Progressive rock moves along

Christian Vander (left) will lead his legendary French progressive rock band Magma to perform in China this month.[Photo provided to China Daily]

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.