Putumayo Presents: Yoga

Liner Note Author: Sean Johnson.
Illustrator: Nicola Heindl.
Photographers: Youri Lenquette; George Long; Rameshwar Das; Jai Uttal; Rasa Acharya; Estefani Garcia; Eldad Danieli; Alejandra Quesada; Aleah Stanbridge; Ajay Chag; Radhanatha Das Jakupko; Lee Everett; Peter Simon.
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, Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band (which consists of Alvin Young and Gwendolyn Colman) present a typical selection in the second track, "Om Hari Om/Sharanam Ganesha (Refuge)," which finds Johnson 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 and 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