Gary McFarland - America The Beautiful
Label:
Catalog#:
SK-8
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Stereo
Country:
US
Released:
1969
Genre:
Jazz
Style:
Big Band
Tracklist
| A1 | 1st Movement – On This Site Shall Be Erected… | 4:36 | ||
| A2 | 2nd Movement – 80 Miles An Hour Through Beer-Can Country | 9:09 | ||
| A3 | 3rd Movement – Suburbia: Two Poodles And A Plastic Jesus | 6:21 | ||
| B1 | 4th Movement – “If I Am Elected…” | 4:41 | ||
| B2 | 5th Movement – Last Rites For The Promised Land | 4:42 | ||
| B3 | 6th Movement – Due To A Lack Of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled | 8:36 |
Credits
Bass Guitar -
Chuck Rainey
(tracks: A2-3, B2-3)
,
Jerry Jemmott
(tracks: A1, B1)
Cello - George Ricci (tracks: A1-2, B1-3) , Harvey Shapiro (tracks: B3)
Composed By - Gary McFarland
Conductor - Gary McFarland
Drums - Bernard Purdie (tracks: A2-3, B2-3) , Bill Lavorgna (tracks: A1, B1)
French Horn - Earl Chapin (tracks: A3, B3) , Jim Buffington (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Ray Alonge
Guitar - Eric Gayle
Percussion - Warren Smith
Piano - Warren Bernhardt
Reeds - Danny Bank (tracks: A1, A3, B1, B3) , Hubert Laws (tracks: A2, B2) , Jerome Richardson , Joe Farrell (tracks: A1, A3, B1, B3) , Ray Beckenstein (tracks: A2, B2) , Romeo Penque , Wally Caine
Trombone - Garnett Brown
Trumpet - Bernie Glow (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Ernie Royal (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Snooky Young* , Marvin Stamm , Randy Brecker (tracks: A3, B3) , Richard Williams (tracks: A3, B3)
Tuba - Harvey Phillips
Viola - Al Brown* (tracks: A2, B2)
Violin - Aaron Rosand (tracks: A2, B2) , David Nadien (tracks: B2) , Gene Orloff (tracks: A2)
Cello - George Ricci (tracks: A1-2, B1-3) , Harvey Shapiro (tracks: B3)
Composed By - Gary McFarland
Conductor - Gary McFarland
Drums - Bernard Purdie (tracks: A2-3, B2-3) , Bill Lavorgna (tracks: A1, B1)
French Horn - Earl Chapin (tracks: A3, B3) , Jim Buffington (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Ray Alonge
Guitar - Eric Gayle
Percussion - Warren Smith
Piano - Warren Bernhardt
Reeds - Danny Bank (tracks: A1, A3, B1, B3) , Hubert Laws (tracks: A2, B2) , Jerome Richardson , Joe Farrell (tracks: A1, A3, B1, B3) , Ray Beckenstein (tracks: A2, B2) , Romeo Penque , Wally Caine
Trombone - Garnett Brown
Trumpet - Bernie Glow (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Ernie Royal (tracks: A1-2, B1-2) , Snooky Young* , Marvin Stamm , Randy Brecker (tracks: A3, B3) , Richard Williams (tracks: A3, B3)
Tuba - Harvey Phillips
Viola - Al Brown* (tracks: A2, B2)
Violin - Aaron Rosand (tracks: A2, B2) , David Nadien (tracks: B2) , Gene Orloff (tracks: A2)
Notes
Full title: “America The Beautiful: An Account Of Its Disappearance”.
Recorded 16, 18, 21, 22 October 1968 at A&R Recording Studios, New York.
Gatefold sleeve design printed on unlaminated card.
Back cover text, from a 1958 essay by Marya Mannes:
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, Iying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piels, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shining in the sun or picked by moon or the beams of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity.
Who are these men who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the men who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink – and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap?
What manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and two hundred horsepower to take them, singly, to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass?
What kind of men can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who leave the carcasses of cars to rot in heaps; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town’s rats? What manner of men choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce, making poison of water?
Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of man and the stigma of his improvidence.
Who is so rich that he can squander forever the wealth of earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that he can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
And what will we leave behind us when we are long dead? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure?
Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of shores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and llght-bulbs and boxes of a people who conserved their convenience at the expense of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste.
Introduction (inside cover of gatefold sleeve):
Gary McFarland actually began AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL half a lifetime ago. When he was seventeen, he spent one summer working as a “whistle punk” at lumber camps in the heavily wooded country that surrounded his home in Grant’s Pass in Oregon. He witnessed the last rites for countless trees that summer, and his sense of desolation at the sight of raw and wounded tracts of leveled woodland remains part of his heritage.
Later, living in Los Angeles, McFarland observed the cancer-like growth of tract housing that has made that city a transportation horror and its car-ridden citizens responsible for an environment which ultimately threatens their lives.
Now a New Yorker, he shares the frustration of urban man as he is squeezed into up-tight apartment buildings and struggles to keep his senses as they are relentlessly battered by the noise and the dirt, the overcrowding and the violence that have turned every small-town boy’s dream of The Big City into a nightmare.
Every summer McFarland and his family join the frantic race for a green and quiet retreat away from the city’s foul air and compounded tensions. And every summer it becomes more difficult to find as undeveloped land goes the way of the whooping crane and the aardvark.
McFarland’s travel in the Army and with bands have given him a virtual seminar on deteriorating America. From Oklahoma dust-storms to Calumet City honky-tonks to decaying New England mill-towns, he has seen much of it up close.
This then is the work of a man who was in training for it even before he had the facility for doing it.
Note by Norman Schwartz (inside cover of gatefold sleeve):
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL by Gary McFarland is a kind of “Picture of Dorian Grey” using our country as the ravaged hero. Most Americans, by ignoring the inroads on our country’s natural splendors in the name of commerce or convenience, are contributing to the final shocking portrait of what America will become.
This work is more than just a protest. McFarland has actually written a Iament for the country he loves, lives in and works in. If enough voices are heard – the voices of poets, artists, writers and musicians – perhaps the fatal tide can be stemmed. Ignored, the voices will echo through concrete jungles, used-car lots and dismal sprawls of tract housing.
This album is a work of love, a paean to the greatest nation on earth. Everyone connected with the making of it, from the engineer to the men in the orchestra, were as much involved with the idea as with the music itself.
The artist assigned the difficult job of creating the cover also became enmeshed in the conservation syndrome when she tried to locate a model for her painting. She discovered the bald eagle was an embarrassing skeleton in the American closet. The official symbol of the United States has been shot out of the skies by Americans in such numbers that its threatened extinction led to a law making it illegal to even own a stuffed one.
A note also about Marya Manne’s essay on the back of this album. It was written – incredibly – in 1958. But nothing has really changed – except to get worse – since then and each word rings true as if it were typed this morning.
Recorded 16, 18, 21, 22 October 1968 at A&R Recording Studios, New York.
Gatefold sleeve design printed on unlaminated card.
Back cover text, from a 1958 essay by Marya Mannes:
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, Iying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piels, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shining in the sun or picked by moon or the beams of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity.
Who are these men who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the men who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink – and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap?
What manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and two hundred horsepower to take them, singly, to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass?
What kind of men can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who leave the carcasses of cars to rot in heaps; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town’s rats? What manner of men choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce, making poison of water?
Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of man and the stigma of his improvidence.
Who is so rich that he can squander forever the wealth of earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that he can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
And what will we leave behind us when we are long dead? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure?
Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of shores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and llght-bulbs and boxes of a people who conserved their convenience at the expense of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste.
Introduction (inside cover of gatefold sleeve):
Gary McFarland actually began AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL half a lifetime ago. When he was seventeen, he spent one summer working as a “whistle punk” at lumber camps in the heavily wooded country that surrounded his home in Grant’s Pass in Oregon. He witnessed the last rites for countless trees that summer, and his sense of desolation at the sight of raw and wounded tracts of leveled woodland remains part of his heritage.
Later, living in Los Angeles, McFarland observed the cancer-like growth of tract housing that has made that city a transportation horror and its car-ridden citizens responsible for an environment which ultimately threatens their lives.
Now a New Yorker, he shares the frustration of urban man as he is squeezed into up-tight apartment buildings and struggles to keep his senses as they are relentlessly battered by the noise and the dirt, the overcrowding and the violence that have turned every small-town boy’s dream of The Big City into a nightmare.
Every summer McFarland and his family join the frantic race for a green and quiet retreat away from the city’s foul air and compounded tensions. And every summer it becomes more difficult to find as undeveloped land goes the way of the whooping crane and the aardvark.
McFarland’s travel in the Army and with bands have given him a virtual seminar on deteriorating America. From Oklahoma dust-storms to Calumet City honky-tonks to decaying New England mill-towns, he has seen much of it up close.
This then is the work of a man who was in training for it even before he had the facility for doing it.
Note by Norman Schwartz (inside cover of gatefold sleeve):
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL by Gary McFarland is a kind of “Picture of Dorian Grey” using our country as the ravaged hero. Most Americans, by ignoring the inroads on our country’s natural splendors in the name of commerce or convenience, are contributing to the final shocking portrait of what America will become.
This work is more than just a protest. McFarland has actually written a Iament for the country he loves, lives in and works in. If enough voices are heard – the voices of poets, artists, writers and musicians – perhaps the fatal tide can be stemmed. Ignored, the voices will echo through concrete jungles, used-car lots and dismal sprawls of tract housing.
This album is a work of love, a paean to the greatest nation on earth. Everyone connected with the making of it, from the engineer to the men in the orchestra, were as much involved with the idea as with the music itself.
The artist assigned the difficult job of creating the cover also became enmeshed in the conservation syndrome when she tried to locate a model for her painting. She discovered the bald eagle was an embarrassing skeleton in the American closet. The official symbol of the United States has been shot out of the skies by Americans in such numbers that its threatened extinction led to a law making it illegal to even own a stuffed one.
A note also about Marya Manne’s essay on the back of this album. It was written – incredibly – in 1958. But nothing has really changed – except to get worse – since then and each word rings true as if it were typed this morning.
history / edit
Release
This release data is new to the Discogs database and has not received a vote yet.