Today is National Vinyl Record Day. I could tell you about my first LP—David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I bought in 1972. For me, that record represented a crossing. I was leaving behind AM radio and Cousin Brucie and discovering WNEW-FM, where music seemed to open into another universe. I wanted to be a Nightbird, like Alison Steele, living somewhere in that mysterious territory between midnight and dawn. But today I want to tell you about a different crossing. Yuri’s.
There was a record that marked a significant turning point in his musical life: The World. For nearly a decade, Yuri had been part of Kinderhook, immersed in the country-rock sound that shaped so much of his early musical identity. The fiddle was already part of his vocabulary, but Yuri was never content to let an instrument—or a genre—tell him where he had to stop. Yuri didn’t leave Kinderhook behind. He carried that musician with him.
The country-rock years had given him a vocabulary, a sense of rhythm, an instinct for melody and harmony, and the fiddle itself. When he crossed into The World, he didn’t discard any of that. He found another way to use it. There, the fiddle became something more. Yuri began treating it like a lead guitar, pushing it into territory it had rarely occupied before. He wasn’t abandoning his musical identity. He was discovering that his identity was larger than the genre that had first defined it.
This was Yuri’s pattern: crossing without erasing. Moving forward without severing the connection to where he had been. Every new musical world became another place where he could bring himself. He didn’t go over the rainbow. He crossed it—and found another voice on the other side. With The World, Yuri was working with Gunter Ford, whose progressive compositions opened another door, and drummer Ron Howden, whose experience with Nektar in the early 1980s brought the vocabulary of progressive rock into the mix.
Yuri took his violin somewhere new, less as a traditional fiddle and more like a lead guitar. He bowed it. He pushed it. He made it cry out. On vinyl. A record as evidence of a life-changing direction. This was not simply Yuri changing musical genres. It was something more fundamental. Yuri refused to let genre define the boundaries of his identity. Thus, his musical life became a series of crossings. Every musician crosses rivers. Some crossings are musical. Some are personal. Some are permanent. Yuri carried his sense of identity with him every time.
He crossed from country rock into progressive music. From there, he veered toward jazz, Jean-Luc Ponty, Steely Dan. Years later, Yuri would form Now, Voyager and create Currents, drawing from classical, jazz, folk and world music while incorporating a progressive-rock sensibility. Eventually came Grupo Yuri, where Latin, jazz and world rhythms became the foundation for another chapter of his musical life. Each time, he carried something forward from the music that came before. A crossing.
You don’t become someone else when you cross a boundary. You discover what happens when you bring yourself with you. That was Yuri. He could have gone across the River Styx with his sense of identity intact. Even at the edges of his musical life, he was still Yuri. The crossing did not erase the person who started the journey. It expanded him.
Looking back, I can see that more clearly now. Kinderhook wasn’t something Yuri had to leave behind in order to become a different musician. It was part of the vocabulary he carried into everything that followed. The fiddle player became the progressive-rock violinist. The violinist became a composer, bandleader, recording artist, and sound sculptor. The musician who had learned to listen across genres kept crossing those boundaries, finding new ways for the instrument—and himself—to speak in a new voice. That is what makes this record meaningful to me.
But I keep coming back to that vinyl. Vinyl has a way of preserving crossings. There is something about holding a record that makes history tangible. You hold it in your hands. You see the cover. You read the musicians’ names. You know that these people gathered somewhere, in a studio, at a particular moment in time, and made something that could be pressed into grooves and carried into the future. And then you put the needle down. There he is. You can hear the crossing. Not just the music. The person becoming. For Yuri, The World was one of those moments. He wasn’t going over the rainbow. He was going across it. And he was taking everything he had learned with him. Yuri, crossing the rainbow.
So, today, on National Vinyl Record Day, that’s the record I want to hear. Irresistable Urge – On the Water. The one that took Yuri across the rainbow.
Note: Yuri dedicated The World to Kinderhook, the country-rock band he had co-founded in the 1970s. The dedication is a meaningful marker of the continuing influence of Kinderhook on his musical journey, even as he moved into more progressive and experimental territory.
I very much enjoyed your piece Crossing the Rainbow. I am fortunate to have known Yuri for the period of Grupo Yuri and to have booked him into Trumpets and other venues. It was certainly not for the money but my love for his music. My neighbor was his drummer for a time: I was a long time lover of the bands who incorporated the violin into progressive music, It’s a beautiful day, the Flock, Seatrain. We were both Rutgers graduates. I had seen Kinerhook in the shore bars and the Capitol Theater long before meeting Yuri. I listen to his music often. Thanks for including me in your mailing list.