The guitar heroes are legion in rock history, the rarest keyboards-heroes. Keith Emerson was undoubtedly the most flamboyant and iconic. Showman delusional doubled accomplished a trained technician to classical, she strove to erect, with Emerson, Lake & amp; Palmer, rock’n’roll to the rank of “great music”. For better and for worse. He committed suicide at age 71.
When the supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer goes on stage at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 29, 1970, the speaker announced that it is his first concert. This is false: it is ground two days earlier in Plymouth, southwest England. But these are images that remain as his birth: in a whole green and blue lamé, leather hat pulled down over his long hair, Keith Emerson grabs his Hammond organ and rocking furiously, then tortures a Moog synthesizer on Pictures at an Exhibition , a suite adapted in thirty minutes of Modest Mussorgsky. Then propelled as the Jimi Hendrix of keyboards, Keith Emerson has just died at 71, at his home in Santa Monica. He would have shot himself in the head.
Keith Emerson bungling his Hammond organ with regularity. A London store undertook long repairs until he discovered, on television, the reasons for such a case: “We do not touch your hardware. Now we know what happened. You do not respect our instrument. “ In fact, he did not meet much since he decided to break new musical regions, for better and for worse. Pressed classical training with a predilection for Bach and Bartok, and host of a jazz trio inspired by Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum Tour journeyman bluesman T-Bone Walker, he had the luggage. The addition of his knowledge, his virtuosity and his ambitions could only drive it away. First with The Nice, which formed in 1967 around the singer PP Arnold (former Ikettes of Ike and Tina Turner), will develop without it a psychedelic rock bombast, from the album The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack in 1967, marked by an adaptation of Blue Rondo a la Turk by Dave Brubeck. The following year, the success of America (adaptate of Leonard Bernstein for West Side Story ) also earned him a scandal when Keith Emerson burned an American flag on the stage of Royal Albert Hall to protest against the war in Vietnam. This is also the time when he discovered the Moog synthesizer which he cleared use, while starting to planting knives in his keyboards, a dagger provided by Lemmy Kilmister, his roadie who founded Motörhead.
“He was a pioneer and innovator whose musical genius has touched us all”
Present on the first Rod Stewart album in 1969, Keith Emerson wants to push the envelope further. Greg Lake, bassist of King Crimson, too. It remains to recruit Carl Palmer, drummer Atomic Rooster. Is an unusual low-keyboards-drums trio, who aback when the hippies appeared in the Isle of Wight. Therefore, ELP deploys hyperbolic compositions influenced by Bartók, Janácek and Ginastera, combined with jazz and psychedelic rock, possibly stretching the pieces on twenty minutes as is the case of the iconic Tarkus in 1971, the concept album of the same name. The sequence of Trilogy (1972 with the hit From the Beginning ) and Brain Salad Surgery (1973), combined with concerts where Keith Emerson is a brilliant keyboardist doubled eccentric showman, catapult ELP concert until the California Jam 1974 Festival, the culmination of his career. Mastodon progressive rock with Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis, the group then decline as the others, ringardisés by the punk wave. Adulated by some and derided by others, the trio has disintegrated over the bombastic albums and tours delusional digging its deficit more than they brought him.
Keith Emerson, author of several film music and whose last studio album, 2012 date ( the Three Fates Project with Marc Bonilla and Terje Mikkelsen), has dragged all his life a contrasting image, we considered the genius or megalomaniac. As he practiced his whole life playing the ragtime of Scott Joplin, it will in any case bravely defended the role of keyboards in rock, as did Jon Lord of Deep Purple and Rick Wakeman of Yes. “He was a pioneer and innovator whose musical genius has touched us all in the worlds of rock, classical and jazz,” Carl Palmer responded yesterday. Keith Emerson would not have supported a degradation of neurological capacity that deprived him of the use of his hands.
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