Keith Emerson (1944 - 2016)

Last Fanfare For The Maestro

Keith Emerson was a titan. He was a polyglot of the keyboard styes as well as a pioneer of the synthesiser. He was equal parts a modernist composer for piano, a jazz pianist, and rock organist of prodigious dexterity. He was a show man and entertainer as well as a deeply studied artist. He was a player who could seemingly vamp forever on conventional chords while exploding across the range in search of melodies and ideas:



As with lots of other musical 'greats' if you sliced up Keith Emerson in to various aspects of his musical persona, there would still be a tremendous player in each and every category - Emerson the composer was just as formidable as the jazz pianist as was the rock organist and early adopter of the Moog synthesiser. If you listen to Emerson's playing, he opens up doorways into other players, and  Composers. They are as diverse as Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, and Glenn Gould. He was a style collector that fused elements of these players in his own style, but you can hear them in short bursts; He had snippets of their touch and vernacular tucked away in his playing. He was hip but also very well versed in piano music in all of its forms.



He was in many ways a musical misfit because he was too open to popular music to walk the straight and narrow path of classical music, while he was probably too aggressive and experimental with tone  and rhythm to stay comfortably in jazz, and ultimately too sophisticated a musician to simply be plying his trade as a rock star. Of all the keyboard players in rock, Emerson alone had the breadth of vision for music that stretched way beyond the confines of genres, and that was his appeal. In a world where 99% of pop music works off conventional chord progressions long established by the hit writers of long ago, Emerson's tracks defied such small pools of ideas.

One of his most famous pieces Tarkus sounds nothing like a conventional rock song. It is impenetrable unless you know it well or you have a really good ear for deconstructing music. This is simply not rock the way Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd are rock. Much like his contemporary Frank Zappa, Keith Emerson was a mid-Twentieth century composer masquerading as a rock star.



The best representation of his playing can be found on the first five ELP albums. Across those five albums, he lays out a total vision of a manic keyboard player mapping out the possibilities of fusing the various vernaculars of rock, bebop jazz, and classical music. Each and every one of those albums is a wild ride through diverse styles and ideas about how to approach the keyboard. Increasingly he evolved his playing towards a more percussive style; and on 'Brain Salad Surgery', it amalgamates into the most phantasmagoric soundscape conceived by any rock band in the 1970s - or perhaps, ever.

While the plaintive band name 'Emerson Lake & Palmer' presented us a vision of three equal partners, the albums belied the reality that the dominant musical vision belonged to Keith Emerson who was singlehanded rewriting what music could be. At times, their music took odd grandiose turns but he always found a way of putting across the essential beauty of the pieces he played.

Perhaps he will be best remembered for this bit of bombast and glory:



...but there was so much more to his playing than big synth horns and Hammond B-III organs being rocked and stabbed. If I were playing fantasy rock band producer and I had to draft a keyboard player to form the greatest band on earth, I'd start with Keith Emerson, and there's really nobody close for second.

Vale Keith Emerson. Oh what a lucky man you were.