Jon Anderson Live at the Napa Valley Opera House,

           “Everywhere I go, all over the world, people sing this song.  I hear it in Brazil, Argentina, Japan.  They don’t know what the words mean, but they sing it.  I don’t know what the words mean, either.”  Everybody laughs.  He plays Your Move/All Good People.

            Jon Anderson is a consummate performer.  He was perfectly at ease in front an audience, which is only to be expected, but not all artists of his renown are like that.  When he talked, he was authentic and direct.  He has a great spirit which is a joy to experience, and he put a lot of humor into his performance.  The audience was highly appreciative, even to the point of giving him a standing ovation just for coming on stage and after every song.  Part of this may have had to do with the fact that this was in Napa, the very heart of California wine country, where half the people are half-baked, a good number are fully baked, and a noticeable few are clearly overdone.  Jon played guitar, a little electric piano, and an instrument he described as being based on a Chinese stringed instrument.  It looked a lot like a Turkish sasz to me, and sounded very similar.  He told a lot of stories about “the band,” and about meeting some individuals in the early years like Joe Cocker and Robert Plant, before all became stars.

            Most of the set were Yes songs, but there was a healthy peppering of solo material.  The biggest surprise and highlight of the show for me were the two songs he played from Olias of Sunhillow on the sazs-like thing.  The reggaefied version of Time and a Word was also great.  In fact, he said he wrote it in Jamaica as a reggae song, but the band would not play it that way.  Another interesting take was Heart of the Sunrise on the electric piano.  He also played two Jon and Vangelis songs (each with accompanying humorous anecdotes), namely Find My Way Home and State of Independence.  I actually like his solo acoustic guitar version of the former better than the studio recording.  Other notable selections included Starship Trooper with a scatted version of Wurm, Turn of the Century, Sacred Ground, and The Revealing Science of God.  Notable in that I did not expect to hear any version of these songs.  As you may imagine, they were shortened a great deal, so much so in fact, that after listening to the full-blown Yes versions for years they sounded incomplete, cut off.  Indeed, some of them ended rather abruptly.  This is one of two complaints I have about the show.  The other is that he seemed to have trouble finding some of the chords on the guitar and piano, and no, he was not playing as Howe would play them.  Still, he kept the flow of the music going.  Most of the classic Yes material does not work well in this context, and hearing these concatenated versions gave me a greater appreciation for their sophistication and complexity in their complete form.   I cannot say much about the solo material he sang since most of it was unfamiliar to me.  They were all quite pretty, however.

            One of the recurring story themes he brought out was his surgery, and how he feels a strong urge to sing.  I mean a stronger urge than he ever had before.  With the possibility of losing his singing voice, or having it drastically change, not to mention losing his life, he has emerged even more committed to making music than ever before.  This seems to be the real reason he is no longer in Yes – he feels compelled to pursue his own vision for his music.  He is in a good place with that.  I think we will see a lot more of him, both in the studio and on stage.

            I am very glad to have gone to see him live, but I would not want a live recording of this.  The Yes material was just too minimal for me (I had the opportunity to buy The Mother’s Day Concert CD, also recorded in California, but did not like the samples I heard).  The last time I saw him was the last time I saw Yes, during the Open Your Eyes tour.  It was a good performance, but there is something very different about Jon on stage now and it is for the better.  I recommend seeing him because of the spirit and good nature he brings to a performance, but do not expect anything like a Yes show.  This is not Yes.  This is Jon Anderson, and he is wondrous if limited.