Reviews: Three Homegrown CDs

Sometimes I feel a little bit like great grandmother must have felt when the first automobiles showed-up or when her house was electrified. What a wondrous world that must have seemed, and what a wondrous world we live in today. I'm reminded of this everyday as I use the Internet, which puts more information at my fingertips than any library.

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The Internet isn't the only modern miracle at our disposal. Just yesterday I listened to a couple of meditation CDs by Dr. Darryl Pokea, a New Age practitioner living in Topeka, Kansas. Both tapes are professionally presented, with beautiful cover art by his wife Jan Jennings and fancy graphics on the CDs themselves. I marvel because these are self-produced and self-issued high quality audio products, something that would have been prohibitively expensive just a few years ago. Anybody who ever tried to get a record pressed back in the days of vinyl can attest to that.

The CDs are home grown grass roots projects that offer the sort of straight-forward approach to meditation you might expect from someone who calls the midwest home. For each offering, Pokea has written and arranged some suitable music which he plays on a keyboard. Over top of this, he voices a guided meditation meant to both relax and heal, again using a straight forward no-nonsense delivery.

Don't get the impression that the content is unsophisticated or otherwise lacking. It's obvious that Pokea has been doing this for a while, and he definitely knows what he's doing. He deftly utilizes techniques that pretty much represent the state-of-the-art as far as guided meditations go, while throwing-in a few neat tricks of his own invention.

Awaken the Senses, Heal the Cells was the first CD I tried, and I like this one the best, mostly because the length is just about perfect, clocking-in at just under a half-hour. Here, the listener is taken on a healing journey that uses the five senses, one-by-one, to bring health to the body, mind and spirit. The rest of this CD is filled with the music track, without the voice-over meditation, which allows the listener to continue in a meditative state after the "official" meditation has ended.

The other CD is called Relax From Head to Toe. Although I liked this one, at nearly an hour I found it to be a bit long for my taste. As the title suggests, this meditation is designed for deep relaxation, beginning at the third eye and top of the head and moving all the way down through the body. I must admit, the morning after I gave this meditation a try, I awoke much more relaxed and clear headed than usual.

Both CDs can be ordered from Dr. Pokea's web site at http://www.drpokea.com.

May the Spirit Be With You, the latest offering from the "world-music jazz" group The Spirit Ensemble, gets off to a very bad start with the opening track "Walk In The Sunshine," which attempts to cram as many New Age platitudes and clichés as possible into it's three minute and eighteen second running time. Fortunately, from this shaky start it's mostly uphill, with only a few dips into oversimplified sappiness.

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Hailing from the Ft. Lauderdale area, The Spirit Ensemble is essentially an acoustic duo (although there are five musicians credited on this project) that dishes-up a pretty infectious Caribbean influenced sound, over which they overlay a positive New Age message. The result is something akin to "the Beach Boys meet the New Age" or "Jimmy Buffet finds a new audience."

One of the most notable aspects of this group is their use of the flute almost like a lead guitar to punctuate the breaks on many of the songs. Also, on the haunting cut "You Are My Love," David Wertman's guitar work is somewhat astounding. Ken LaRoche's saxophone work, especially on "Open Your Heart," where he plays around Lynne Meryl's vocal work in a manner reminiscent of 50s style jazz, is most impressive. Meryl, who supplies the vocals on the entire album, is most effective when being slow and plaintive.

The lyrics are mostly written by Wertman and Meryl, and it's this area where the group is most lacking. It's not that there's too much positiveness here (even though a Pollyanna attitude seems to rule the day), as it's the fact that their words seem to overstate the obvious. All the while, it seem as if they think that something profound is being said. I don't want to be a spoilsport and come down against a positive mental attitude, but I do wish they'd find a little more depth when they set their thoughts to words.

Despite it's shortcomings, this effort gets three out of five stars. The musicianship is excellent, complex and highly listenable. The lyrics, even though a bit on the sappy side, are uplifting. This is a good album to play when you need your spirits lifted.

May the Spirit Be With You by The Spirit Ensemble can be ordered online at http://www.sunmuserecords.homestead.com.

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