Jon Anderson brings Yes songs to Greensburg with new generation of musicians

Jon Anderson still hasn’t given up on a Yes reunion. He knows Yes fans have spent 18 years hoping the surviving members of the seminal prog rock group would achieve some sort of détente and reunite on stage.

But Anderson also knows he doesn’t necessarily need former band mates like songwriter/guitarist Steve Howe to play Yes’ brilliant musical works live.

Anderson, Yes’ lead singer and composer for most of the group’s existence, and certainly of its most consequential songs — “Roundabout,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “Owner of a Lonely Heart” — is playing select shows this summer with a different band. They’re talented young students of the Paul Green Rock Academy, an advanced rock music school in Norwalk, Conn.

The school was reportedly the inspiration for the 2003 Jack Black film “School of Rock” and Anderson has been performing with its alumni since 2005.

The baker’s dozen dates on this tour include a show at The Palace Theatre in Greensburg at 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 27.

Anderson and the ensemble will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Yes’ classic album “Close to the Edge” by performing the groundbreaking record in its entirety along with other Yes favorites and deep cuts.

Anderson has worked with many variations of Yes but none quite like this group of teen-aged musicians who weren’t even a gleam in their parents eyes when he created this music but have learned to appreciate and master it.

“The way I feel about music is I just want to have fun,” Anderson told the Tribune-Review in a video chat last month. “I feel grateful, hopeful and thankful for what I do, and that’s exactly what the teenagers are like. They’re just so wonderful to be with.”

They got together for a short tour last August. And when Green Rock suggested they reunite this summer, Anderson brought up the idea of doing “Close to the Edge.”

“They’re doing (Yes songs) ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ and ‘Starship Trooper,’ we may as well stretch them a little more you know,” Anderson said. “And that’s what we did in Florida (in May) and it really was a blast.”

And what a learning opportunity for the students who may not have known that one of the most dramatic shifts in popular music happened in the late 1960s and early ‘70s with the emergence of Yes and its version of progressive rock.

By this time, rock ‘n’ roll had become the dominant pop force. But before groups like Yes, it had mostly taken the form of two-minute, boy/girl bubblegum love songs that dominated rock ‘n’ roll radio stations.

Now some of those songs were being cast aside to make way for something more substantial and cerebral — a style of rock music strongly influenced by a variety of classical and keyboard sounds and longer compositions. No group personified prog rock better than Yes, which had made the decision to go in a new and fresh direction after they formed in 1968.

“Close to the Edge,” released in September 1972, might well have represented the group’s zenith. At the time of its release, it became Yes’ biggest commercial success, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and selling one million copies. Its intricately woven tapestry of sound was best exemplified by the 18-minute title track.

Anderson, sporting a thick Albert Einstein-style hairdo and speaking in the same high register as his singing voice, spoke of being inspired by the Herman Hesse novel “Siddhartha.”

He described the process of making the album as so complex they had to record each rehearsal for future reference.

“So, you’d say ‘let’s listen to what we have’ and we’d listen to it and say ‘oh, it’s pretty good. So, where does it go now?’ And mentally, I just tended to know what were the next steps to get into the next groove and another verse, another big chorus and then we got to go somewhere,” Anderson said. “And then I said, ‘why don’t we go back into the intro and create a lake of sound.”

Anderson remembers drummer Bill Bruford dripping water from a bottle into a pan to create a lake sound effect. In fact, the whole process speaks to the organic nature of working in a recording studio in those pre-digital days when everything was recorded on audio tape.

They created five-minute segments and mixed them onto quarter-inch audiotape, he explained. The strips of tape were marked and saved by sticking them to a wall — which was fine until the cleaning lady showed up and tossed one of them in the garbage.

“The (cleaning) lady called Lizzy comes in ‘everybody get out of the bloody way I’m cleaning up here’ with a brush and vacuum cleaner,” Anderson said. “We had two tapes left to finish the whole track ‘Close to the Edge.’ ”

When she was done cleaning they discovered a strip of audiotape was missing. They started looking on the floor and couldn’t find it. They ended up having to go outside in the pouring rain to fish the missing segment of tape out of a garbage container.

It’s not lost on Anderson that he was in his music making prime decades before his teenage collaborators were born. And it doesn’t bother him one bit.

“To me the neat thing is they’re happy, they’re grateful and they’re thankful. And that’s all I need around me,” he said. “They rehearse like crazy. And the great thing about working with them: I don’t realize how old I am until we do a selfie.”

While prospects for a reunion of the surviving members of Yes that includes Anderson and Howe seem slim at best after Howe told Rolling Stone “I don’t think (the fans) should stay up nights worrying about that,” Anderson is giving Yes fans in this area something to look forward to when his “Close to the Edge” 50th anniversary tour with the Paul Green Rock Academy stops in Greensburg.