Keith Emerson, the flamboyant and accomplished keyboardist who pioneered the use of synthesizers in rock music, has died at the age of 71, his former band, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, have announced on Facebook.
The AFP news agency reports that the English keyboardist died late on Thursday at his home in the Los Angeles area.
"Keith was a gentle soul whose love for music and passion for his performance as a keyboard player will remain unmatched for many years to come," Carl Palmer, the group's percussionist, said in a separate statement.
"He was a pioneer and an innovator whose musical genius touched all of us in the worlds of rock, classical and jazz," he said.
Inspired by Jimi Hendrix's theatrics with the electric guitar, Emerson created a new showmanship with the keyboards as he would attack the keys with knives and play the organ upside down with the giant instrument suspended over him.
Emerson studied classical piano as a child in England and eventually took up the Hammond organ as he became intrigued by jazz.
But Emerson's career - and, to an extent, the trajectory of rock - changed when he heard the influential 1968 album Switched-On Bach by the composer then known as Walter Carlos, who performed classical pieces on the Moog synthesizer.
Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer of ELP receive their awards at the 1972 Melody Maker Pop Poll
The early-generation analog synthesizers, named after their creator, US engineer Robert Moog, had gradually been finding their way into popular music, most notably appearing on The Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road.
But Emerson was considered the first to make the synthesizer a central rock instrument on its own, taking it on concert tours.
After the disbanding of his band The Nice in 1970, the keyboardist joined Palmer and singer and guitarist Greg Lake to form Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who became a force in the progressive rock genre that grew in the 1970s with a new focus on elaborate musical structure.
The trio won a wide following around the world but especially in Britain, where several albums including Tarkus, Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery entered the top five on the UK chart.
Emerson eventually went solo and remained active in later years, although he was forced to call off a tour in 2010 due to abnormal growth in his colon.
His bandmates did not reveal a cause of his death.
