Improvisation and Composition

I tend to go back and forth on the importance I place on improvisation in music. On one hand, my first great musical love was The Grateful Dead, but on the other hand Progressive rock has been a huge influence to me as well. Ultimately, in considering where and how I value improvisation over composition, especially comparing my experiences within Jam and Prog scenes, I find I land somewhere in the middle.
The Grateful Dead have some shining moments of virtuosity, especially in their first 10-odd years of playing, and their most impressive jams range a variety of structural stabilities - from the relatively straightforward "St. Stephen", to the ambient, mellow, feedback laced "Dark Star" that so often preceded it. It's fair to say that The Dead never limited themselves from total anarchy or generally strict guidelines in their playing, which was part of what made them such a well rounded group. An experience with a version of "Eyes of the World" I had once surprised me however. On The Grateful Dead Movie, there's a 13 minute version of "Eyes" that to me is far and away the best version of that song The Dead ever recorded, if not one of their best live tracks ever. After listening to the song for a few years I came across another version, about five minutes longer, that after two listens (a roughly 18-minute double take) I realized to be an unedited version of the same performance. The extra five minutes are far weaker than the rest of the take, and objectively hurts the track. After doing some research, I found that Jerry was looking to make The Grateful Dead Movie a perfect artifact, and likely cut the offending sections (with surprising seamlessness) in an effort to secure that. For all my love of The Dead, I have to concede that by and large, they were a band of occasional, even frequent, genius that spent much of it's time wallowing in the mediocrity afforded to them by their oft easy to please audience and the supreme difficulty of living up to tracks as incredible as that "Eyes of the World" from 1974. Cutting the track, something that wouldn't have been done without Jerry's approval, feels wrong for the fetishising of improvisation; that the premier jam band would choose post-production perfection over the honesty of an uncut performance always struck me as a cop out and self-conscious mistake, and somehow felt sad - as though Jerry didn't really believe in all that The Deadhead culture made him to be. The track discussed is below in its uncut form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ_0mQLt4jo

On the other hand, I was particularly titillated by the discussion of Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans, another band I spend much time with, and an album I actually liked, but never figured I would get to talk about. For all its excess and ignorance ("half-digested extracts from Swami Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi" comes to mind) it still strikes me as a towering achievement musically, the scope of which still boggles me as much as it did when I was 14 listening to it. The opening chant sends shivers down my spine, which is only increased by the two minutes of quiet wooshing and Steve Howe volume swells that precedes it on the extended version I hunted down in the bowels of the internet. I was happy to see a somewhat favorable (or at least compared to the usual vitriol the album receives) review by Hegarty. It is monumental, for all its faults as much as in spite of them. I think it even gains credibility from being the follow up to the infinitely superior Close to the Edge because they pushed the boundaries even further. Granted, they almost definitely went too far, but I have to give them credit for trying. After all, where would we be if Rush hadn't pushed past Caress of Steel (which I also think is great) to do the even more bold 2112? Returning to the point somewhat, the emphasis on composition cannibalizes Yes in the same way an obsession with improvisation hurt The Dead. Yes's composition fetish led to the excess of Tales, and in some ways the departure of Bill Bruford who just couldn't take the endless debate of compositional masturbation.

The real shame is that when either group focused in the other direction even briefly the results were incredible. Yes, Yes's first album (granted with a vastly different lineup than the progressive Yes) had some raucous Jazz-Rock tracks like the Beatles cover "I See You" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPKp4lLLMu4) or the groove based outro of "Starship Trooper." Likewise The Dead's Blues For Allah features some great tracks with involved structure and complex changes, and Bob Weir's "Weather Report Suite" or "Terrapin Station" entered the realm of Progressive rock with strong results. In the end, the answer, as always, is everything in moderation. While improvisation can have the flair of technical superiority, composition can be just as difficult and impressive (if deemed try-hard by critics and the general public). And both disciplines can hurt a group's output if the other is ignored, as was the case with Yes and The Dead.