GENTLE Vinyl Records and CDs

They never earned the mass audience accorded to Progressive Rock contemporaries like Yes or King Crimson, but Britain's Gentle Giant did succeed in gaining a cult-like underground following based on the strength of their early 1970s work. Largely sidestepping the bombast and humorlessness that often plagued the genre, they built a unique group sound based on an unusual blend of influences including Blues Rock, Gregorian chants, and twentieth century classical music. They augmented the usual rock instruments with cello, horns, mallet percussion, and Moog synthesizers, and showed taste and dexterity in their use of tricky time signatures and leaping, atonal vocal lines. Their influence can still be heard in present-day underground acts such as Happy the Man, Ruins and jazz drummer Gregg Bendian.