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Highly recommended for all. This intercultural blending of Native American styles and Western Christian carols transcends sectarianism for universal peace. Canyon Records' recording of R. Carlos Nakai and William Eaton's Winter Classic has become a standard part of my Winter Solstice / Christmas holidays.
The music is soothing and I've played it for my students as they work. One of my all time favorite CD's.
The music is hauntingly beautiful. I have owned this CD for years. Treat yourself and your music loving friends to this great CD. It melts away the stress that sometimes comes along with the season and helps me remember what the season is all about. I still buy it as a gift for friends. It remains one of my all time Christmas favorites.
Although an obscure artist Carlos Nakai always creates an enchanting dreamlike environment for his listeners. This is one of the most beautiful Christmas CD's ever produced.
But sometimes his flute is jarringly off-key. It's not something he can help; it's the nature of wood flutes. I recently discovered Nakai and Eaton, and I enjoy their music greatly, but they are much better at doing their own compositions and improvisations than trying to cover standard melodies. I mean, like fingernails on a chalk-board off-key. But I'm not sure that they should even have attempted to match these instruments on such standard, familiar tunes.What I'm going to do with it is rip the tunes I like and add them to one of my easy-listening Christmas CDs (as a Christian I appreciate anyone who honors the holiday), but then this CD is going bye-bye, because I can't bring myself to play it all the way through. There are some gems on this CD, such as "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming", "Silent Night" (sung beautifully in a Navajo translation by a children's choir) and "Coventry Carol", but they tend to be the ones that feature Eaton's stringed instruments, because he can tune his instruments to the orthodox scales of these Christmas tunes. Nakai's flutes, beautiful as they are, often don't match this standard tuning: frequently he sounds a little off-key in the tonal scales that he plays in (which is, truth be told, one of the charms of the instrument).
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