Review: Burning Sky: Creation

Burning Sky is Michael Bannister (percussion), Kelvin Bizahaloni (flutes, didgeridoo, bass), and Aaron White (guitar, synthesizer, rattles). Creation is an example of what can happen when Native traditions make their way into the contemporary popular music scene, particularly in the hands of Native musicians who have assimilated the culture that surrounds them while maintaining a firm grasp on their own traditions (Bizahaloni is Navajo; White is Navajo-Ute).

One of the characteristics of North American wooden flutes is their haunting, melancholy tone. The cedar flute of the Plains and the Southwest has been seen as a messenger, evoking the wind and tying the player and the community to the natural world. It is very easy to picture the High Plains or the Southwest deserts, with all their vastness and their striking silence, their endless, living emptiness, when listening to Native flute music (especially when the recording engineer is savvy enough to give it a slight reverb).

That said, it comes as no surprise that the four tracks on this CD are titled "Sun," "Wind," "Rain," and "Earth." I admit I was suspicious of this album, given the packaging: there is some New Age music that is substantial and worth listening to; there is more that is pabulum, and this CD must, I think, be put under "New Age." (The term, like "psychology" and "photography," seems to have vacuumed up everything that doesn't quite fit anywhere else.) There are enough elements of jazz and mainstream pop music involved in these songs that I don't think one can honestly call them "Native American" music with any degree of accuracy, although the foundation quite obviously lies in that tradition.

The common elements throughout the music are the flute melodies, some of which are haunting, as they should be, and the fact that the flute remains largely in a "traditional" mode; the incorporation of jazz and pop elements – there are several guitar passages that are worthy of some of the greats, and show the same focus that builds the kind of intensity that Eric Clapton or Robin Trower might have put into a three-note riff; percussion that is usually completely what it should be, although some of the more jazz-inspired passages don't quite make it – not to fault Bannister's playing, which is crisp and fluent and displays a high degree of musicianship, but more because, I think, they were not necessarily a good idea to start with. There is an underlying unity that makes pointing out highlights superfluous – you're either going to like this album, or you're not.

That said, I have to admit that the album largely leaves me cold, and I can't quite put my finger on why. It may just be that, along with some of the patterns, the music has incorporated some of the distance of jazz, that kind of intellectualism that becomes opaque; there is an inwardness to portions of this recording that never makes it past the speakers. (Subjectivity alert: There are large portions of the jazz repertoire that are simply blank to me; I just don't connect with a lot of jazz at all, and this is coming from someone who can find passion in Philip Glass and Steve Reich.) All in all, Creation is better than I had feared, but not as rewarding as I had hoped.

(Canyon Records, 1996)