s New Zealand Soundscapes

New Zealand composer Rhian Sheehan uses synthesizers and music boxes.

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Rhian Sheehan’s music, here.

In the attic studio of his New Zealand home, just around the corner from where Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson makes his films,  Rhian Sheehan spins out electronic fantasies.  He’s got a room full of electronic gear, but on his new album, Standing in Silence, he raided his daughter’s toy chest and came out with a music box. It originally played “What a Wonderful World,” but after Rhian finished sampling it, it sounded quite different.

Rhian Sheehan: I took it out of context and tuned it to my own melody, Popped it through a sampler. I had this idea of What would it be like if you were inside of the music box and you could hear the cranks and the sounds, what would it sound like? That was the idea of that track which is track 3 on that album.

In a post-modern twist, Rhian took the digital melody he made from the music box and had that made back into a physical music box which he gave away with his CD. As he plays it in his studio, you can hear the melody of “Standing In Silence 3.”

Rhian Sheehan: We actually put that melody into a real music box so it was like deconstructing and reconstructing.

Although these instrument give Rhian Sheehan’s Standing in Silence a sense of innocence, there is also an undertow of foreboding.  Upon returning to the bucolic calm of New Zealand after an extended trips to places like Tokyo and India, he felt a certain disconnect.  You can see that in the photographs that accompany the CD: desolate urban locations in Tokyo and other places, but the music contains field recordings he made that are full of life and people.

Rhian Sheehan: I was fascinated with that idea. There are photos of shopping malls for example but there are no people, there’s nobody there. I guess that was the idea, in the music you can hear crowds and hear people but you never see people.

Rhian Sheehan’s new album is called Standing in Silence on Loop Records. I’ll have a more extended interview with Rhian on next Tuesdays Echoes.  This has been an Echo Location.

Here’s a video from Standing in Silence.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Trippin’ Out to Saturn with the Sun Ra Arkestra

The Sun Ra Arkestra made a return to earth this past Wednesday night at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.  The sound was high-school-gym awful, the seating on the floor uncomfortable, the lighting harsh.  It didn’t matter.  The 21-piece Sun Ra Arkestra, led by alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, raised the spirits in a two hour, non-stop performance that ranged from swing to corn to way the hell beyond.

The concert made me a born-again Arkestra devotee. Between 1972 and his departure from the planet in 1993, I saw the Arkestra every chance I could, some 30 times, including Christmas Eve in Boston.  But I’d resisted the Marshal Allen led band.  I thought it could only be a shell of the cosmic circus that Ra presented.  I was wrong.  Allen, always one of the formidable voices in the band, has kept Ra’s spirit alive with a performance that wasn’t a recreation.  It was another step in the Arkestra’s evolution.

But all the great Sun Ra elements were present.  There were spangled capes and hats, swing numbers and corny tunes, amateurish dancers and riveting horn sections, and of course, free form blowouts like you rarely see anymore.

Farrid Barron did a great job on piano and sending out shards of synthesizer chords, but it was actually Allen who handled all the electronic space age whoops, whorls and wiggles.  He played his antiquated, but effective electronic valve instrument when this wizened wizard wasn’t spitting out oscillating alto solos.  Now a spry 85, and with the Arkestra since 1958, he hasn’t lost anything.

Stalwarts with the Arkestra from the 60s, 70s and 80s included bassist Juini Booth, baritone man Danny Thompson, tenor sax player Charles Davis and trumpeter Michael Ray, who I still think of as the hot new young trumpeter, even though he’s been with the group since the late 1970s.

The Arkestra did their walk through the crowd, Noel Scott did somersaults, they essayed Fletcher Henderson’s “Big John Special,” a staple of Sun Ra’s later years and at the end, most of the horns left the stage and Marshall Allen and the percussionists let loose a joyful cacophony of free jazz blowing.

In the late 90s, I produced a documentary called Sun Ra’s Cosmic Swing for NPR‘s Jazz Profiles.  You can still catch it online, here.

Allen has released several albums with the Arkestra and they are currently touring Europe, doing the festival circuit.  You can catch their tour dates on the Arkestra’s website.

The Sun Ra Arkestra will perform  a Halloween show, an Arkestra tradition, on Oct. 31st. Philadelphia, PA, International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut street, PA 19104.  I’ll be the one standing in rapture.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Moby’s Wait for Me-July CD of the Month

Moby releases his best album in a decade, and it’s the July Echoes CD of the Month

It’s been ten years since Moby put out his multi-platinum selling album, Play. it became ubiquitous in films, TV, and commercials.   You’ll hear echoes of Play in Moby’s new album, Wait for Me,   a song cycle of personal reflection and heart-tugging moods.  Like the old field recordings he used on Play , its sound is dusty, scratchy and has an antique techno veneer. But even though he uses little vocal sampling, he writes his lyrics as if he was cutting and pasting vocals off old 78s.

Moby: I listen to a lot of very, very old music, And one of the things that I love about old blues and some old gospel music is how plaintive and repetitive they can be. And I guess because I listen to so much old African-American music, it kind of makes sense that when I would write my own vocals and my own lyrics that they’d be inspired by that.

Singers  Kelli Scarr and Amelia Zirin Brown (who also performs burlesque as Lady Rizzo) are the vocalists on several songs.   They’re little known singers, but they bring a vulnerability and world-weariness beyond their years to Moby’s music on songs like the title track, “Wait For Me.”

Moby: What’s expressed in that idea, “Wait for Me,” is a degree of vulnerability and longing. there is a spiritual connotation to it, which is that idea of like saying to God or to whomever, like I clearly have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know what I’m doing, just have a little patience with me.

Wait for Me,  is a deeply personal album, far removed from Moby’s techno dance origins.

Moby:  Wait for Me is made by me in a very almost monastic way in my studio by myself late at night. And it’s really designed for one listener. It’s not designed for a party, it’s not designed for 20 people in a bar or night club to listen to. It’s for someone lying in bed Sunday morning at 9 o’clock when it’s raining outside.

Moby said he wanted to make a personal album, and he did, but it also speaks to universal yearning.  Wait for Me is out now on Mute Records.  It’s the Echoes July CD of the Month and I’ll have a more extended interview with Moby about it on Monday’s Echoes.

You can read a full review of Moby’s Wait for Me here.
You can hear an audio podcast of this blog, with music, here
You can hear an audio podcast of this past week’s Moby Profile, here.

This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

 

NEARFEST 2009 REFLECTIONS & 10 Classic Progressive Rock Albums

Is Progressive rock  progressing?

Another year, another NEARFEST and the 2009 edition was as good as any, and much better than 2008, which, as I wrote then, was overlong and overwrought.   In ’09 I rarely looked at my watch, there were several acts that excited and you heard nothing but brilliant musicianship.   Van Der Graaf Generator fullfilled a 35 year old dream, Gong made you remember why you love their goofy psychedelia and PFM redeemed themselves.

After NEARFEST 2005 I wrote a web piece called There Is No Progress in Progressive Rock.  That was actually a quote from several musicians I talked to.  Four years later that’s still largely true and I could just write what I wrote then:

To listen to the bands at NEARfest, you’d never know that world music has been a phenomena of the last 30 years that has penetrated jazz, classical, avant-garde, new age and even space music genres. And that’s surprising given that one of the icons of Progressive Rock, Peter Gabriel, created the Realworld music label and has been infusing his own music with global elements since the early 1980s.

The Progrockers on stage also seem blithely unaware of trends related to their own genre. Space music, electronica, techno and ambient, all styles created by former prog & art rockers like Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Kraftwerk and others, find little representation in the expansive compositions of mainstream Progressive Rock.

With the striking exception of Cabezas de Cerra, who used Latin touches and home made instruments that evoked sitars, ouds, tablas and more, that all remains true.

What’s perhaps more disconcerting is that the elder bands, PFM, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gong, and the Steve Hillage Band, were by and large content to play their golden oldies.  Yes, VDGG insisted they “weren’t here to be holograms” and played music off 2008′s Trisector and Gong and PFM all played recent or soon to be released compositions, but none of that materiel was as strong as the classics and ultimately were swamped by older materiel.

It’s great to see these bands, who we may have missed in the 1970s, play the songs that we loved in our youth.  But  I know when I was thinking this was the crown of creation in 1974, I never suspected they might become the equivalent of a Golden Oldies Tour with Rick Nelson, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Bobby Rydell. Is this any different than Hippiefest with Three Dog Night, The Rascals, Badfinger, Flo & Eddie, Mountain and Country Joe (Or actually, some fractional semblance of those groups) trotting out their hits?  Is NEARFEST like the “Garden Party” that Rick Nelson sang about 27 years ago?

All those aforementioned Nearfest bands played their butts off, but you don’t see Peter Gabriel just performing his greatest hits.  He tours his new album.  King Crimson is always playing later era music and John McLaughlin rarely revisits Mahavishnu Orchestra material.  Why don’t Nearfest bands do the same (and I don’t mean PFM playing the blues, please)?

I think that’s the conundrum of Nearfest.  Every year, a couple of bands break the mold, but they are the exception.  A few groups, like Univers Zero, Present, Magma, Steve Roach and The Muffins, just live on the edge of the new anyway, so it’s not an issue.  But a lot of the elder statesman seem content to regurgitate the past and their descendants aren’t really interested in breaking form.

Nearfest once again produced a first class plus festival, a festival that is as geared to the musicians as it is to the fans, a real rarity in concert production.  Sound and lights were improved over previous years and the transition from the founders to the new caretakers was smooth and seems to assure more quality Nearfests to come.

In that article I wrote 4 years ago, I cited 10 classics from Progressive Rocks Golden years.  Here they are again.

TEN CLASSICS FROM PROGRESSIVE ROCK’S GOLDEN YEARS

King Crimson-Red
The definitive electric guitar Prog album with Robert Fripp and drummer Bill Bruford locking into a headlong charge towards the abyss

Yes-Tales from Topographic Oceans
Their definitive double album epic has everything from soaring keyboard orchestrations to Jon Anderson’s choirboy vocals.

Genesis-Foxtrot
Watcher of the Skies and Supper’s Ready.  What else needs be said about this symphonic-theatrical epic.

Univers Zero-Heresie
Music from beyond the void.  Glorious in it’s frightening gothic cadences and honking bassoons.

Van Der Graaf Generator – Pawn Hearts
Peter Hammill and crew ably mixing lyrical contemplations on life and epic, but smokey Hammond B-3 instrumental workouts.

Camel-The Snow Goose
One of the prettier prog bands, this is their crowning conceptual work, with arrangements from David Bedford.

Mike Oldfield-Ommadawn
His third album was also his most compositionally integrated, mixing Celtic themes and searing guitar.

Jade Warrior-Way of the Sun
The single most under-rated group of the Prog era and one of the few still timeless enough to be played on Echoes.  They mixed Asian delicacy with blues-rock edges in this epic, instrumental tone poem, the last in a brilliant quartet of albums on Island.

Pink Floyd-Meddle
The band that bridged the gap between psychedelic and Progressive Rock, it contains the serene epic, “Echoes” as well as the propulsive “One of These Days.”

Can -Soon Over Babaluma
The German spacerock bands most melodic and kinetic album of man-machine rhythms, electro-shock guitar and propulsive bass

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))