The debut album by the American progressive rock band Happy the Man, released in 1977. Ranked 50th on RS’s list of the 50 greatest prog-rock albums of all time

This is definitely more prog than jazz, but it is definitely jazz!

    • Krudler@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      I’d love to know what you think

      I discovered it because I also have an interest in e:progdrop rock & there’s a lot of crossover

      But I’m kind of scratching my head at how this makes it on the top 50 of all time prog lists??

            • Krudler@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              4 days ago

              Hey thanks! I enjoyed the heck out of that

              What do you think about this: It’s neither jazz nor prog. Jazz requires human rhythm, humans playing instruments- This is computerized tone generation arranged with human assistance. Also it’s not prog rock as it’s clearly not rock and it lacks the sweeping compositional tones of prog.

              I do actually hate labels, just talking

              • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                4 days ago

                Man, they have live recordings that sound pretty much identical. There’s nothing pre-sequenced there.

                It’s neither jazz nor prog.

                It’s one of the things that jazz has become. “The sound of surprise” if you will. I like to think of it as “jazz musicians playing x.” So they’ve taken a sound palette from synth heavy prog, little bit of early Genesis, that sort of thing, and played it with a jazz state of mind, jazz harmonies. There’s only a small amount of melodic improvisation, which is kinda like prog-less rock in quantity, but very jazzy in style.

                • Krudler@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
                  1·
                  4 days ago

                  I should confess I’m not familiar enough with this artist to make a declarative statement, but I have a very astute ear and to me it sounded very quantized. I could be wrong. I don’t think that’s really a bad thing inherently, I just know that it is deeply not to my tastes.

                  I also felt this music was middling and dull and repetitive. It had elements of snappiness to it that were catchy, but it just was missing something at its soul. Maybe again it’s a personal thing but I like to hear music that has something to say, I don’t want to hear passable, I want to hear musicians driving forward with every note and phrase, their heart and soul.

                  I’m hearing your other thoughts about the identity of jazz changing, and I think that’s essential to what jazz is. It’s always been shifting. I suppose here again it’s a philosophical thing for me, I need to hear humans playing instruments for me to feel like it’s music. To me. I suppose it’s one of those things that can’t be explained with words, it’s a feeling deep inside me when I hear music that sounds a certain way made in a certain way. In a sense I need to see the sky, not a picture of the sky.

                  Many of my favorite jazz artists, Prince included, programmed a lot of their music, but they had the underlying music intelligence to know that they can’t just let a computer pump out quantized tones at a predictable speed, there has to be something deeper for the human ear to connect to. So much of that is missing in modern electronically produced music. I think music again is loosely used here because it’s more a series of tones, rather than music, music has to have that other thing.

                  Surprise to me is not the primary element of jazz. Although surprise is an element of jazz, all great jazz should be continually challenging and surprising, that I do not believe is the underlying thing that is at its core. I feel that jazz is rebellion. I feel that jazz is brilliance in defiance of conformity; being brilliant in a way the status quo hates.

                  I’m seeing both sides in a way, I know that in a lot of ways it’s just perspective, and I’m an old curmudgeon.