Tricycle Rider said:
Yeah, but is he really prog? Or is he actually progressive?
I know of a forum where they got extensively into what they would consider progressive/prog or not. It got rather tiresome, so I quit that forum shortly after I had joined it. (Nice people otherwise, though, I'm sure.)
Well, it depends on whether you mean progressive in the literal sense or whether you refer to the specific style from the 70s (with Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer etc.) and later rock/metal acts heavily influenced by that type of music and going for a similar aesthetic (e.g. Dream Theater, Spock's Beard etc.) I mean, current acts named progrock ironically aren't actually progressive (usually) in the literal sense because they're often not much different from those 70s bands. The style hasn't progressed that much from the 70s!
Actually, Tigran is progressive to some extent in both ways. The odd time signatures and the fast very loud and intense playing of Tigran create a kind of aesthetic that's similar to progrock/metal. On the other hand, he's also actually literally progressive in the sense some elements that he incorporates in his music are actually quite new. For instance a lot of the scales he uses when improvising are based on scales from Armenian folk music or on scales from Middle Eastern music. The complex additive rhythms have been done before (Note especially Avishai Cohen, who studied the rhythms of Indian music and incorporated it into his own music; the aforementioned Shai Maestro, who is often comapred to Tigran, used to be the piano player for Avishai Cohen.), but with the extremely and complex use of it, Tigran does seem to be pushing forward its use. I've never heard something like the alternating 17/16 and 15/16 like in the song of Tigran posted above before.
But best of all, these exotic elements aren't used in some kind of crappy gimmicky world music type of thing. Using the fast paced and loud aesthetic of rock/metal, complex additive rhythms and non-Western scales, he creates a new and exciting sound that genuinely progresses jazz in a day and age when jazz has maybe become a bit stale and people who listen to jazz mostly listen to the same old bebop stuff from decades ago.