A Conversation with Jon Anderson – HuffPost 11.6.13

Mike Ragogna: Hello Jon. So what’s all this about a cruise in February?

Jon Anderson: I know! The idea is I’ve been asked to do it now for the last three years and I keep saying, “I’m not quite sure,” but then one of the main guys from the Transatlantic band said, “Come on, Jon, we can do the show together, do a couple of Yes songs with you guys,” and I said, “Well, alright, and I’ll do a sort of meet and greet and then I’ll do a conversation with the audience kind of thing because you’re on the boat together. And at the end, I’ll be happy to get up and do a couple of songs together and it’ll be fun.” It sounds like a fun experience for everybody and the people that run it are very, very professional, so we won’t be rowing the boat.

MR: [laughs] When you guys were making your music together as Yes and also as Jon Anderson, did you ever in your wildest dreams predict that this music would be cruise bound?

JA: [laughs] No idea at all. You never think of these things, but actually years ago, these guys came to us, maybe twenty years ago, and asked us if we’d do a cruise where we could stop at every port along the way and do a concert on a cruise around the world. We thought that would be a cool idea but it never happened.

MR: Hey, give us a catch-up as far as Jon Anderson. I know there was the Wolfgang’s Vault event happening in Vegas. What was the concept behind that?

JA: Oh yeah, it’s called “Raiding The Vault.” The last thing I would think of would be going to Vegas to sing in a show, but I checked it out and it’s a really good show. It’s the ages of rock ‘n’ roll from the sixties and seventies and eighties. I just wanted to be involved and get up and do three or four songs. I just said, “Well, maybe it’d be fun to do.” I’m in that state of mind where if something comes along and it feels like fun, I’m going to go along and do it.

MR: You know, even internationally, I think it’s every guy’s fantasy to be dressed up in a tuxedo singing on a Vegas stage with all of these beautiful women with fans dancing around him, isn’t it?

JA: I hope so!

MR: [laughs] Then again, just look into how much it costs to hire fan girls. It might be cost prohibitive.

JA: Oh my gosh, at my age, it’s all very frightening.

MR: [laughs] What else are you up to these days, Jon? Catch us up.

JA: Well I’m in the middle of large-scale projects, I just finished one yesterday. I just started working on a project called Violin Stories. It’s about this street violinist who finds a crystal violin in a dumpster and every time he plays it, it flies to a different part of the world and gets to know the indigenous life. I just finished the first rough sketch of that yesterday; it took me about two weeks to finish. But I’ve been working on it with a friend of mind, Bill Kilpatrick, who actually orchestrated it for me for the last couple years. It’s one of those parts of my life. I’m working on another thing today. You see, over a period of time, you begin working on a lot of projects and they build and they build. It’s like building a big castle of music, you know?

MR: Yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah. At this point, how do you view your old castles? You’ve built a lot of castles.

JA: Yeah, I’m totally proud of what Yes has done musically over the years. I’m very proud that I was involved for so many years. Somebody sent me a link to The Yes Story–you can watch it on YouTube and it’s quite amazing. It’s everybody that was ever in the band talking about being in the band. It’s quite a wonderful experience, it’s like going through your musical life. It’s quite extraordinary, the amount of music that Yes did over the years, and my work with Vangelis, re-releasing the last two albums we put together. So you get to the point in your career where people are looking back and seeing what you’ve done and all that I do is look forward to what I’ve got to do.

MR: So looking forward to what you’ve got to do, have you ever been on a cruise?

JA: No. It’s going to be exciting. We’ll see what happens.

MR: Now that you’ve committed to it, what are the plans?

JA: It’s just me and my wife Jane happy to be together and we’ve got a separate suite with a balcony so we can just hang out there most of the time and look at the weather and the birds flying by and the water.

MR: Are you looking forward to the other music that’s going to be on the boat, too?

JA: Yessiree! I’ve been watching and listening to everybody. I’m thinking about getting together with a band of musicians over the next couple of years, so I’m thinking about going out with a band. I’ve been solo now for the last five or six years and I’ve been very happy doing that. But something inside wants me to be within a band, so that could be part of the experience, you meet musicians and you try out working together and we’ll see what happens.

MR: Jon, what advice do you have for new artists?

JA: It’s very, very simple: You practice, you practice, and then you practice more. The breaks will come if you keep working. There’s no point in sitting around waiting to be a star. It’s not going to happen. You’ve got to work on your craft and you’ve got to go out there and perform. I’m working with a young guitar player at the moment. We’ve been working together for the last three years on and off; he’s a beautiful guitar player and I’ve got him into playing classical guitar and we’ve written two concertos together. They’re mostly his ideas and he works on the arrangements with orchestras himself. It’s wonderful to work with young people. Next Spring, I’ll be working with Studio House up in Woodstock, New York. It’s working with Paul Green who started School Of Rock and we’re working with a bunch of young musicians again and doing a performance together. So these things are part of my life. I love working with young musicians.

MR: So you love this mentoring role?

JA: Yeah! There’s some great music out there, there’s a lot of young music out there. It’s got nothing to do with the pop charts, it’s just young people out there doing festivals and things like that and people love it.

MR: What do you gravitate towards when you’re listening to music now? I imagine it’s not the pop charts.

JA: Well, now and again, there’s a great song. I love Bruno Mars, I love Katy Perry; she’s got an incredible voice. There are always great songs, it’s a never-ending flow, but for bands that are really pushing the envelope and trying different things, there’s a band called Battles that I like. There are a lot of young bands out there really pushing the envelope musically and there always will be.

MR: Jon, what is the future of prog these days? How is it even defined?

JA: It’s funny because now there are different styles of prog, because you’ve got the progressive music of the seventies bands, progressive music of the eighties style bands, and then there are very, very progressive modern musicians now who are really doing sort of soundscape music with the rhythms and not so much the obvious progression of music, it’s something different. I like the whole scope of it. It’s like a never-ending library of musical ideas. The prog rock thing has now become a stated sort of style, that’s the seventies and eighties, that’s what is but you do get a lot of young musicians pushing that envelope, which is great.

MR: Yeah, there’s a group called Mew out there that I like a lot.

JA: I’ll Google them now as we speak.

MR: “Prog” is such a tricky category too. For instance, when a jazz musician attempts it, it’s “fusion.” Chick Corea comes to mind.

JA: I love Chick Corea. I think he’s one of the greatest. It’s just one of those things, he’s fabulous.

MR: Do you think that maybe jazz is one of the areas that prog went to or one of the places where prog is developing more than anywhere else?

JA: Yeah, I really think so, because when Yes started up, we were listening to Frank Zappa, which was rock jazz. But we were really listening to the great jazz players like Bill Bruford, a great jazz drummer. “Jazz” means free-form. I don’t particularly enjoy the jazz that’s written out and you know what it is. I like the free-form crazy wild jazz. There’s a band in Philadelphia, they used to have about thirty people in the band, called Sun Ra Arkestra, do you remember them?

MR: Oh, absolutely.

JA: That was one of my favorite jazz experiences.

MR: Doesn’t it sort of tempt you to want to explore jazz a little bit? Isn’t it one of the last fields that would be really interesting to hear Jon Anderson’s voice on?

JA: Well it depends. I’ve always said I wanted to work with Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett. I’d love to sing with them, man, that’d be so cool.

MR: Is there anything that you feel strongly about right now that we can get the word out on?

JA: Gosh, there are so many things that I’m excited about, it’s hard to pinpoint one specific event. I just know there are so many incredible shows out there–theater, dance, musical. I’m very interested in all of it so I’m excited because I think I’ve got a lot of ideas for what I’d like to see on stage, but that’s the first thing to think about. If you’ve got an idea for a theater piece you’d love to see, why not create it and then try bringing it to the theater?

MR: I wish you all the best, Jon. You’ve got a creative finger in about a dozen pies.

JA: I know, that’s just like. It’s an adventure and it’s a great feeling that I’ve got.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne