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Recorded at the studios of XM satellite radio on April 1, 2004, Tour of the Universe is Jon Anderson's first solo home video. Characteristic of his work, it is visually lush. This isn't just Anderson, sitting in front of a small audience in a radio studio with his guitar, keyboards, and harp. Each song has accompanying video footage: sometimes abstract graphic images; sometimes film footage of urban landscapes ("State of Independence"), the Vietnam War era ("Long Distance Runaround"), Native Americans and the American West ("White Buffalo"), Australian Aborigines and, it appears, other indigenous peoples around the world ("Change We Must"), or tanks, battleships, and military aircraft ("Yours Is No Disgrace"). There are also spoken interludes by Anderson and, unfortunately, periodic obnoxious advertisements for XM. "Show Me" adds Rick Wakeman, one of Anderson's bandmates from Yes, on piano, and choirs provide occasional backup vocals. These seem to be prerecorded and pre-filmed, and other some prerecorded instrumental material is also included, but otherwise Anderson performs solo, singing and playing his own solo songs, plus some material from Jon & Vangelis and a few Yes favorites. Without the more elaborate band arrangements, a closer focus is placed on Anderson's ethereal high-tenor singing voice, which is fine, and on his lyrics, which tends to reveal their extremely poetic, if somewhat vague nature. (This is especially true if one clicks on the version with lyrics in the "Special Features" section, which produces an edit of the performance, 15 minutes shorter than the regular 73-minute version and with only still photographs, in which the lyrics appear on the bottom of the screen like subtitles.) A sense of exactly what Anderson is on about in his lyrics and music is perhaps the point of including two short lectures by college professors in the "Special Features." Dr. Ron Knott spends 14 minutes discussing "The Golden Mean," a mathematical pattern found in nature and employed in such fields as architecture and, as Roy Howat of Cambridge University points out in his nearly 13-minute talk, in the music of such composers as Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. How this relates to Anderson and his music isn't clear, even though, in the main video, he dons glasses to speak directly to the camera and explain, "The Golden Mean is the gateway to inter-dimensional reality." According to Anderson, it also has something to do with crop circles, although he acknowledges, "That's as far as I've got." That's OK. One expects no less of one of the godfathers of progressive rock. ~ William Ruhlmann
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