Seasons Will Pass You By

Today's formative-album replay: Yes Close to the Edge. I've made no bones about the fact that I first got into Yes because I thought they were sufficiently "classical," and as such were a part of my deprogramming from a self-imposed junior high musical snobbery. But I was so much older then etc., and now I can appreciate the best of Yes both for its rockier edges and its classical ambitions.

Case in point, this high water mark album from 1972, one I loved more or less immediately and can return to with unmitigated pleasure, and which handily meets one definition of a major work (not the only one, by any means): It offers both immediate gratification and rewards sustained scrutiny. It has as many hooks as a banging pop record, as many hard jams as a great rock collection, and yet it really does hang together as a long-form composition—or rather, three distinct but complementary compositions. That last quality, more than any twinkling harpsichords or tricky tempo changes, is the way in which Yes at its best could be said to be "classical": They do thematic development over long forms. To wit, the title track takes up—and handily fills—the 18 minutes and 40 seconds of the LP's first side, while "And You and I" and "Siberian Khatru" run 10:09 and 8:56, respectively.

They had explored longer pieces previously, most notably The Yes Album's "Yours Is No Disgrace" and Fragile's "Heart of the Sunrise," "South of the Sky," and "Roundabout," and would follow Close to the Edge with the infamous four-song double album Tales From Topographic Oceans (which I've learned to enjoy, but it was a steep learning curve), as well as essentially trying to repeat the three-song template with Relayer. But none of them come close to Close to the Edge.

If I had to pinpoint what makes the difference, I'd say it's the quality and pliability of the main motifs they generated for each piece. In most cases I don't mean the vocal melodies, though those too are handled deftly. In "Close to the Edge," after a minute of watery jungle ambience and two minutes of slithery and prickly guitar-bass-synth counterpoint along a tetchy D-minor Aeolian scale, the song lands on a sweet, galumphing, almost nursery-rhyme tune in D-major that Bartok or Copland would have envied:

It's the kind of sing-songy tune you can endlessly reharmonize and repurpose and return to in various guises, which they do; it's even followed immediately by a minor-key version, a classical trick as old as Mozart:

There are at least four other major motifs in this first sprawling song: the insistent verse melody over a churning A-minor groove, the hardest and funkiest 6/8 I know (starts with "a seasoned witch" at 3:54); a bouncy bridge in F-major a minute later; the terse title chorus, rolling up and down in adjacent minor keys yet still sounding hopeful; and the tiny earworm "I get up, I get down," which mostly functions as a transition until it gets its own organ-in-the-jungle showcase in a long, quietly mounting episode in the middle of the piece.

These motifs are plenty to work with, and even though there's no single composer here—by all accounts, Yes worked like most bands, with each member contributing their own parts and piecing together bits they came up with both independently and collectively—"Close to the Edge" holds together beautifully on the strength of this interlocking musical material. It's all so juicy that in a sense it simply feels natural that a band would want to return to these themes and explore them from many angles, whether or not any of them explicitly had the sonata form in mind.

If anything the subsequent songs have even better tunes, from the folky sunshine of "And You and I," with a vocal melody rising in a series of neat fourths...

...to the appropriately Eastern-sounding motif that overlays the deep grooves of "Siberian Khatru":

You can point to links among the three songs: Like "Close to the Edge," "And You and I" has at its center a sunny D-major tune in 6/8, and it ends on an irresolute B-major chord, passing the baton to "Siberian Khatru's" opening snarl of B-minor. But what they really have in common is a simultaneous joy and rigor, a symphonic sweep that doesn't feel overthought or self-consciously "classical" but nevertheless gives the formal satisfaction that comes with expertly executed durational work.

The impulse that draws album-rock fans to long forms isn't necessarily a love for pretentious grandiosity, though the results often come off that way, but simply the hunger for more of a good thing, a craving for surfeit. And it turns out that to pull off a big piece of music demands more than big ideas (the less said about Jon Anderson's lyrics, except as felicitous musical sounds themselves, the better); it takes music that can stand up, over time, on its own terms. I'd say Close to the Edge stands that test of time, and all the others too.

P.S. My ranking of Yes albums.