the movements age

I'd like to start this post with a paraphrase from the prologue to Listen to This by Alex Ross. He makes the very interesting point that all music becomes classical in the end. Jazz and rock have both progressed through similar stages in fast pace:
Phase 1: Youth rebellion. Satchmo, Duke, Jelly Roll Morton. I'll add Elvis and the like.
Phase 2: Romanticism. Bourgeois pomp of swing band. I would add Mingus as the apex of high Romanticism in jazz, Stadium rock.
Phase 3: Artists rebel against bourgeois image, echoing classical modernism. Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, punk rock.
Phase 4: a vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant garde. Babbitt, free jazz, Zappa.
Phase 5: Retrenchment. Wynton, del Tredici, Barber launch a neo-Romantic idealization of the past, but efforts are too late to restore the art to the mainstream. Countless rock bands from the 60s and 70s continue to tour and fill arenas, reminiscing in lost moments of the audience's youth.

I have found all this very illuminating.


One of Zappa's last concerts, on tour in Barcelona. Full concert:

In the remainder of this post I would like to share some more experimental songs.
Rush's Cygnus X-1 features many unusual time signatures

There is a huge and flourishing experimental indie rock scene, of which I know basically nothing. The very interesting band Neptune is doing some unusual experimentation with soundscapes and invented instruments. Check it out!!



Taken from their website, Neptune writes:
"Neptune's origins trace to 1994 as a sculpture project by Boston artist/musician Jason Sanford, who forged the band's haphazard guitars and reluctant drums from scrap steel and found objects.  Seven lineups, twenty-three releases and hundreds of instruments later, the band continues to wrench its sound spatter on self-built instruments to often confounded audiences around the world."

Moving to the totally mainstream, I particularly enjoy Dave Matthews Band for its intelligent construction and complicated structures."
Dreaming Tree is in 7/8,

#34 is a really off-balance 9/8

What meter is Let You Down?

Saucers by Ozric Tentacles is also extremely metrically irregular.

Dream Theatre did some very experimental works. The Dance of Eternity is a true tone poem, orchestrally scored, with significant motivic development within a creative soundscape.