Progressive rock moves along

Nearly 50 years after it came together, the legendary French progressive rock band Magma will perform in China for the first time, visiting Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen this month.

"Every concert is an enriching experience for us as musicians," says 67-year-old founder Christian Vander, a classically trained drummer, who started the band in 1969 in Paris.

"For the audience, that's probably the best way to discover this kind of music - especially for China, where we have never been to before."

When he started the band, the musician recalls, he was kind of sick of hearing European bands play only Anglo-Saxon music.

"How can you surprise the British and American audience if you just copy their music? No! We had to aim high and strike hard. It wasn't really premeditated. Magma's music arrived at the right moment. It truly was a win by a landslide," he says.

Vander, the stepson of the famous French jazz piano player Maurice Vander, joined with seven founding members to create their self-invented language, Kobaian, in which they tell "ancient and apocalyptic tales", with diverse musical styles such as jazz, blues, classical and rock.

As Vander says, the language is organic rather than artificially constructed. It had already appeared in his childhood dreams and some of the words are, even now, still untranslatable.

"It's, above everything else, a musical and spiritual language. Always evolving, every new composition brings forth new words. The first sound I ever sang while composing was 'Kobaia'. That's where the legend started," Vander says.

In 1970, Magma composed its double-album debut, entitled Kobaia and 1001 Centigrades, in which the musicians "tell the story of a group of people fleeing a doomed Earth to settle on the planet called Kobaia, and the conflict between the Earth refugees and the descendants of the originals colonists".

From 1974 to 1978, the band members experienced their most intense period of work, releasing four albums, and then took a break before returning in 1985 with their album Merci, featuring songs full of soul, disco and funk influences. With each album released, the band won a bigger worldwide following. Its music is considered "imaginative and adventurous" by critics.

"When the music is born and exists, I decipher and analyze - mostly afterwards - its meaning and story. I don't look for the story intentionally; it is already there," he says.

In the 2000s, Magma played and recorded pieces from throughout its career in live settings, which gave birth to a series of all Magma's songs with appearances of former band members, such as Jannick Top and Klaus Blasquiz.

Many of the musicians who have played with the band have gone on to their own solo projects, influenced by the experience with Magma. Even though that was difficult sometimes, Vander says, it gave Magma a chance to evolve in a positive way.

"What stays unchanged: the raging passion of wanting to play a 'construction', the sound, the long-term vision and the fact that we don't compromise," he says.

The new lineup will feature Vander and his singer wife, Stella, guitar-player James MacGaw, bass-player Philippe Bussonet and a short list of male and female vocalists.

"We never followed any trends or musical tendency. I think that's why we are still here today and why a lot of younger bands take us as an example," says Vander. "In the future, we will continue to play and give people a chance of discovering our music all around the world. And most of all, continue to surprise others and myself."

chennan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/22/2015 page24)