As someone who has been playing synthesizers since 1977 I am of course interested in what other musicians do with that instrument. So recently I started work on a list of my favourite synthesizer-musicians/bands. As I don't want to get into the impossible job of grading keyboard players themselves, this is a list of musicians and bands that actually published records under the same name. So you will not see sole bandmembers in this list, only 'acts'. That is why names such as Rick Wright(Pink Floyd) and Roger Powell(Utopia, Todd Rundgren, etcetera) are not on this list. I think these guys were brilliant, but not so much in their solo efforts.
The musicians/bands are listed in random order, this is not a 'Top-10' list. Also: I have not included any Jazz keyboard players in this list because I plan to write a separate entry about those people, including musicians such as Chick Corea, George Duke, etcetera.
Anyway : here's what I came up with :
Tangerine Dream
A German band of legendary stature. They started out as early as 1967 and are still performing. In it's best days the nucleus of the band consisted of Chris Franke, Chris Froese and Peter Baumann. Tangerine Dream(TD) became famous for it's atmospheric, yes almost ambient music. Most of the albums they released in the 70ies were actually complete live-recordings. The band would jam most of the music(based on a pattern of course) and release the recordings if the jam-results sounded good. I realized years later, that my co-musicians and I used exactly the same method when we had our DrumNBass band a few years ago...
Recommended listening :
Phaedra
Rubycon
Ricochet
Force Majeure
Cyclone
Vangelis
There are millions and millions of people out there who got to know Vangelis after he recorded his best albums. No disrespect to any of his later records such as 'Chariots Of Fire' etcetera, but the 70-ies era was the time that he really shone. Albums like 'Beaubourgh' and especially 'China' are of an unsurpassable beauty. The latter album('China') was one of the first synthesizer albums that incorporated various other instruments, such as the Koto, Violin, Chinese Drums, and so on. This made the album sound distinctly 'chinese', although one can hear the man is Greek if one listens carefully.
Recommended listening :
China
Beaubourg
Heaven and Hell
Brian Eno
Technically speaking Eno only started to use synthesizers later on in his career. He started out as the keyboard player for Roxy Music and used 'traditional' instruments like the Hammond Organ. After his stint with Roxy Music he started to experiment with sound effects, tapes played backwards, etcetera, and came up with the all-time classic 'Music For Films', followed by 'Music For Airports'. To describe these albums is really hard, as the records contain not so much 'music' in the classic way. The records consist of sound-scapes that have been made by producing sound with every object he thought sounded good. These sounds were frequently re-recorded to give them more 'grainy' characteristics.
If this sounds familiar that's understandable. Twenty years later a band called 'Portishead' did exactly the same thing and became world famous for it as well.
Recommended listening :
Music For Films
Music For Airports
Kate Bush
Ri-i-i-ght! you may say. Kate Bush is well known for playing beautiful keyboard arrangements but one might not expect her in this list. So why is Kate in this list? I'll begin with two words : "The Dreaming".
At the start of her career, Kate Bush mainly played traditional keyboards, especially the piano. However: after recording three LPs, she got fed up with the limitations of those instruments. Fortunately for her there was this guy Peter Gabriel who invited her to sing background vocals on one of his records. The rest, one may safely say, is history. Gabriel showed her his new Fairlight CMI synthesizer and the next thing he knew was that Kate had bought on for herself. This may sound like nothing special but that synthesizer cost what would now be over 100.000 euros. She still uses the synth for specific jobs because it has really defined her sound since 1983. Whether you hear 'Suspended in Gaffa'(1984), 'And Dream Of Sheep'(1988), or 'King Of The Mountain(2006), you will always hear some part there that is pure Fairlight CMI.
Recommended listening :
The Dreaming
Hounds Of Love
Aerial
and basically everything else she has released...
Mannfred Mann's Earth Band
No list about synthesizer players/bands would be complete without Mannfred Mann. The man was a pioneer. He almost personally introduced the synthesizer - especially the solo-synthesizer - in rock music. He not only made some great albums with his Earth Band, but also played on the early records by Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, and so on and so on.
Recommended listening :
Nightingales And Bombers
The Roaring Silence
Watch
Tony Banks
Under normal circumstances Tony Banks would not be in this list. He is after all the only keyboard player Genesis ever had, but still: he is a band member. Fortunately for me the man recorded quite a list of solo records. Lately his recordings involve grand orchestral pieces which are recorded with the aid of an actual classical orchestra. That's what you get when you have the money to do whatever you want...
In the 70ies however, after Gabriel had left Genesis and the band wanted to move towards a somewhat lighter musical style, Tony Banks found that he had a lot of material on the shelf that sounded like the old Genesis and therefore would not be recorded by the band. This made him record his first solo-record 'A Curious Feeling'. After this album many more have followed : 'The Wicked Lady', 'Still', etcetara. In my opinion however, none of those albums has had the impact of 'A Curious Feeling'.
Tony achieved fame and fortune with Genesis. Because this band became so huge, Tony's innovative approach to keyboards(albeit with a classical twist) has never been as clear as it could have been. To name an example : he was the first keyboard player to experiment with effect pedals instead of a Lesley cabinet(mainly because he got fed up with carrying around the bloody speakers), and also to be noted : he was one of the very first who combined a drumcomputer(the famous Linn Drum) to a synthesizer in order to get the sequences that we know from 'By You'(from 'The Fugitive') and 'Mama' by Genesis.
Recommended listening :
A Curious Feeling
The Fugutive
3 comments:
An obvious list from you - by no means nastily meant.
I'm still not sure about Kate Bush' mention in your shortlist though. She got that Fairlight from PG and applied it in her own music. How's that so groundbreaking to make it to your 5 greatest?
Of course it's obvious: it IS my list... *grin*
Kate Bush; Closer to the truth is that she was introduced to the Fairlight by PG. In my personal opinion she took that instrument much much further that PG though, and certainly way further that bands like Duran Duran and The Art Of Noise.
What KB did was record(i.e. sample) the complete album on her Fairlight and use that instrument to colour/change/rape the original tracks. So there are guitar-parts on The Dreaming, played by Alan Murphy, that aren't even recognizable as guitar anymore and yet the part itself is still beautiful.
All the vocals(sometimes over 70 tracks!) were remixed and rebuilt on the Fairlight. So even Kate Bush' voice, which is quite unique in itself, was distorted, put in the mix extremely panned, etcetera.
I once had the opportunity to listen to The Dreaming with my head between my B&O speakers(which were about 1 meter apart) and the stereo-image she created on what was basically a mainframe with an 8 Bit(!) sampler is just incredible.
This recording-method was later used by myriads of bands and artists. As I wrote in the posting, Portishead turned that method into a whole career.
And of course nowadays an incredible lot of music is sampled 'til the cows come home. ;)
There were others who experimented with huge sampler-projects but I have not come across those projects often.
For the record : this all happened from 'The Dreaming' onward. In the early days she was 'just' a very able pianoplayer with sometimes very strange yet logical ideas about how to play that instrument. In itself perhaps nothing special if one plays Jazz of course, but in Pop?
BTW : Made a terrible mistake in my first draft by crediting Vangelis for 'The Planets', whereas that album was of course released by Tomita.
But even a big mistake can be corrected on one's own blog!
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