In November 1968 a band who had started life backing a soul singer put out a record with a twenty-minute suite on side two, scored for group and orchestra, built around an Allegro by Bach. In the Court of the Crimson King was still a year away. Nobody was doing this. Ars Longa Vita Brevis did not chart in Britain or America and is nowhere near as good as what it made possible, and it is still one of the two or three records where you can watch progressive rock being invented in real time, by a keyboard player who had already been banned from the Royal Albert Hall.

The short version

Ars Longa Vita Brevis is the Nice’s second album, released in November 1968 on Immediate and the following year in America. It is their first as a trio: Keith Emerson on organ, piano and vocals, Lee Jackson on bass and vocals, Brian Davison on drums. The band arranged and produced it themselves, with Don Brewer engineering; Robert Stewart wrote the orchestral parts and conducted, and Malcolm Langstaff guests on guitar in the second movement. Side one holds three psychedelic songs and a nine-minute reading of Sibelius; side two is the title suite, a prelude, four movements and a coda running about twenty minutes. Gered Mankowitz shot the sleeve, which uses X-rays of the band. The title is the aphorism attributed to Hippocrates: art is long, life is short. It failed to chart anywhere.

Burning flags and losing a guitarist

1968 was a loud year for them. Their instrumental demolition of America, from West Side Story, reached 21 in Britain that summer; Emerson called it the first instrumental protest song and picked it as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King that spring. At a prestige booking at the Royal Albert Hall in July he burned a spray-painted mock-up of the American flag on stage, and the hall banned them from ever coming back. Then, as sessions for this album got under way, David O’List left under circumstances that are still disputed — he had already helped develop much of the material and had played it on BBC sessions through the year, and he keeps a co-writing credit on the second movement. The band tried out replacements, including a young Steve Howe, and then decided not to bother: keyboards, bass, drums. It is the template Emerson would take to Emerson, Lake and Palmer eighteen months later, and it starts here.

The sound

Two records in one sleeve, and only one of them matters. Side one is 1968 English psychedelia with jokes: sophisticated backings, Alice-in-Wonderland lyrics, and Lee Jackson’s untrained voice pushed through vari-speed and echo until the limitation becomes a feature. Side two is the future. Emerson does not quote the classics here the way the debut did — he takes them apart and rebuilds them as rock, which is a completely different proposition, and the Hammond is the tool he does it with. The orchestra is real, and so is the friction: during a break in the Brandenburger sessions Emerson overheard some of the players complaining about the noise and the tempo, and responded by turning the organ up. The engineering is uneven to the point of distraction, the second movement sounding markedly worse than the third, and the suite sprawls where ELP would later tighten. But the ambition is not in doubt, and neither is the playing.

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The songs

Daddy, Where Did I Come From? opens the album with Emerson singing lead, which almost never happened, over a punchy blues-rocker; Jackson delivers the answer to the title question as a spoken tour of a garden, and it is very funny. Little Arabella and Happy Freuds are the other two psych confections, somewhere between Syd Barrett and early Zappa. Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite is Emerson’s best classical reinterpretation on record: Sibelius’s sombre melody turned into a furious military march, with Hammond harmonisation over a contrapuntal bowed bass, and at nine minutes it earns every one. Don Edito el Gruva is thirteen seconds of the orchestra tuning up, as a joke. Then the suite: Prelude brings the orchestra in properly, Awakening is essentially a Davison drum solo, Realisation is the acid-rock movement with Langstaff’s guitar, Acceptance is Brandenburger — Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto rebuilt around the organ, released as a single that went nowhere and easily the best thing here — Denial is the three-man workout, and the Coda brings the orchestra back for the close.

Reception and legacy

The reviews were good and the sales were not. Record Mirror reported in late October that the record was nearly done after more than sixty hours in the studio and that the title track had been cut from twenty-four minutes to twenty; when it appeared, the paper called it original and well aimed. Melody Maker went further, arguing that the phrase pop group no longer applied to what the Nice were doing. The public disagreed, or never heard it. What happened next matters more than the chart position: Emerson took the trio format and the classical-demolition method to ELP in 1970 and made both work on a scale the Nice never reached; Brian Davison went to Every Which Way; Lee Jackson formed Jackson Heights and later Refugee, with a keyboard player called Patrick Moraz who would end up in the Moody Blues. Everything progressive rock did with orchestras in the next decade has a piece of this record in it.

The verdict

A historical document that happens to contain two genuinely great tracks. Do not come expecting ELP: the singing is amateur, the production is rough, and side one is a different band from side two. Come for Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite, which is the finest thing the Nice ever recorded, and for Brandenburger, which is Bach played by people who plainly loved him and had no intention of being polite about it. Then place it correctly: November 1968, a side-long symphony for group and orchestra, a full year before anybody agreed that rock music was allowed to do this.

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