‘Let’s Play Jazz, Boys': Progressive Fusion and the Long 1970s

Pianist Keith Tippett’s arrival ‘at the court of King Crimson’ for their second album In the Wake of Poseidon (1970) saw the band’s music move further in the direction of jazz. It was a sign of the times. Progressive rock’s appropriation of elements from ‘art music’ is often considered a key factor in its stylistic evolution but jazz also played an important role. Jazz itself underwent something of a crisis of identity by the mid-1960s when avant-garde forms such as free jazz alienated more traditional followers while offering little to pop audiences caught up in the Beatlemania craze. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s free jazz had found a more welcoming home in experimental forms of rock. Alliances were formed between jazz’s more outré manifestations and progressive rock, which determined the latter’s course throughout the 1970s.

This chapter examines the influence of jazz on progressive rock from their poly-stylistic interactions during the late 1960s to the synthesis of so-called ‘progressive fusion’ in the mid-1970s then on to the post-Progressive fusion style of the early 1980s. Starting with the argument that classical music paradigms have often been overemphasized in historical accounts, Part 1 situates progressive rock in-between jazz and rock, before tracing points of explicit contact between the two, with musicians such as Tippett moving within and between the boundaries of both forms. Proposing a series of divisions and classifications for progressive fusion based on a set of stylistic changes that took place during the 1970s, Part 2 analyses three examples from fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth in order to illuminate some of its most obvious features.