SACD Yes – Fragile

Five musicians introduce themselves

On Fragile, released in 1971, Yes places four band pieces alongside five smaller contributions associated with individual members. Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford make their first Yes album with Rick Wakeman. The new keyboard player brings Mellotron and Minimoog into the group’s resources alongside piano and Hammond organ. Recording and production take place with Eddy Offord at London’s Advision Studios.

The concept makes the album more than a sequence of extended tracks. Between “Roundabout”, “South Side of the Sky”, “Long Distance Runaround” and “Heart of the Sunrise”, individual musical personalities come into focus. Those short contributions change the scale and the way we attend to the ensemble.

Rick Wakeman and the opening of “Roundabout”

“Cans and Brahms” makes Wakeman’s classical connection explicit, transferring material from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony to keyboards. Elsewhere, he works within the full band. That movement between an individual miniature and collective playing is part of the album’s design.

The opening of “Roundabout” combines reversed piano sounds with Steve Howe’s acoustic guitar. A familiar song begins by creating a small, unusual space. Listen to how that introduction leads into the ensemble. The arrangement has already begun to tell its story before the first vocal line arrives.

Steve Howe between miniature and extended form

“Mood for a Day” presents Howe’s acoustic playing on its own. Later, “Heart of the Sunrise” gives the collective band a larger framework again. Squire’s bass, Bruford’s drums and Anderson’s voice are as important to that structure as guitar and keyboards. The individual pieces help identify those voices when they return within the larger forms.

You can enter the record through the short tracks on one listen and follow the extended band arrangements on the next. They are two perspectives on the same lineup. On SACD, all nine selections remain together in sequence without side changes.

The Atlantic 75 hybrid stereo SACD

CAPA 014 SA is a hybrid stereo SACD. The publisher credits Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio with mastering directly from the original master tape to DSD. A CD layer supports conventional CD players; accessing the SACD layer requires SACD-compatible hardware. No multichannel programme or bonus tracks are specified for this edition. Production details for the separately available double LP do not describe this disc.

You order from Michael 45 in Germany. We arrange the US import and dispatch from Hilden.

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Musicians

Documented selection of participating musicians. Personnel may vary by track; this list does not claim to be complete.