Patient Reader, it is the most beautiful night in California that Queen Califia ever ordained for her grateful subjects. Yet there is no Hollywood Bowl. My heart has been sunk way low in the muck of the breathless La Brea Tarpits. How can these summer weeks go by without a Bowl concert to look forward to?

The closest thing I can find to bring the drama, the fresh delight, the majestic splendor, the joy of music on a summer night: this magnificent performance of “Grand Canyon Suite” by Ferde Grofe — Ferdinand Rudolf von Grofe, the child of German immigrants in New York, who grew up in New Jersey, became Paul Whiteman’s chief arranger, from there got to know everyone in music from Gershwin to Paderewski to Toscanini, and wrote much on his own, admired by all of the above, but nothing so great as this, Grand Canyon Suite. It has been played at the Bowl almost yearly since I think, he wrote it. At least it should have been.

You have to click through the “Skip Ads” after each of the five movements; but this recording, by the fabulous Detroit Symphony, features magnificent photography of the Canyon; it’s highly worth it to enjoy the whole thing as a suite, to imagine oneself under the stars in Hollywood, a famous visiting orchestra down in the glare, the searchlights criss-crossed overhead, looking at the purple back of the hills, reading how Grofe was a New Jersey boy in Hollywood, having seen the great West, and trying to express it all, in tone and time, before the artistic greats of the 20’s and 30’s, gathered here together. God bless the Bowl, and Ferde Grofe, immortal in California music.