After being critically lambasted by the jazz cognoscenti of the mid-1960s for his pop-jazz recordings, composer and arranger Gary McFarland silenced the naysayers with his impressive orchestral masterpiece, America the Beautiful: An Account of Its Disappearance. A concept album that used the pro-environmental essays of Marya Mannes as its launching point, America the Beautiful successfully brought Gary McFarland's output from the early '60s full circle. A mixture of jazz and rock, America mixes McFarland's earlier orchestral style with his growing fascination with the pop-song form to create a devastating tone poem on the state of America in 1968. Breathtaking in its scope and beauty, this sadly would be McFarland's last major orchestral work. He continued to steer more and more toward popular music, and then died tragically in 1971. One of the recurring themes throughout this piece is the haunting melody that would later be renamed "Gary's Theme" and recorded as a memorial by such jazz greats as Cal Tjader and Bill Evans. --Kristian St. Clair