Tonight I walked into Times Square through a pleasant sea of people and warm spring air to BB King’s music club, where I went to see Jon Anderson in concert. Anderson was the singer of Yes, a legendary and influential English art-rock band.

Showing up a few minutes before start time, I was surprised to find the club utterly packed, and had to settle for squeezing into a space next to the bar at the back of the club, leaning left and right around shoulders and heads to glimpse Anderson 100 feet or so away, and sometimes had to content myself with watching one of the two video screens to either side of the stage.

The crowd was what you might expect of those who are wild about music that began as 1970s progressive rock: heavily male and white, 40- and 50-somethings. (I sometimes feel like Yes and Rush concerts are reunions for guys and some women who all grew up under the same psycho-social roof in the 70s and 80s: a little nerdy, a little brainy, not at home in the prevailing social orders of youth but much more at home in the world of fantasy and nature mysticism. And when I see guys with jean jackets or still proudly sporting mullets, I think to myself, “You are my people!”)

Such associations are far from incidental to the comprehension of a Jon Anderson concert, because so much of the evening had to do with recollection of music that spoke from the times of fans’ adolescence or young adulthood, framing those years in a now-pantheistic, now-panentheistic, wash of hermetic images that fit multiple moods and frames of mind while also referring them to a mysterious beyond, sung by the elfin Anderson and his unusual pop voice (which sounded in warmly clear and generous shape tonight).

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