Music Review: Music as Medicine
by James Bean
Copyright October 2005
Music as Medicine
Genres: Tibetan Music, Native American Music, World Music
Artists: Nawang Khechog and R. Carlos Nakai
Label: Sound True – http://www.soundstrue.com

The soothing sounds of the flute have always been part of traditional world music, consoling hearts for countless generations. The flute universally appears in most all cultures of the world, East, West, North, and South. According to many great mystics and their students who have explored heavenly regions via soul travel, there is even a mystic flute sound beyond this world in the Fourth Heaven known as Bhanwar Gupha, the place of the rotating cave vortex. In this realm, the plaintive melody of flute will be encountered by the self-realized soul. And it was this same Divine Flute that Rumi wrote of in his famous poem titled, the Song of the Reed.

This new disc, Music As Medicine, is a collaboration between Tibetan artist Nawang Khechog and Native American flutist R. Carlos Nakai, which creates a unique recording of healing sound-meditations from two very different parts of the planet. This new album is dedicated to the Dalai Lama on the most auspicious occasion of his 70th birthday. Khechog, who has in recent years become a well-known musician with several albums of Tibetan flute music, has studied Buddhism and meditation, was a monk and hermit for eleven years. He fled Tibet when China invaded in 1959.