Gary McFarland – “America the Beautiful” (1969)

America the Beautiful, billed by its composer as “America’s first protest symphony,” is certainly Gary McFarland’s magnum opus. But it is not the McFarland album most people remember nearly some six decades later. That honor probably belongs to either the Stan Getz and Bill Evans albums he waxed for the jazz diehards or Soft Samba and The In Sound for the crossover crowd.

This six-movement work – each with such cynical titles as “Due to a Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled” – juxtaposes rock, jazz and boogie-woogie with classical composition in a cohesive fashion that holds together marvelously well.

Subtitled “An Account of Its Disappearance,” America the Beautiful represents a musical lament and an instrumental protest, calling out the degradation and destruction of McFarland’s beloved home country and, as annotator Norman Schwartz aptly notes, “our country’s natural splendors in the name of commerce or convenience.”

Remarkably, America the Beautiful predates the very first annual Earth Day – originally a protest of the mounting air and water pollution infecting the world and a program to bring environmental health to the national political agenda – by a full year. As a first-grader in 1970, I remember proudly taking part in that very first event.

But in an age of global-warming denialism, extreme weather events, destructive floods and wildfires throughout the world, not to mention the United States’ current willingness to destroy or dissect anything that helps preserve or improve life, liberty or the pursuit of anything good, a statement like America the Beautiful remains topical and remarkably prescient to this day.

Recorded over four days in October 1968, America the Beautiful features a who’s who of New York session players, including:

Warren Bernhardt on piano (solo on “80 Miles,” “Suburbia”)
Eric Gayle [sic] on guitar (solos on “On This Site,” “80 Miles”)
Jerry Jemmott or Chuck Rainey on bass guitar
Bernard Purdie or Bill Lavorgna on drums
Warren Smith on percussion

Plus horns:

Marvin Stamm (solo on “Due to a Lack of Interest”), Snooky Young (solo on “Last Rites”) and Ernie Royal & Bernie Glow or Richard Williams & Randy Brecker on trumpet
Garnett Brown on trombone
Harvey Phillips on tuba
Ray Alonge and Jim Buffington or Earl Chapin on French horn
Jerome Richardson (solos on “Suburbia,” “If I’m Elected”), Romeo Penque (solo on “80 Miles”), Wally Caine and Danny Bank & Joe Farrell or Hubert Laws & Ray Beckenstein on reeds

And strings:

George Ricci (solos on “On This Site,” “80 Miles”) or Harvey Shapiro (“Suburbia” only) on cello
Al Brown (solo on “Last Rites”) on viola (“80 Miles,” “Last Rites” only)
Aaron Rosand and Gene Orloss or David Nadien (“80 Miles,” “Last Rites” only)

McFarland opts out as a participating musician here (interestingly not including a vibraphonist to replace him), sticking, rather, to conducting his sprawling composition. But his signature is all over the work. The composer’s always-looming melancholy here turns toward disenchantment and anger, while his signature sense of humor comes to an ultimate resignation to a doomed fate.

The original LP’s first side includes the titles “On This Site Shall Be Erected,” “80 Miles an Hour Through Beer-Can Country,” and “Suburbia – Two Poodles and a Plastic Jesus,” with the second side featuring “If I’m Elected…” (originally from the 1964 McFarland/Donald McKayle ballet “Reflections in the Park”), “Last Rites for the Promised Land,” and concluding with “Due to a Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled.”

This is a tale of two Americas – one that is pure and beautiful and another that is self-destructive and in need of healing – told primarily by the strings. On the one hand there are the classical strings, headlined by George Ricci’s mournful cello, and, on the other, there is Eric Gale’s harsh, jangly and more menacingly-metallic-than-usual electric guitar (balanced, as ever, by the guitarist’s inherent bluesy soulfulness).

McFarland’s conception works surprisingly well, at least at first. America the Beautiful is positively commanding during the work’s first three movements (the original LP’s first side, about 19 minutes of music). But it loses momentum – and much direction – in the program’s next two movements. Things get back on track, however, for the final movement, which is less a bravura finale than a varied restatement of earlier themes.

(While calling this a symphony, McFarland doesn’t really align with – or, possibly, even want to adhere to – the structure of a classical symphony, or even, for that matter, a typical concerto. It is more aptly considered a suite.)

With a title like “Due to a Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled,” you’d expect more of an apocalypse – consider the floods, wildfires and other natural disasters that the world faces today – instead of a coda that hints at “Oh well, there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s just go about our business.” But isn’t that what most of us do anyway? Maybe McFarland realized that even back then.

America the Beautiful was released in March 1969 to generally positive notice. “Even though Gary McFarland’s symphony has something to say about our time,” wrote the music-industry trade paper Billboard, “it is loaded with musical vibrations. In its six movements, McFarland protests the progressive destruction of America’s natural beauty and he hits the mark. The orchestration is rich and the beat is pertinent, and it should not be limited to jazz play alone.”

Additionally, the Sierra Club, through its recently-formed Artists’ Resistance Movement (ARM), honored McFarland on March 19, 1969, for his efforts to stir public reaction against the deterioration of America’s natural resources and treasures with the release of America the Beautiful.

“First,” wrote Don DeMichael in his five-star DownBeat review, “let it be understood that this album’s title is meant to be sardonic. Second, let it be known that this is a compositional effort that succeeds without reservation in its obviously programmatic portrayal of certain aspects of our society. …The musicians play McFarland’s scores without serious mishap (the writing can be difficult to play) and with more than a little understanding and enthusiasm. … The level of interpretation combined with that of the composition makes this an album of importance.”

Later, in its 1971 obituary for McFarland, DownBeat specifically referenced America the Beautiful, by saying that it “stands as one of the landmarks of his career.”

“America the Beautiful is the best thing McFarland has done yet,” enthused John S. Wilson in the July 1969 issue of High Fidelity. “It is a superb development of traditional large group jazz devices – almost a summation of what has been created to this point. He rises strings with striking skill and imagination -and this has been a consistent weak point of jazz composers. He uses rock coloration, relating it to a jazz context. His brass is brilliant, high, low, and full. The only weakness of this composition – and it becomes a weakness simply because of its length – is his repetition of a sort of “good -guy/bad-guy” theme…This is a forty-minute statement that could have been said as well – better – in twenty minutes.”

Two singles from the album were released: “80 Miles an Hour” (a 3:02 edit, starting at about the 4:35 mark in the LP track, where Eric Gale comes in), backed with “On This Site” (a 1:52 edit, starting, again, at about the LP track’s 1:56 mark, where Gale starts) and, strangely, a promotional single – with a different catalog number altogether – of the 3:02 edit of “80 Miles an Hour” on both sides.

America the Beautiful was also a modest commercial hit for Gary McFarland, peaking at number 189 in April 1969 on the Billboard 200 (when the original cast album for Hair was number one), while reaching number 10 on the Billboard Jazz LPs chart in June of that year (while Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground was topping that chart).

America the Beautiful was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1969, one for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist (losing to Walking in Space by Quincy Jones) and another for Best Album Cover, painted by Evelyn J. Kelbish, with graphics by David Stahlberg, which it won – competing against such covers as Led Zeppelin II and the eponymous Blind Faith album.

Kelbish’s cover art was appropriated just three years later by McFarland manager/business partner Norman Schwartz for the Cobblestone compilation Requiem for Gary McFarland: A Collection of the Finest of Gary McFarland, a program that includes this album’s “80 Miles an Hour Through Beer-Can Country” and “Last Rites for the Promised Land.”

While Gary McFarland never had the opportunity to compose another album-length contemporary classical piece, he did, however, produce composer and arranger Bob Freedman’s Journeys of Odysseus: A Jazz Suite for Chamber Orchestra, a 1969 recording that wasn’t issued until 1972 on the Cobblestone label.

Freedman’s set features many of the same musicians who participated on America the Beautiful – including George Ricci, Gene Orloff, Hubert Laws, Jerome Richardson and Marvin Stamm – while adding other such stalwarts as guitarists Jay Berliner and Bucky Pizzarelli and bassists Ron Carter and Richard Davis.

Journeys of Odysseus, however, is unfortunately marred by a pompous and wholly unnecessary album-length narration that the composer claims was supposed to have been omitted before release. (If so, why go to the trouble of recording it in the first place?)

#McFarlandMonday