Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Yes Snubbed by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame


The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is to music what:

a) Keystone Light is to beer.

 b) Chef Boyardee is to fine cuisine.

c) Bernie Madoff is to business ethics

d) all of the above

So, Yes has been snubbed once again by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Most aficionados of progressive music could care less about the institution.  However, being inducted would have been a career boost for tYes and a possible catalyst for the return of Jon Anderson.

Yes’ exclusion from the Hall of Fame, however, makes a mockery of the supposedly objective criteria the judges utilize before casting their votes.  Presumably, longevity, sales, instrumental, excellence, musical merit, and influence are supposed to count.  Yes has been around as viable touring and recording group for forty-six years.  They’ve had numerous Billboard hits such as: Roundabout, All Good People/Your Move, Wondrous Stories, The Rhythm of Love, and a #1 hit with Owner of a Lonely Heart.  The album Close to the Edge is routinely described as a musical masterpiece and the pinnacle achievement of the progressive rock movement.  Yes’s roster of musicians – most notably Rick Wakeman, Steve Howe, Bill Bruford, and Chris Squire – have rightly drawn acclaim as among the finest rock musicians of our time.  Finally, can anyone seriously argue that Yes hasn’t had a significant influence on a generation of musicians and musical artists?

Centuries from now, I doubt many people will be listening much to the “music” of inductees like Kiss or the pleasant but bland pop churned out by Hall & Oates.  Close to the Edge, The Gates of Delirium, Awaken, and Tales from Topographic Oceans, on the other hand, are musical works that seems both ahead of their time and timeless.  That’s just the kind of thing that the judges at the Rock and Roll of Fame just don’t seem to get.  But that’s not surprising.  After all, mediocrity never recognizes anything higher than itself.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Free e-book: Yes and Philosophy -- Available Aug 3rd 2013

To help celebrate Yestival on August 3rd 2013 I will be offering all Yes fans a free copy of my e-book "Yes and Philosophy."  To get your free copy you can visit the Amazon website and download the book at no charge on Sat Aug 3rd.  I would ask anyone who enjoys the book to please consider writing a review for the Amazon site.   Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the book.

To see a sample essay please scroll below to "Roundabout: Metaphysics Set to Music."

Link to  book at Amazon (US): Yes and Philosophy

P.S:  Heck, while I'm at it I'm going to make my e-book Socrates in Cyberspace available for free August 3rd.  If you are interested in philosophy of mind then you may want to check it out.  Again, if you enjoy the book I hope you'll consider writing a review for Amazon. 

Roundabout: Metaphysics Set to Music

Forty years ago, the song Roundabout, hit the radio airwaves like a hurricane.  Most rock fans had never heard anything like it before.  Guitarist Steve Howe’s melancholic guitar intro sounded like something Segovia might play, but the classical style prologue was just the beginning of music that seemed space-age and baroque all at the same time. 

Roundabout, however, really blasted off with the introduction of Chris Squire’s phase-delayed bass, a mesmerizing riff that seemed to double back upon itself, like a snake eating its own tail.  Squire played the bass, a traditional back-up instrument, as if it was a lead instrument.  But this was hardly the only element that made the music in Roundabout stand out.  Drummer Bill Bruford’s exotic style owed more to jazz than rock and his percussion was multi-layered by engineer extraordinaire Eddie Offord to hypnotic effect.  And then there was the classically-trained Rick Wakeman contributing florid keyboard runs on a newfangled instrument known as the synthesizer.  Topping everything off was vocalist Jon Anderson, an alto-tenor who often sounded more like a choirboy than a traditional rock singer.  Anderson’s cryptic lyrics and otherworldly vocals imbued Roundabout with a mystic dimension.  Roundabout was the first taste most listeners had of the British progressive rock group known as Yes.

Roundabout raised the bar in rock music.  The musicians that composed Yes were regarded by fans and critics as virtuosos, the highest quality instrumentalists the rock genre had produced at the time.  Roundabout was infused with classical elements, but the song really rocked.  Yes it seemed, were pioneers of a new movement known as progressive rock.  With albums like Fragile, Close to the Edge, and Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes were among the earliest and most successful groups to use rock instruments to create works of an orchestral length and style.

The visionary head of Atlantic records, the late Amhet Ertegun, once described Yes as a group that painted pictures with sounds.  This is a wonderfully paradoxical notion, but one that captures the mysterious ability of music to conjure up imagery and tap into the imagination.   Classical composers have long harnessed the power of music to represent natural phenomenon and emotional states, but until Yes few rock groups had a rich enough instrumental palette to conjure up such vivid and complex soundscapes.
 
Yes music is pitched to the auditory and visual imagination, but it is also capable of tapping into the abstract and/or philosophical imagination.  Schopenhauer once wrote that “Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.”  This is a rather astounding thought.  Schopenhauer believed that music was the most authentic and immediate manifestation of the Will, the primal life-force that underlies our phenomenal reality.   In other words, Schopenhauer believed that it is through music that the conscious subject can encounter the mysterious and fundamental energies that underlie all existence.  No wonder Schopenhauer’s spiritual student, Nietzsche, claimed that life would be a mistake without music.
Roundabout is music that has the potential to plug listeners into a cosmic and philosophical state of mind.  It is music rich and enigmatic enough to reward repeated listening and serious analysis.  What exactly is a roundabout?  Anderson claims the lyrics were inspired by a traffic roundabout he encountered on the way to the recording studio, but a literal interpretation of such an evocative and imagistic song need not steer us in such a pedestrian direction, if you’ll forgive the pun.

The novelist Umberto Eco once identified what he called the “poetic effect,” which refers to a quality in texts and works of art that allow them to continue “to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”  The lyrics and music of Roundabout exemplify the poetic effect.
In my view, there is a lot going on in the song to suggest that the term “roundabout” refers to a cosmic process symbolized by the mythical Uroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail.  The Uroboros, of course, is one of the most potent images in the mythic imagination.  Artwork and jewelry depicting the Uroboros date to earliest antiquity.  Descriptions of the Uroboros appear in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Plato’s philosophy, and in the Hindu Upanishads.  The Uroboros was a frequently used motif in alchemy; the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed the Uroboros symbolically represented the psyche; and the chemist Kekule dreamt of a snake eating its own tail shortly before discovering that the structure of the benzene molecule resembled the Uroboros!  In short, the Uroboros is one of the most fundamental and far-reaching image/ideas in the history of humankind.


Yes fans, of course, are familiar with the Uroboros motif.  To begin with, artist Roger Dean’s famous Yes logo implicitly feeds into itself just as the mythical Uroboros does.  You can see this most explicitly with Dean’s Yes logo on the inner booklet of their latest album, Fly From Here, where the Yes logo is depicted as a snake twisting back upon itself.  But the motif actually crops up a lot in Yes’ work.  For instance, as philosopher Bill Martin notes in his  “Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock,” Chris Squire’s phase-delayed bass in Roundabout seems to double back on itself, like a snake eating it own tail.  Furthermore, Roundabout is a song that explicitly comes full circle: the ending recapitulates the same acoustic guitar motif that song began with.
What is the philosophical significance of the Uroboros motif?  To begin with, The Uroboros motif seems to represent a central truth about the cosmos:  namely, that life feeds off itself.  The Uroboros devours itself, but in doing so it nourishes itself.  The Uroboros slays itself, but it is reborn in the process.  All mortal beings perish, but their lives feed the process of life.  The wheel of life spins eternally.  Yes actually explored this theme in an early song called Survival, but motif is developed with much greater poetic sophistication in Roundabout.

There is an even deeper way of looking at the Uroboros motif.  Scientists tell us that our Universe began with the Big Bang.  Prior to the Big Bang, time and space presumably did not yet exist.  There was only nothingness.  How can something (the universe) come out of nothingness?  The ancient Greeks believed nothing could come out of nothing.  The idea that the universe arose out of nothingness sounds like a paradox, if not a contradiction, but perhaps we can resolve this paradox by thinking in terms of no-thing-ness (i.e., no things).  At the Big Bang, all that existed was what scientists have called a quantum singularity.  Out of this uniform and entirely undifferentiated state (no-thing-ness) the entire cosmos was born.
Following the Big Bang, matter was formed.  As the universe cooled, sub-atomic particles began to form molecules.  Later, molecules arranged themselves into inorganic compounds.  Still later, simple self-replicating organisms such as bacteria emerged.  After this, single-celled organisms came onto the scene.  Soon, multi-cellular organism evolved.  Today, a highly complex multi-celled organism known as homo sapiens is able to trace the evolutionary path of a universe that has given birth to self-aware creatures capable of investigating their own evolutionary path and origins.  In other words, the path from the Big Bang to consciousness investigating the Big Bang is very much like the snake that twists back to bite its own tail.  As Anderson sings: 

I’ll be the Roundabout
The words will make you out and out.

The Princeton physicist John Wheeler would have appreciated this point of view.  Wheeler advocated something called the Anthropic Principle.  In its strongest from, the Anthropic Principle holds that sentient creatures are necessary for the universe to fully exist.  After all, as Wheeler puts it, “what good would the universe be if no one existed to observer it?  Wheeler’s outlook is shaped by the strange implications of quantum mechanics; particularly the notion that subatomic “particles” can exist in an indefinite state, until they are observed.  In other words, consciousness may be necessary to collapse the wave function of quantum level particles.  That is, Wheeler believed that the relationship between the quantum realm and consciousness was, in his own words, like “a smoky dragon biting its tail.” 
The Anthropic Principle is hard for many scientists to digest because it puts consciousness back at the center of creation.  If the Anthropic Principle is correct, then the emergence of sentient creatures is not just some fluke in an entirely random process of evolution.  Instead, the potential for sentience has been woven into the fabric of the universe all along; that is, sentience is something the universe aims at, even if the route it takes to get there is undetermined and even random.

The Uroboros and the Anthropic Principle would appear to imply a teleological view of nature.  That is, the Universe aims at something; most plausibly self-understanding.  That is, the Universe has evolved creatures capable of representing to cosmos to itself.  As Schelling put it, “we are the eyes and ears of the universe.”  If this view is correct, then consciousness is not a fluke, but an inextricable thread woven into the fabric of the universe.  Anderson echoes this view; in his solo DVD, A Tour of the Universe, Anderson insists that the purpose of life is to seek out the source of our creation.  This is a mystical outlook, no doubt, but it is a view that is in accord with many mystically inclined philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Schelling, to name a few.
The song Roundabout is a musical journey that travels full circle.  In the end, Roundabout revisits and recapitulates the acoustic guitar motif the song began with.   Musically, the song seems capture the same theme expressed in T.S. Eliot’s famous lines: 

We shall not cease from our exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Roundabout is music that takes listeners on a journey.  The song raised the bar in rock music by demonstrating that rock musicians could aspire to create serious music with an orchestral impact.  In particular, Yes’ exceptional ability to paint pictures with sound and create a rich sonic landscape listeners can explore and ponder is on full display here.  But Roundabout is not just a musical tour de force; it is also song that kindles the philosophical imagination.  This is not to say that Yes deliberately set out to express philosophical ideas.  Rather, as Schopenhauer noted, music can be an unconscious exercise in metaphysics.  Roundabout is not jut symphonic rock, it metaphysics set to music.

Scott O’Reilly is a freelance writer.  He is the author of Yes and Philosophy: The Spiritual and Philosophical Dimensions of Yes Music.  To learn more about Yes and Philosophy and my other books you can visit my author page at:  http://www.amazon.com/Scott-OReilly/e/B007C7POK0/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1  Contact:( neuroscott@aol.com)

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Review: Yes at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester NY July 28th 2013


Yes is a band that has had more ups and downs than an elevator operator.  Albums such as “Close to the Edge,” “The Yes Album,” and “Going for the One” represent the heights of progressive rock, but the group has also had its share of low points too (as bargain bin albums like “Open Your Eyes,” Big Generator,” and “Tormato” demonstrate).  On their 2013 tour, however, Yes is very much a band very much on the upswing.

Yes is celebrating their 45th anniversary as a group this year.  To mark the occasion the band is performing three of its most popular and critically acclaimed albums (“Close to the Edge,” “The Yes Album,” and “Going for the One”) in their entirety and original running order on tour.  This approach has proven a hit with fans as Yes is playing to capacity crowds and rave reviews.  The acclamation is well-deserved.  Put simply, right now Yes is playing like a well-oiled machine firing on all cylinders.  Epics like “Awaken” and “Close to the Edge” are executed with musical precision, but there is also a freshness, vitality, and soul in the performances.

Newcomer Jon Davison is especially impressive and an exceptionally good fit for the band.  His voice may lack the uniqueness of the inimitable Jon Anderson, but he has a very attractive timbre, an innate musicality, an ease with his upper-register.  Time and again, Davison embellished familiar musical codas with novel inflections in ways that were surprising and inspired.  You’d have to be deaf (or a music critic at Rolling Stone) not appreciate the grace and beauty he added to Yes’ classics.

This is the first time I’ve been at a Yes concert where the crowd was on its feet following each and every song.  However, the band created many spine-tingling moments and the spontaneous applause and standing ovations were more than merited.  As is customary, Guitarist Steve Howe was in superb form.  If there is a more tasteful, imaginative, and dexterous six-stringer out there, then I haven’t heard him.  Geoff Downes may not be the kind of keyboardist to don a cape, but he was excellent throughout.  Indeed, his jazzy improvisation on the overlooked gem, “A Venture,” was a highlight.  The Squire/White rhythm section was crisp, powerful, and dynamic as well.        

Yes as long been ridiculed by critics at Rolling Stone and snubbed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but as the 2013 tour progresses it is clear that Yes will let the music speak for itself.  Right now, as a live act Yes is on Everest.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Renaissance at The Strand April 13th 2013 -- A Review


Adversity has a way of revealing character.  Few bands have been tested the way Renaissance has of late.  Fewer still have met their challenges with such flying colors.  In late November of last year Michael Dunford, the lead acoustic guitarist and guiding spirit of the band, passed away unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage .  The group had just completed work on Grandine il Vento, its first studio album in more than a decade, but their tour schedule was hampered by lead vocalist Annie Haslam’s fractured spine and Hurricane Sandy.  Nevertheless, the group was vibrant and impressive when I heard them at the Ridgefield Playhouse (CT) on Oct 19th 2012.  Tragically, it was one of the last opportunities to hear Michael’s tasteful acoustic work live.

The spirit of Michael Dunford was very much in evidence as a regrouped Renaissance took the stage at the historic Strand Theatre April 13th 2013 in Lakewood NJ.  The band has a new guitarist, Ryche Chlanda, a Jersey native, who did a commendable job conjuring up Michael’s inimitable tapestry-like fretwork.  Likewise, percussionist Joe Goldberger was energetic and rock solid behind the drums.  And the rest of the band, which includes David Keyes (bass and vocals), Rave Tesar (piano), and Jason Hart (keyboards and vocals), was fresh and impressive on even the most ambitious material, which included an epic rendition of The Tales of Scheherazade.

The highlight of the evening, however, may have been the two songs from the new album, Cry to the, World and Grandine il Vento, which were performed during the encore.  The music had a special poignancy given the circumstance, but to my ears this was some best music Renaissance has ever done.   Annie’s voice remains as wondrous and attractive as ever, but her performance was also infused with the kind of passion and artistry that made the concert a fitting tribute to Michael Dunford.  If you have a chance to see Renaissance on tour, then don’t miss them.  You’d be hard pressed to find better live music anywhere.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Review Yes at The Beacon Theatre April 9th 2013


Thirty years ago, Yes was being compared to dinosaurs.  Today, as Yes celebrates its 45th anniversary, the group is still trudging the musical landscape and showing no sign that they are near extinction.   They released their most successful album in decades last year (Fly From Here), they are embarked on an extensive tour this year, and another new album and world tour appear to be in works for 2014.  On Tuesday April 9th the group performed at the famed Beacon Theatre in NYC to a sold out and decidedly enthusiastic crowd.  Both the set list and the musical performance came the closest in years to recapturing the Yes magic of yore.
In recent years, some fans have grumbled about slowing tempos, patchy vocals, and the absence of founding lead singer Jon Anderson.   There was little to gripe about on Tuesday night, however, as Yes delved into some of its most complex and ambitious extended works – most notably Close to the Edge and Awaken – with precision and gusto.  The set list included some of their most challenging material, but the band sounded energetic, cohesive, and near the top of their game.
Guitarist Steve Howe was his usual dexterous and inventive self.  Often switching between three or more guitars in a single song, Mr. Howe has a gift for avoiding the obvious and making each solo sound fresh and seemingly off the cuff.  His fretwork on the climatic portion of Siberian Khatru and a show-stopping solo in Awaken showed why he is one of the most admired guitarists around.

Highlights of the evening also included rarely performed tracks such as A Venture and Turn of the Century.  The former is a whimsical, off-beat tune with a jazzy keyboard coda; the latter a gentle ballad featuring exceptionally tasteful Spanish guitar and lilting piano.  In the both instances the interplay between keyboardist Geoff Downes and Mr. Howe was impressive and satisfying.

Indeed, tracks like Wondrous Stories showed just how good the musical interchange is between the various band members.  Here, Jon Davison light, ethereal voice came close to duplicating the magic of the inimitable Jon Anderson.   Drummer Alan White was in fine form throughout the night too.

Chris Squire’s unique bass and fine supporting vocals should be noted too.  Mr. Squire is the only remaining member of the group he helped found 45 years ago.  With his large frame and thunderous bass, Mr. Squire could easily be mistaken for some musical Tyrannosaurus Rex.  But it is in no small measure to his credit that Yes is outlasting the critics and detractors who insisted the days of Yes music were numbered.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Peter Banks: An Appreciation


Peter Banks , the original guitarist for Yes, was destined to be overshadowed by his replacement, the legendary Steve Howe.  Nevertheless, Banks was a fine guitarist and an important part of Yes’ development.  Banks coined the band’s name, designed their first logo, and contributed mightily to the group’s combustible, jazzy, and adventurous early sound.  Banks fiery style is especially evident on “I See You,” and “Every Little Thing,” Yes’ covers of tunes by The Byrds and the Beatles respectively.
Banks resented the fact that many fans believed Yes only began with the arrival of Steve Howe.  Something’s Coming: The BBC Recordings 1969-1970 document that was Banks an integral factor in Yes’ scintillating live sound.  Check out “Astral Traveler,””Then” and “Everydays” from this set to appreciate how inventive and exciting Banks’ fretwork could be.   Yes did progress with Banks departure, but the tracks on the BBC Recordings remain the definitive versions of these songs.  RIP Peter Banks.  Your dexterous guitar work helped propel Yes to superstardom.