John Finbury’s New Age Twaddle

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

John Cage used to tell the story about how his approach to making music was influenced by the Indian singer and tabla player Gita Sarabhai. He credits Sarabhai with telling him the following:

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

In the midst of a pandemic, any influence that sobers and quiets the mind is likely to be beneficial. Sadly, those influences are often undermined by practices that do little more than numb the mind. thus preventing it from being susceptible to anything.

Consider, as a case in point, John Finbury’s album American Nocturnes: Final Days of July, released at the beginning of this past May when the toll of COVID-19 pandemic victims was steadily increasing. Over the last few months we have all experienced the deleterious impact of minds that are anything but sober and quiet, and we are in dire need of influences that pull in the opposite direction. Finbury clearly wished to contribute to those influences. Sadly, the eleven tracks of his album do little more than recall the bad old days of New Age music at its most insipid.

The album constitutes a radical shift from Finbury’s past experiences with Latin Jazz. One can appreciate his intention to shift into a new domain, particularly by drawing upon the talents of cellist Eugene Friesen. In other circumstances one might relish Friesen’s capacity for lyrical rhetoric. Sadly, Finbury’s thematic material is too shallow to allow for the depths of such rhetoric.

By the time I had experienced the last of the album’s eleven tracks, a piano solo taken by Finbury himself, I found myself with an intense desire to experience Cage’s 4’33” for an influence that would quiet my agitated mind.