After 23 years, Jethro Tull strikes back with original music: Why Ian Anderson's band hasn't been rendered irrelevant with time

In #TheMusicThatMadeUs, senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape us into the people we become: their greatest legacies.

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Everything about Jethro Tull is unusual. Starting from its flummoxing name to being a pioneering rock sound centred on the flute, the British band helmed by Ian Anderson is an anomaly that has continued to inspire over 50 years since its inception.  

What started as a predominantly blues band in 1967, featuring vocalist-flautist-guitarist Anderson and fellow guitarist Martin Barre, has over half a century morphed into a revolving-door band member experience, along with a whole host of drummers and bassists who have made their mark, or not. Yet at the core has been Anderson’s vision for this collective, spearheading a progressive movement that combined witty and incisive storytelling on a tapestry of intricate musical arrangements and rich melodic structures.

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Their range, as seen in the blues-rich debut Stand Up and the monumental Thick As A Brick to Heavy Horses, Stormwatch  and Songs From The Wood, is nothing short of a musical education for their peers and generations of musicians who have followed. The result has been a five-decade musical treatise on Anderson’s various musings: religion, parenting, culture, the environment, relationships and more. So much of their music has been thematically ahead of its time if not for being sharply contemporary.  

If their sound has been an amalgamation of the various musical influences of the time, then Anderson’s lyrics have frequently pushed you to question status quo, mull over intellectual inertia or caution you about moral atrophy. All this has been with a generous helping of the frontman’s typically acerbic sense of humour. Journalists, in fact, are frequently reminded of how woefully boring their questions are at press conferences, and so Anderson takes it upon himself to not-so-gently pre-empt this with a FAQs list.  

Boredom does not sit well with Anderson who has constantly looked to push the boundaries of the genre from 1967-2012, and then 2017-till date.

From their blues rock roots, the band traverses the jazz fusion space, harnessed classical influences while also dabbling with folk and hard rock, thus creating a sound that is both distinctly Jethro Tull and universal.

And now, more than 19 years since their last album, the first in 23 years to contain original content, progressive rock veterans Jethro Tull are back with The Zealot Gene.

The use of religious ideas and spiritual motifs are not uncommon for a band like Tull, so the zealot component is one that is sure to be backed by much of Anderson’s thought processes. In interviews before, Anderson has spoken about The Bible as a rich source of characters and plots for a storyteller, one that he truly identifies with. When you look at Jethro Tull’s extensive discography, it feels like a music library that contains within it solutions to every kind of world problem, where neither the answers nor the questions are rendered irrelevant with time.  

Given the band’s penchant for sonic experimenting, it is no surprise that the list of musicians that Jethro Tull has inspired spans various genres. From Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, and Rush to Joe Bonamassa, Eddie Vedder and more, scores of artists have been drawn to Tull’s musical philosophy that the songs can be true to their rock roots without losing their essence when a flute or jazz instruments take centre-stage. Anderson made it acceptable to play whatever instrument befit the song with a kind of confidence that shows in so many of these musicians’ path-breaking musical decisions. Be it experimenting with time signature or exercising restraint as a frontman and letting the instruments speak, the Jethro Tull way of composing and performing should be a ready reckoner for budding musicians.

If rockstars are known for their flamboyance, Ian Anderson is a man playing a flute while balancing like a flamingo, making fun of you for answering a phone call during his performance. He has seriously done that at Mumbai’s Shanmukhananda Hall in the mid-2000s, and was applauded cheerily by those who were getting annoyed by the incessant ringing.  

This Indophile has performed several times in India, each time to a packed audience that has come to love his interactions just as much as being nostalgic for Tull’s music. Anderson has always been candid over his opinion on his vocals, admitting that while it lacks the genius of a Robert Plant, it does the job for the songs he writes. While that may be partly true, Tull’s enduring legacy rests on the dynamic nature of the band’s sound and the bandleader’s potent combination of self-awareness, vision, and talent that has only matured and reinvented itself with time.

The Zealot Gene is another opportunity for Anderson and his band to show us that they maybe boomers but they certainly ain’t living in the past.  

Senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri has spent a good part of two decades chronicling the arts, culture and lifestyles.