Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy Comes To The Ridgefield Playhouse

RIDGEFIELD, CT — Keyboardist Keith Emerson and guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake passed on in 2016, leaving Carl Palmer to carry on the legacy of 70s super group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s a responsibility that he has taken to quite literally.

Palmer formed a new trio and has taken it on a world tour, the final leg of which began this week on Long Island. “Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy: Emerson Lake & Palmer Lives On” pounds its way into the Ridgefield Playhouse Friday night.

Palmer, of course, is the dean of progressive rock’s drummers, having been the sonic foundation for Atomic Rooster, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and Asia as well as ELP. At last count, he and his bandmates have sold over 50 million records.

Arguably hitting its height with the release of ELP’s “Works, Vol. I” in 1977, “prog” rock is complex, multi-layered and sometimes discordant. It's as likely to feature a full symphony orchestra as it might Napoleonic Era cannons. The stories prog’s songs told were as Wagnerian as the music, all space ships and ancient gods and pirates and giant weaponized armadillos. Prog albums don’t chart today the way they did in the early 70s – ELP’s “Brain Salad Surgery” reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the U.S. when it was released in 1973 – but, the drummer noted, prog rock is still selling records and filling concert halls worldwide.

"It's very strong," Palmer says enthusiastically. "Especially in Europe. Prog rock is an English artform, just like jazz is an American artform. It will always be here, but at different levels, and stronger in certain parts of the world, or in certain states of America. Here on the East Coast of America, it is still well and truly accepted.”

Notably missing from Palmer’s new prog rock trio is a keyboardist. The musical holes left by that omission are filled by ELP Legacy’s Simon Fitzpatrick's playing of the Chapman stick. Less a guitar and more an electric 12-string orchestra, “the stick” can play multiple notes at once, and stick players can manage lines of bass, melody, and multiple chords simultaneously.

To hear Palmer tell it, the absence of a keyboard is not a handicap, but a bonus.

“The reason I have always wanted to do it this way is I believe there is a certain amount of energy and creativity that takes place when you have guitars playing complex music that we didn't experience years ago because there weren't the players to play it, to be honest. They weren't good enough.

“If you cast your mind back to the 70s, you hear great keyboard players, you didn’t really have a lot of great guitar players,” he said. “There were some, that's for sure, but now it is a complete reversal of roles. You only ever hear of great lead guitar players, and keyboard players are rather low on the ground."

When he is not playing drums in a laser-lit concert hall before hundreds of people, Palmer now often finds himself playing in a dark room with just a videographer. It’s all part of the process for his second career, in visual art.

“I'm in a room about 12 foot square, pitch black, and there is one guy in there with hand held cameras, one in each hand, different shutter speeds, and he just goes around and around the drums taking pictures of me playing with the drumsticks illuminating. From that, we can capture some shadows, reflections, the movement of light, the mixture of colors within the light circuit, and we can reproduce some interesting shapes. You can actually see what ‘The Great Gates of Kiev’ looked like.”

The individual canvasses and the art books into which they are collected have all sold “incredibly well,” according to Palmer, who donates 25 to 30 percent of the proceeds to local charities.

The Ridgefield Playhouse (“It's just one of the better venues that everyone likes to play.") is only the third stop on this leg of the band’s tour. They will be working their way to the Midwest playing almost nightly through the beginning of November, and resuming in Europe in early 2019. If it sounds like they are hard driven, it's because they are: BMG is issuing a brand new ELP box set, re-launching the ELP catalog, and releasing a live CD and DVD combo of Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy performances.

“We are playing now into a second and third generation of people who want to come and hear it, understand it,” Palmer said of the audiences. “They realize it's not the original, it's been taken from the original, still being played by some of the same guys, but played differently. We produce a different sound using the same music, so that generation can make it their own. That's what prog rock can do quite easily, it can stretch across a lot of generations.”

“Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy: Emerson Lake & Palmer Lives On” plays the Ridgefield Playhouse on Friday, Oct. 12 at 8 p.m. For tickets ($45-$95) call or visit the box office, 203-438-5795, or go online at ridgefieldplayhouse.org.

Check Palmer's website for more info on the tour, and Carl Palmer Art for the latest on his exhibitions.

The Ridgefield Playhouse is a non-profit performing arts center located at 80 East Ridge, parallel to Main Street, Ridgefield, CT.

Photos of Carl Palmer provided.