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September 2002 Jazz Blues Other

Written by Joe Hartlaub

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5.0

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Artist: Nikkos
Title: Angels Flying
Label: Nikkos Music

If you watch cable TV late at night you've undoubtedly seen the commercials hawking CDs by various flute players you'd never heard of, playing standards you'd rather forget, with the come on that if you act now, they'll send you six CDs for the price of one. I always have a vision of some guy in an electric forklift in the middle of a huge warehouse, sleeping at the wheel while he waits to get the word that someone has called. I thought if those CDs while trying to listen to ANGELS FLYING.

All right, all right, ANGELS FLYING, and Nikkos, the flautist, isn't as bad as James Galway, or God help us, Zamphir. But there is nothing stirring about ANGELS FLYING unless you toss and turn in your sleep. The liner notes say it all: "Like a piece of heaven for your home!...(T)his music smoothes away stress and gently stimulates the senses." That's accurate, so far as it goes. My concept of heaven as a child was sitting on a cloud for all eternity, staring at a horizon that drifted on forever. It scared the hell out of me. Still does. And believe me, ANGELS FLYING seems to go on for all eternity. And what is this stuff about gently stimulating the senses?! I don't want my senses gently stimulated. I want them smacked upside the head and piledriven into the ground by someone along the lines of Xena, Warrior Princess.

The problem here is that one song fades into another, with Nikkos blowing away, but softly, accompanied by harpsichord, cello, and, according to the jacket, bass and percussion, though I don't recall hearing any bass (for some reason, I just got this image in my head of a war wagon cruising through the Hamptons, a Hillary! bumpersticker on the back, with ANGELS FLYING pumped up full blast on the speakers, and no bass, and everyone on the sidewalk silently nodding in approval but being unable to tap their feet). The tracks don't all sound alike; it's just that there is really nothing to hang on to from track to track. The result is kind of like highway trance; you don't really lose consciousness, but you don't know what happened to the last 30 minutes either, and all of a sudden you're in Bowling Green, Kentucky. In this case, you never really leave your living room. Kind of like listening to a new John David Souther CD. And while 30 minutes or so of lost time may not seem like much, when you're hitting the half-century mark those minutes seem more and more valuable. I mean, you could be watching a new Dixie Chicks video. Or anything else, really.

I think what I'm gonna do is donate this one to my daughter's preschool. They can play it during naptime. Maybe I'll get a break on the tuition. Or maybe everyone will oversleep. I better think this one through.

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