Yoga may have been born in India and developed over the past 5,000 years, as
Sean Johnson
's liner notes to this album attest, but it is best known in the West as a variant of exercise taught and practiced by suburbanites who have never bathed in the Ganges.
Putumayo World Music
, a label that exists to address the taste for light exotica among such music listeners, has created an appropriate soundtrack to yoga exercise on this various-artists compilation, containing many performers who, like
Johnson
, are actually Westerners with Eastern training. Based in New Orleans,
and
the Wild Lotus Band
(which consists of
Alvin Young
Gwendolyn Colman
) present a typical selection in the second track,
"Om Hari Om/Sharanam Ganesha (Refuge),"
which finds
singing in a voice that might be
James Taylor
or
John Denver
, if he weren't singing in Hindi. Some of the tracks are more overtly Indian, notably the instrumental
"Cerulean"
by
Ben Leinbach
Geoffrey Gordon
, on which
Gordon
plays tabla and
Jai Uttal
dotar. But usually the music is a hybrid of Indian elements with laid-back Western folk-rock, which should make it highly palatable to its intended audience. ~ William Ruhlmann