NEW AGE MUSIC REVIEW : Trio Offers Over-Amplified Mixed Set at the Wiltern

Friday night’s so-called New Age music concert at the Wiltern Theater had a lot less to do with New Age than it did with simple commercial exploitation. None of the acts--performance artist David Van Tieghem, former Missing Persons bassist Patrick O’Hearn and pop music keyboardist Yanni--played much of anything that could have been identified with the floating rhythms, gentle harmonies and healing intent generally associated with New Age music.

To make matters worse, one of the program’s co-sponsors was an audio manufacturer whose primary concern seemed to be the demonstration of its equipment’s ability to generate a merciless level of decibel production. In those relatively rare moments when O’Hearn and Yanni generated some appealing passages, the music was blasted into the auditorium at an intensity level virtually guaranteed to produce high levels of stress rather than meditative moments of relaxation.

Aside from the questions of inaccurate labeling and inappropriate sound, however, the program’s music provided little cause for enthusiasm, even on its own terms.

Van Tieghem’s opening solo turn was a humorous tour through a bizarre collection of sound-producing sources: pots, pans, hoses, balloons, whistles, bottles, etc. Call it a contemporized Spike Jones act, but without the enrichment of satire and parody that made Jones’ music so much more than an assemblage of wacky sounds.

Yanni, on the other hand, played an interminably long set of music that took itself far more seriously, with far less reason to do so. Despite a Broadway musical’s worth of atmospheric lighting effects and the highly visible presence of “Entertainment Tonight’s” John Tesh on keyboards, Yanni’s pieces had the featureless, emotionally neutral quality of kaleidoscopic sound without substance.

O’Hearn, when he finally reached the stage, had more to offer. Pieces like “Rainmaker,” “Journey To Europa,” “Sky Juice” and “The Stroll” revealed an expansively growing talent. His strong bass playing (along with effective support from Peter Maunu’s guitar) dominated the set, but O’Hearn is clearly a composer with a future. He would do well, however, to move away from the inaccurate New Age labeling currently associated with his music.