"Progressive Soul"

While growing up in the 1960s and 1970s I was surrounded by the music of my parents in the form of my mother's love of The Beatles and folk music, my father's love of jazz--especially New Orleans jazz and the wave of Latin-based pop-jazz artists such as Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes. The AM radio stations played in our home or in our cars contained a lot of silly pop music but growing up in Detroit gave us an advantage to hearing radio stations saturated by Motown and other African-American/Black artists. In fact, I can remember that to my young brain I knew no distinction between the music coming from The Mamas and the Papas or The Fifth Dimension, The Carpenters or The Supremes, The Osmond Brothers or The Jackson Five. But, as the harder, more psychedelic and rebellious elements of the "counter culture" began to assert itself into the music being produced at the time, onto the music that was played on the radio, I began to notice. By this time my independent musical tastes and preferences were forming. I became affixed to local AM radio station CKLW, which listed a weekly Top 30, presented each week over a two hour periods. 

Born into a family whose maternal line was obsessed with keeping lists, CKLW's Top 30 lists were something that I immediately latched onto: I began my own list-keeping, spending hours on my new radio dialing through the AM channels to hear and tabulate the songs from the previous week's Top 30. Despite my innate impairment to being able to hear the words, lyrics, and messages of the songs I hear, I could feel a change occurring the emotional essence and intention of music I was hearing. Fading was the dominance of the innocuous happy-go-lucky or silly teeny-bopper songs of the naïve 1950s and 1960s. I think the impact of protest songs the folk singers was infiltrating, gradually working their way into the mainstream through integrated Broadway plays like Pippin, Hair!, Joseph and The Technicolor Amazing Dreamcoat, Godspell, and Jesus Christ Superstar. 

The Civil Rights Movement had spawned new hope in the Black population, the heinous assassinations of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy inciting anger and even violence. The music began to reflect this; the artists were shifting. New technologies--many of which were pioneered by George Martin and The Beatles--were also becoming more present and more influential in the songs the radios were disseminating. At this same time I discovered FM radio--a vast universe in which Detroit saw the pioneering of two album-oriented music stations: WABX at 99.5 in 1969, and, in February of 1971, WXYZ FM at 101.1 changed WRIF. While the former station began with a more local, garage-band exposure philosophy--like Rare Earth, The Stooges, MC5, The Amboy Dukes, Saving Grace, Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, and J. Giels--these stations still played the more serious pop hits heard on the AM channels. While my ears and tastes hadn't really accommodated raw, raunchy, anger-ridden rock 'n' roll--and especially hard rock--the engineering and electronic nuances entering the music coming from new and old Soul and Rhythm and Blues artists was immediately noticeable: it was interesting and likable. What I heard from Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Chicago, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Billie Preston, Eddie Kendricks, Earth Wind and Fire, Kool and the Gang, and The Temptations amazed and astounded me. Had I been more attentive I'm sure I would have caught wind of the amazing stuff The Chamber Brothers, Parliament, Eric Burden and War, Gil Scott-Heron, Mandrilll, Osibisa, Earth Wind and Fire, Herbie Hancock, and Kool and the Gang were doing, but alas! My heart was still in the hands of the mainstream pop side of the Soul/R&B world; while "What's Going on," "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and "Also Sprach Zarathustra" were enjoyable, I was bathing in the glorious melodies of The Stylisitcs, Aretha, Roberta Flack, Barry White, and the Motown, Stax, and Philadelphia sounds. 

My point here is that, even in the Black community of music making all of the things that would later be considered "progressive" were happening and affecting their soundscapes: organs, synthesizers, electric bass, expansive jazz-rock drum-and-percussion sets, and, of course, wild guitar solos were infecting these artists. The only thing lacking here is, perhaps, the classical training tht many white musicians may have had and, instead of the American folk traditions to draw from, the African-American Southern and Chicago blues traditions. (Many musicologists might jump in here to extoll the rich "classical" traditions available to the African-American community in the way of Jazz music.) Thus, I think it not far-fetched to endorse the category of progressive rock music coined as "Progressive Soul." In fact, I would argue that many of the techno-synth techniques employed by the Rap and Hip-Hop worlds might not have existed without the infatuation of new musical technologies being explored by their "progressive" forebears--and lord knows I love me some Prince, Newcleus, Run-DMC, Cameo, Whodini, and practically anything Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis have touched!