My Top 1000 Songs #891: Cadence And Cascade

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Undoubtedly the most beautiful song from my high school prog phase, a stripped-down, simply gorgeous acoustic guitar & piano ballad (plus flute solo--c'mon, it's prog!) that puts the art in art rock. And also a door into myriad King Crimson what-might-have-beens.

After the remarkable triumph of the band's 1969 debut, still one of the defining moments in progressive music, King Crimson splintered into various factions. Guitarist Robert Fripp soldiered on under the King Crimson moniker he'd continue to use on and off for the next half century, beginning the cycle of reconfiguring the band's line-up every album or so. Vocalist Greg Lake joined up with Messrs. Emerson & Palmer for the intermittently great but usually not ELP. And band co-founders Ian McDonald and Michael Giles set up McDonald & Giles, which only sadly only endured for one (albeit excellent) eponymous LP.

Lake did stick around to sing on much of King Crimson's 1970 sophomore LP, In The Wake Of Poseidon, though he sat out the record's "Cadence And Cascade," which was instead sung by Fripp's childhood friend Gordon Haskell (who would in turn stick around to sing on the following Crimson album before also moving on). That version is magnificent, the highlight of a record which I like a lot but doesn't quite match up with the debut. (Ok, lyricist Peter Sinfield can be a lot, but the song is just so pretty!)

But it later turned out that the band had also recorded a version with Lake laying down the vocals, albeit in unfinished form, which was appended to later reissues of the album. As a fan of Lake's voice (if not much of his work with ELP), I adore this one as well.

McDonald & Giles apparently liked the song as well, arguably reworking the basic melody for their own record's "Flight Of The Ibis." ("Cadence" is credited to Fripp and Sinfield, "Ibis" to McDonald.) It's lovely, a different song entirely yet clearly drawn from the same well.

The original Haskell-sung Crimson version:

With Greg Lake vocals:

Live 1971 (by which time Boz Burrell had taken over as vocalist, before he departed to help form Bad Company):

McDonald & Giles, "Flight Of The Ibis" (at 11:15 into the Side A clip):

Japanese band The M covering "Ibis":

"Cadence" recreated as bouncy island vacation lounge music in 2015 by Caballero Reynaldo: