Listen to Steve Howe and most people catch on the same thing.
The tempo is a little suspect.
Is he rushing? Dragging? Or playing that way on purpose?
What is interesting is that this catch does not go away as you listen more. It deepens.
This article listens again to Howe's "suspectness" not as poor playing or improvisational wobble, but as a playing philosophy. The key is a sense of time — where in the beat a phrase is inserted.
The first impression: the tempo is suspect
Howe's phrases do not always place notes squarely at the centre of the beat. The starts and landings of phrases sound as though they shift ahead of or behind it.
That is an observation, not yet a conclusion. It is at the stage of a feeling that this is different from simple rushing or dragging.
Two examples are easy to compare. The opening guitar of Yours Is No Disgrace, and the late solo in Heat of the Moment from the Asia period, distant in both era and lineup. The same player, the same tendency, audible across separated years.
One fact worth holding: independent musical analysis has notated the opening of Yours Is No Disgrace as an example of making the listener mistake the downbeat without changing the metre. The suspectness, in other words, is not only in the listener's head. It happens on the page as well.
It sounds free, and it can be reproduced
If this were merely capricious wobble, it would vary from performance to performance.
But Howe plays his characteristic phrases, and their placement in time, with high reproducibility live. That is the reason it is hard to regard as unplanned improvisation or accidental drift.
Dividing that reproducibility this way makes the picture clearer.
Inside: fine subdivisions, fixed fingerings and order of attacks, repeatable rhythmic values.
Surface: long slides, swells and fades, sustained notes stretching across bar lines.
Result: a state that sounds freely floating, yet whose contour can be traced again live.
Long slides and volume swells make the surface sound like free time, while underneath it is written out in finer rhythmic units — that reading makes sense. This is a hypothesis. But the view of a "controlled asymmetry" explains a great deal of Howe's playing.
Howe may be less a player who aims at improvisation itself than one who fixes, as composed performance, a degree of freedom that sounds improvised.
Design, or temperament?
Here the question forks.
That it can be reproduced means it is a stable style. But whether it was theoretically designed by the player, or simply arose naturally from years of fingering, listening habits and bodily sense, is a separate matter.
I do not want to force a resolution.
What makes Howe interesting is that precisely assembled playing and a "natural strangeness" — which to him may just be how he plays — are felt at the same time.
In a listener's head, the loop usually runs like this.
The tempo is suspect. Is he missing on purpose? No, he reproduces it live. So is it designed? No, it might just be natural to him. In the end, unclear. Listen again.
Howe's playing settles into neither "accurate/inaccurate" nor "intended/accidental." This oscillation of interpretation is itself the pull that makes you listen repeatedly. Being unable to tell is not the same as being unable to evaluate. Here, the undecidability itself is placed at the centre of Howe.
Not Howe's achievement alone
That said, I want to carefully avoid crediting Yes's sense of time to Howe alone. This objection belongs here, squarely.
Yes's construction is joint architecture. Anderson and Howe put forward overall shapes and fragments; Squire spent long stretches tightening the bass, the harmony and the precision of details. Bruford supplied asymmetric beats and reactions; Tony Kaye and Rick Wakeman widened the harmonic and sonic scale. And studio work with Eddy Offord fixed the fragments into a single recorded work.
So one could also say: Bruford's and Squire's rhythmic design is what allowed Howe's displaced timing to work. A new sense of Yes time emerged as interaction.
Production methods such as section-by-section recording and editing may also have emphasised the performed asymmetry after the fact.
Even the agreement heard live may be an auditory impression created by shared landmark phrases, fingerings and effect operations, rather than strict rhythmic reproduction.
These are weights placed to keep Howe from being the sole author. The colour he brought and the structure everyone assembled are better considered separately.
Using the guitar as a colour
Writing about Howe, the gear history cannot be avoided. But the interest here is not "what he used" — it is what roles the same person assigned to different timbres.
Howe used the ES-175, a Telecaster, a Stratocaster, steel guitar, various acoustics and twelve-strings — instruments differing greatly in construction and output characteristics — selected by song and era.
Even so, his outline as a player is stable.
Howe's identity, then, does not reside in the sound of a particular guitar or amplifier. It resides in attack, rhythmic placement, note length, voicing, and where a timbre is put.
He has described Relayer as a very Fender-like record centred on the Telecaster. Elsewhere he has recalled that, after a period including Asia, he came to recognise the ES-175 again as his central instrument. The tools move; the core of the playing does not.
The layered distortion that comes forward in the Asia period is probably not a story of abandoning his former sound and converting to a distortion player. It reads better as adding distortion to an existing palette as one new colour. That is an interpretation. And to be careful: that distortion owes not only to Howe's personal choice but to the production policies, the writing, and the sonic norms of early-1980s commercial rock.
Seen this way, changes of gear are not ruptures in Howe's style. Even with different tools, the orchestrational idea of assigning each timbre a role within a piece stays consistent. Howe's "stable sound" is not a fixed frequency response but a stable grammar for placing timbres.
What changed with The Yes Album
One fact. The Yes Album is Yes's third record and the first studio album Howe played on. And its keyboard player is Tony Kaye, not Rick Wakeman.
This is easy to get wrong, because Yes's "constructed sound" is often tied in discussion to Wakeman's arrival.
But Howe was involved in the writing and in supplying material for Yours Is No Disgrace and Starship Trooper. Which means part of the shift in which Yes's language began moving had already happened before Wakeman came.
That order matters when placing Howe on the side of those who designed the era's worldview.
Sound Chaser — what remained when the keyboard player changed
On Relayer, Patrick Moraz joined in place of Wakeman. Sound Chaser is credited to all members. Moraz himself recalled that music had already been written and played by the time he joined, while he was involved in the introduction and the final arrangement.
What is worth noting is that Yes's way of making time survives the change of keyboard player.
Sound Chaser builds several times and sonic spaces inside one piece — classical-style free tempo, volume swells, riffs mixed with slides, collective call and response using voices percussively, and a guitar solo that keeps switching.
Incidentally, that vocal repetition brings to mind Balinese kecak. But no direct line of influence has been confirmed. That stays an associative impression, not an assertion.
90125 — the counter-example of Yes without Howe
Here is a fact inconvenient for my own reading.
90125 was made without Steve Howe, with Trevor Rabin joining for the first time and Jon Anderson returning. Official band histories describe material by Cinema — Squire, White, Kaye and Rabin — to which Anderson was added, reconstituting the group as Yes.
And it worked as Yes.
That is a counter-example to any view that Howe is so indispensable an identifier that Yes cannot exist without him.
So where does Yes-ness reside? Thinking in layers helps.
The minimal identifier is Jon Anderson's voice. Even on Howe-less 90125, Anderson singing produces enough strength to be recognised as Yes.
The continuing body is the rhythm, the harmonies and the low-end contour centred on Squire and White.
And the 1970s worldview is Howe's asymmetric sense of time, his palette of many stringed instruments, and the idea of treating the guitar as an arranging device.
So there is no need to make Howe "Yes-ness itself." Anderson's voice establishes the band's identity, and Howe strongly designed the worldview of classic-period Yes — that two-layer reading fits the facts better.
One addition. "Anderson's voice" here does not mean only his presence. Even in Anderson-less periods such as Drama, the successor singer carried over Anderson-type roles: the high register, the resonance of vowels, the way melody is placed. So this is not a simple counter-example proving Anderson was dispensable. It rather invites the opposite consideration — that even without him, Yes was hard to sustain unless the type of voice was substituted.
Not listening through "good or bad"
Trying to measure Howe by technical skill or rhythmic accuracy generally hits a dead end.
Rushing, or designed? Accident, or intention? It settles into neither.
That undecidability is not a flaw. It circulates the listener's judgement and makes them press play again.
To draw a line, for the record: no millisecond-level deviations were measured here. No quantitative comparison of live and studio versions was made. Those would be interesting to do, but they are not the premise of the argument. The premise is something plainer — the listening fact that the same player, across separated eras, places time similarly with similar reproducibility.
Howe's playing does not sit on the ruler of accuracy. It does not sit there, and it keeps making you listen.
You do not understand, so you listen again. If that circuit is running, then the playing that designed time has already won.
Sources
- Official Yes / Steve Howe discography and album credits
- Various interviews with Steve Howe, Patrick Moraz and others involved
- Third-party musical analysis (including the notation of the downbeat illusion at the opening of
Yours Is No Disgrace) - Audio in the text: Yes,
Starship Trooper(fromThe Yes Album/ ℗1971 Atlantic Recording Corporation), from the official "Yes - Topic" channel. Note: the streaming version is a 2008 remaster, but the performance is the same 1971 recording.