It's A Beautiful Day

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The band It’s a Beautiful Day formed in San Francisco toward the end of the hippie phenomenon. Led by violinist David LaFlamme, who had played with a classical orchestra and in a jazz ensemble, the group absorbed exoticism into the sound of acid rock.

Formed in 1968 around the charismatic figure of the violinist and singer (who had long played folk, jazz, and classical music), they included a fine counterpart to Grace Slick (Pattie Santos) on female vocals and a restrained yet consistently inspired keyboardist, his wife Linda (who moved from harpsichord to celesta, from organ to electric piano). LaFlamme played a special five-string violin that effectively reached the tonal range of the viola.

They became famous with one of the most—deservedly—celebrated records of 1969, It’s A Beautiful Day (Columbia, 1969). The album unfurls an impressionistic, highly colorful sound, dense with fairy-tale madrigals and hypnotic psalms, sent into orbit by diaphanous vocal interplay worthy of the Jefferson Airplane, ennobled by evocative arrangements drawing on jazz, gospel, raga, and calypso.
More than songs, these are chromatic mosaics. If the solemn anthem White Bird, with Gypsy guitar, gospel organ, and romantic violin, and the dreamy fresco Hot Summer Day, which conveys the sense of blazing sunshine through the varied sonorities of the organ, are the tracks closest to the fashionable folk rock of the time, elsewhere the group forges entirely new languages: the delicate, classicizing serenade Girl With No Eyes, for soprano and harpsichord; the instrumental Bombay Calling, a blues rock propelled by an obsessive “Indian” riff; and the grave Slavic psalm Bulgaria, with an epic final duet between the singer and the violin. The experimental climax of the work is the mad, heavily percussive para-jazz dash of Time Is, with a circus-like gait, Native American dance, voodoo tribalisms, and raga minimalism.
The hippie sensibility—in which Indian transcendental meditation merges with the sensory relaxation induced by drugs—finds its natural vehicle in these slow, insinuating melodic fantasies, in a form of effeminate and fairy-tale rock, precious and baroque, which expands and rarefies the Jeffersons’ “epic” vocalism and aristocratizes the Grateful Dead’s “acid” orchestration.

The group enjoyed the friendship of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who helped them on the second album Marrying Maiden (Columbia, 1970), more eclectic and less relaxed, and they concluded their creative period with the Grand Camel Suite on the third album Choice Quality Stuff (1971), after which they slipped back into anonymity and disappeared altogether from the scene.

Girl With No Eyes (2013) documents a live concert of 1969.

LaFlamme died in 2023.