By Don Phipps

A Japanese Zen rock backyard is majestic in its personal proper. The stones,
manicured and ordered but free and flowing, appear to mirror a cosmic
calendar the place infinite time may be skilled inside the confines of
bounded area.

Within the 60s, New York born Paul Horn, a jazz flutist famous for his
contribution to the “cool jazz” motion (a motion ushered in by Miles
Davis and his album “Start of the Cool” and which reached its musical apex
with the basic and much-beloved Davis album “Type of Blue”), started to
discover transcendental meditation. He was joined in these explorations by
the Beatles, amongst different rock notables of the interval. Horn determined to take
his flute to India with the purpose to recreate meditation inside music. Thus
was created the distinctive and beneficial 1968 album “Inside,” the place Horn used
the precise Taj Mahal as a studio! Apparently, he later recorded inside
the Nice Pyramid at Giza, the Kazamieras cathedral in Lithuania, and in
the magnificent Monument Valley (with the wonderful Native American
flautist R Carlos Nakai).

Horn’s light but profound music has been reborn in Invoice McBirnie’s album
Reflections (for Paul Horn). McBirnie makes use of Horn’s free kind and
unstructured improvisational method to create music of innate magnificence –
with an intrinsic high quality that appears to exist outdoors of time. Consider
gentle showing and disappearing by branches swaying within the wind on a
sunny afternoon. McBirnie’s flute captures this fluid languid movement whereas
concurrently retaining the serenity of a Zen backyard.

McBirnie makes use of cascades of notes, operating up and down the flute registers,
and combines this with quick staccato phrases and silent areas. One can
definitely embrace the peaceable respiration on the title reduce “Reflections.”
It’s like waking up in a verdant and aromatic forest. Or the dreamy “Masada
Dawn,” which brings to thoughts Monet’s 250 water lily work, and the
gorgeous variations they reveal of a pond at completely different occasions of day and
completely different seasons. Or take “Kitten & Moth,” and its impressionistic
playfulness. And with “Monk’s Strut,” McBirnie even honors Horn’s cool
interval. One can envision a smiling Thelonious listening to the skipping
blissful tempo.

Recorded at his personal studio, McBurnie writes in his liner notes, that “Paul
Horn is definitely the earliest, the strongest and the most enduring of
all my influences on this instrument, no matter idiom.” These who
imagine jazz can discover an internal voice will do properly to expertise
McBirnie’s reflections.