Philip Glass half empty

As a big fan of both Philip Glass and Tenzin Choegyal I greatly admired their collaboration on the 2020 album The Last Dalai Lama. So I was particularly looking forward to their Be The Sky project. This was released by Philip Glass' Orange Mountain Music (OMM) label as a download last year to celebrate the 90th birthday of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and has only just appeared as a CD release. 

Unsatisfactoriness - dukkha (Pali) - is at the core of Buddhist teachings. It describes an inherent sense of unease, incompleteness, or imperfection underlying all worldly experiences. Which, unfortunately, pretty well sums up Be The Sky. 

Dukkha sets in from the start of the first track Snowy Mountains which features  the choir of the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala. Tenzin Choegyal's dranyen (3-stringed Tibetan lute) is far too prominent and the mix is skewed heavily to the left channel. As on Heart Strings, which was the stand out track on The Last Dalai Lama, the heroes here are the Tibetan children. But on Snowy Mountain they are relegated to third place behind Choegyal's dranyen and singing. Sadly the engineering throughout the rest of album is in varying degrees a sonic mess; on some tracks spoken text is buried beneath consistently over-prominent instruments.

Musically the album fares no better. Much of it is quasi-New Age noodling on piano underpinned by a few familiar Glass tropes. The puzzling choice of NYC-based Vietnamese-American composer and multi-media artist Vicki Leona Nguyen and Philip Glass' partner Saori Tsukada to contribute some barely-intelligible spoken text just sounds like Patti Smith on a bad day. All this may work on a Spotify throwaway, but does not stand up to serious listening.*

Significantly the name of Philip Glass' long time amanuensis Michael Riesman, who produced, mixed, and mastered The Last Dalai Lama and many other outstanding Glass albums,  is completely missing from the album credits. Credit (blame?) for mixing Be The Sky goes to Alex Ring Gray who is currently Philip Glass' music assistant and production manager. On one track Alex Ring Gray plays saxophone and bass guitar presumably to give the tantra some attitude, and his voice is one of those lost in production on track 3, which is appropriately titled Who Am I?

Praiseworthy but unable to redeem a seriously flawed album is the really excellent cover art which is the work of Tenzing Rigdol. It is from his installation Biography of a Thought which was was displayed at the Metropolitam Museum of Art.  

Any project which raises awareness of the tragedy of Tibet is praiseworthy. But just as we must beware of falsely projecting Tibet before the Chinese invasion as a spiritual Shangri-La, so we should not be obliged to unreservedly praise well-intentioned but flawed projects such as Be The Sky.

* In my auditioning system CD replay is from a Denon DCD-1700NE CD/SACD player through QED Audio 40 cables into a Rotel RA-1592 integrated amplifier (200wpc). The amplifier signals travel along Audioquest Rocket 11 speaker cables configuration to Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus 803 speakers. Equipment is on a spiked Norstone Esse HiFi 4 rack with custom-made footers. Auditioning also used Sennheiser HD 580 Precision studio quality headphones. My listening room is purpose built and has very low ambient noise. All equipment is powered via a direct mains feed from the house consumer board, via an unswitched mains socket with a high thermal stability fuse and custom constructed mains leads with professional quality IEC connectors.

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