"Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream"

"Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream" is the latest music release from Native American artist Louie Gonnie. Gonnie is Dine from the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Gonnie admired his father and uncles and wanted to be like them so he began to sing in the Native American Church. He is also a well rounded artist, expressing himself in music, art and writing.

Gonnie started singing for family and friends. Eventually, people were recording his music and he realized that he could have a career as a recording artist. His albums started out as Peyote songs of the Native American Church. Since then he has created a more contemporary style.

Gonnie is the exemplar of a creative artist. While very much a part of Dine traditions and very much living its values, Gonnie has an artist's desire to find personal expression within the world of his community. His first two recordings -- Sacred Mountains and Elements (my personal favorite) -- were explorations of the music of the Navajo people in which traditional experience was the foundation for this artist's unique music.

Gonnie's latest album, "Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream," is a direct return to his roots in the Native American Church. The recording of peyote songs is always a controversial issue within the Native American Church. Some practitioners feel that the songs, as they are intrinsic to a sacred ritual, should never be recorded, while many others feel that recordings are important for disseminating their songs throughout the community.

Even as he lives in respect for NAC values, Gonnie takes the songs for the peyote ritual to a new place. While his song forms are very traditional, the means of producing those songs (extensive studio multi-tracking) is not. Nonetheless Gonnie's compositions and layered harmonies are reverent, spiritual, and achieve transcendence. Anchored by a water drum and sustained by waves of his flowing vocals, Gonnie leads an inner voyage from dreams to actuality, from earth to sky and from the past to eternity.

The Dalai Lama's First Musical Album

"Inner World," the Dalai Lama's first musical album, is a sacred offering of mantras and teachings set to music. In "Inner World," Tibet's leader, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, chants key Buddhist mantras and delivers his insights that trace much of the world's pressing concerns to the spiritual malaise characterizing life in the new century. In short, much of the world's problems owe much to its neglect of the soul: the "Inner World."

Released July 6 when the Dalai Lama celebrated his 85th birthday, "Inner World" consists of 11 tracks along the New World music genre written mainly by New Zealand composer Abraham Kunin, a follower of the Tibetan leader. Kunin's compositions are similar to Tibetan religious music; the main instruments seem to be the bamboo flute, biwan fiddle, Zhannian zither and dungchen or Tibetan long horn. Since this is Tibetan music, it is also Shamanic or meditative music with its use of continuous sounds, some of them natural, such as running water or fountain.

One of my favorite tracks is "Compassion," in which the Dalai Lama intones the famous "Om mani padme hum," the six-syllable mantra associated with the bodhisattva of compassion. In his best-selling books, the Dalai Lama refers to the mantra as a purification on the path to enlightenment -- to "transform your impure body, speech and mind into the pure exalted body, speech and mind of a Buddha."

In "Humanity," we hear the Dalai Lama blaming violence and injustice to "a lack of human compassion . . . a lack of oneness as brothers and sisters." He explains that a "self-centered attitude" puts "too much emphasis on we and them, (which is the) basis of killing, bullying and exploitation." "All injustice is based on too much concept of we and they," the Dalai Lama declares.

Toward the end of the record, he says that whether believer or nonbeliever, "we are the same human beings (who want) a happy life, a peaceful life." This could be attained only by inner conversion. "We have to make every effort to promote through education about inner values," he concludes.

The Dalai Lama's renewed calls for "inner values" and "compassion" are peaceful and nonviolent exhortations that are addressed as much to modern mankind as to Communist China, which has been enslaving Tibet for nearly 70 years now.