E-Mail This Article to a Friend Progressing nicely, thank you Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Yes’s Rick Wakeman BY BRETT MILANO

On one of his early-’80s solo albums, King Crimson leader Robert Fripp had a secret message inscribed into the vinyl run-out groove: "New music is not a style. It is a quality." The same can be said for another often-used term, progressive rock. It’s a name that nobody seems entirely comfortable with, least of all the musicians associated with it.

"I can’t say whether everyone in this band likes that term, but I don’t," explains Fripp’s current bandmate, King Crimson bassist Trey Gunn, over the phone from the West Coast. "For one thing, there’s been so much bad music from that school. And it generally means old, which this band isn’t. You might hate this band, but you can’t deny its power. We don’t want to be seen as old, lame guys trying to make their guitars sound loud."

"Rock music is a finite musical form," notes Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson. "It depends on a limited vocabulary, fairly straightforward signatures, certain rules harmonically and rhythmically. It’s rather like clothes fashion; it just recycles and things come back again — but 20-year-olds don’t remember that, so it becomes their fashion. So it’s harder to find anything in rock that you could call progressive — certainly harder than when we were playing the Marquee Club in 1967, when anyone with halfway-decent playing ability had a good chance of becoming successful."

Yet King Crimson and Jethro Tull have nonetheless progressed, though in very different directions. Always the darkest and heaviest of prog bands, Crimson have lately emerged as godfathers of the new-metal movement. Meanwhile Anderson, both solo and with Tull, has come close to dropping rock altogether. Both bands are hitting town: Anderson brings his solo tour to Berklee Performance Center this Saturday and King Crimson play Avalon on Wednesday. And it’s turning out to be an unusually prog-heavy month, since Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman played the Somerville Theatre last week and the current, acoustic version of Wakeman’s pre-Yes band, the Strawbs, will be at Johnny D’s on the 18th.

Perhaps taking a hint from all the Metallica fans who got pissed off when Jethro Tull won the hard-rock/heavy-metal Grammy in 1987 (an occasion he’s joked about on stage ever since), Anderson pushes the folk, jazz, and classical elements forward on a new pair of simultaneous releases, his solo Rupi’s Dance and The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (both on Fuel 2000). Neither tries very hard for airplay or the Grammys, and maybe it’s no coincidence that they’re the best things he’s done in at least 10 years. Like his previous solo efforts, Rupi’s Dance is an album-length extension of the acoustic and instrumental interludes heard on Tull albums. But the melodies flow more freely on this one, and Anderson’s singing voice, which has been dodgy over the past decade, has settled into a deeper register that suits the reflective and conversational tone of the lyrics.

The Christmas album is a bigger surprise, coming as it does from a band who remain best known for an album-length attack on organized religion, 1971’s Aqualung. Yet a third of its tracks are instrumental and barely half even mention the holiday; those that do are more concerned with family and friendship. It proves rather an occasion to plug back into the Anglo-folk-orchestral sound of Tull’s last essential album, 1977’s Songs from the Wood (two of whose tracks are redone here), with guitarist Martin Barre’s power chords becoming more of a seasoning. Having spent a few years turning up the guitars and looking to relate to current trends (the last studio album bore the unfortunate title Dot Com), Tull have rediscovered the quirkier threads that made them unique.

"That’s in keeping with most people’s idea of Christmas — the time of year does lend itself to that historical, particularly European perspective," Anderson points out. "And it does call for a certain measure of cynicism, maybe less than usual, but Christmas tends to bring up difficult emotions for a lot of people — it’s not always a happy occasion. So I have a certain level of cynicism and grumpiness, but I’m careful to measure that out and have a greater variety of things happening on each record. On a scale of one to 10, I try to keep my grumpiness level somewhere between three and seven."

KING CRIMSON’S CAREER has overlapped a few times with other prog bands: Greg Lake sang in the original line-up before forming ELP, ’80s and ’90s Crimson drummer Bill Bruford was previously a Yes founder, and ’70s Crimson sideman Eddie Jobson was later a Tull keyboardist. Still, Crimson continue to exist in their own universe. Although the band have broken up, re-formed, and changed personnel numerous times since 1969, something essential has endured, more a quality than a style. Perhaps leader and guitarist Robert Fripp’s stormy personality has given the music enough depth and intrigue — along with the tuneful beauty that usually crops up somewhere — to intersect with current trends. Or maybe he’s just been smart enough to know when and how to tweak the band’s approach. The mid-’80s line-up gave free rein to newly joined singer/guitarist Adrian Belew’s cerebral pop sense, and that provided a hook for Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel fans. The six-piece mid-’90s line-up, which retained Belew and added the current rhythm section of Gunn and drummer Pat Mastelotto, was a sonic rumble, with guitars piled on guitars — grunge as a quality.

The present four-piece line-up continues to jack up the drama and phase out the pop. Although Belew still adds a melodic touch, there’s nothing as radio-friendly as the ’80s numbers "Heartbeat" and "Elephant Talk" (and nothing from that era is currently being played on stage). The recent The Power To Believe (Sanctuary) might be called their heavy-metal album, even though only one track ("Happy with What You Have To Be Happy With," which matches some incongruously funny Belew lyrics to a menacing tune) fits easily into that format. Still, co-producer Machine (of White Zombie fame) gives the trickier instrumentals enough sonic bite to suggest a passing resemblance to Sonic Youth’s denser guitar explorations, or to new-metal outfits like the Mars Volta and Tool.

"I wonder what Sonic Youth would say about that," Gunn muses over the phone. "To me, Crimson has always been a heavy band, but it’s never sounded that heavy to me on record. The main difference with this album was that the engineer was able to make the band sound big in the studio, in a way it really hadn’t before. Around the time of our Thrak album [1995], it seemed that heavier music was starting to re-emerge on the radio, and we were also moving in that direction. But someone like Robert doesn’t listen to the radio or watch MTV, so he is in no way attuned to what in the world is going on out there."

Still, Crimson wound up opening a handful of Tool dates over the past summer, the first time they’d joined someone else’s tour since a HORDE appearance a decade earlier, when they made an odd pairing with Blues Traveler and Lenny Kravitz. "I definitely saw some guys with Blues Traveler hats on who just couldn’t bear us," Gunn admits. "On the other hand, the Tool shows were really satisfying. We wanted to play with someone else, which for us is usually impossible. Most bands wouldn’t want to share the stage with Crimson, or it would be a bad musical fit. But we know the Tool guys and it was a good combination; and it means we got to play to a mixed audience. That’s one of the most satisfying things for us: to play for an audience that knows your music well and also has no idea about it."

AT THE OTHER END of the light-to-dark spectrum, Rick Wakeman’s Somerville show was one that you could bring your grandparents to. He admitted as much during one of his long monologues on stage. It turns out that Wakeman’s healthy sense of humor has made him a fixture on British TV, where he’s been embraced by an older audience that barely realizes he plays keyboards. And the two-hour-plus show was highlighted by long stretches of storytelling, including one priceless jab at Yes bandmate Jon Anderson ("He’s trying to save this planet while living on a different one altogether").

It was clear that Wakeman needs a band like Yes to make him play more aggressively. When he sat at a grand piano decked with two candelabras and added florid flourishes to his own classically based pieces, it was hard not to think of Liberace. But when he gets a beautiful melody, he’s more than capable of running with it, as he proved by improvising on Yes’s "Wondrous Stories" and the Irish hymn tune "Morning Has Broken" (repeating the piano part he played on Cat Stevens’s version). It wasn’t quite progressive and it wasn’t even rock, but one can still find some pleasure in music with no grumpiness quotient whatsoever.

"Rubbing Elbows with Ian Anderson" takes place this Saturday, November 8, at Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston; call (617) 747-2261. King Crimson perform this Wednesday, November 12, at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street; call (617) 262-2424. The Strawbs perform a week from Tuesday, November 18, at Johnny D’s, 17 Holland Street in Davis Square; call (617) 776-2004.