Customer Rating: 
Summary: Perfect & Wonderful!!!
Comment: This CD is perfect! A beautiful blend of vocals & music create a wonderful relaxed & meditative experience.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Transporting!
Comment: Haunting, simple and surreal, this is music that will gently but unapologetically usher you into another world. The nasal, microtonal chants of Tibetan nuns from Nagi Gompa, led by Choying Drolma, are enhanced by tasteful, sparing and somehow utterly appropriate accompaniments composed by Steve Tibbets. Instruments used include bells, simple drums, guitar, bouzouki, cymbals, cello, viola da gamba, violin and electric bass, but don't expect any funky club-like fusion act here. This music is the real thing--utterly Tibetan and utterly alien for most western ears, with the subdued and often atonal instrumentals falling quietly and respectfully in line behind the chanting nuns. According to the CD insert, "Cho" is a system of contemplative Buddhist practices based on Prajnaparamita. The literal translation of the word is "cutting", as in cutting through ego-clinging and excising demons. It took me a few listens to get used to this album, expecting the chants to be jarring and distracting, but finding them unexpectedly comforting instead. Now "Cho" is one of my favorite albums to meditate to--simultaneously down-to-earth and otherworldy. For a livelier interpretation of traditional Buddhist chants, check out the releases of the Japanese group Uttara Kuru.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful music
Comment: Here is a great example of Tibetan music emerging from the isolated plateaus and valleys where it has been passed on from generation to generation for more than a thousand years. Choying studied with the Lama Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, one of the greatest teachers of luminous awareness meditation and this album leads us into the space in which we too can touch the existential awareness, purity and beauty that the Tibetans have preserved for us for all these centuries. The simple harmonies of Tibetan sacred music have been designed to create energetic response patterns in the singer and the listener ... to link the visible with the invisible. The particular chants in Cho represent and mediate the surrendering of the body to "hungry ghosts" - an ancient Bonpo (shamanic) practice in which the practitioner sees through the illusion of a solid reality by recognizing the insubstantial nature of all things.
You cannot miss with this music that celebrates awareness and truth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredible mystical journey with Tibetan nuns et al...
Comment: I can't wait to receive and hear this CD; the frammis.com website which has all of Tibbett's CD's has an incredible PBS interview from 1998 with Tibbetts describing how he came about making and recording the Tibetan nuns on this album. The music and the process is simply amazing. Here's the frammis website review:
CHOYING DROLMA and STEVE TIBBETTS Chö Over the past few years, the music of Tibetan monks has gained a massive audience, with Western listeners finding refuge from the rat race in the chants and songs of the East. Those same medicinal properties are at the core of this breathtaking collaboration between veteran Minneapolis guitar wizard Steve Tibbetts and Choying Drolma, a Buddhist nun whom Tibbetts met and recorded at a small monastery in Nepal. When Tibbetts returned home with the tape of Drolma supernatural vocals he added some instruments to the songs and sent the tape back to the nunnery as a gift, and to Rykodisc and Hannibal Records, who decided to release it. The result is "Chö" (English translation: "cutting"), a beautiful pastiche of celestial songs that evokes a tenderness, optimism and appetite for life that cuts through in any language. Tibbetts' understated instrumentation nicely complement the nuns' disciplined chants, to the point where it sounds as if they've been collaborating forever. St. Paul Pioneer Press...
Customer Rating:
Summary: BEATIFUL AND TRANSPORTING -- SIMPLY STUNNING
Comment: I've heard works by Steve Tibbetts before, over the years. I don't own any of his recordings, but I've admired his work and his talents -- some of his ECM recordings might well find their way into my collection in due time. I found this cd a couple of days ago while browsing in the international section at our local, internationally legendary independent music store here in Austin, Texas (which shall remain nameless to keep the folks at Amazon happy -- they, after all, carry a lot of wonderful music, easily accessible for all...). I found three discs in the Tibetan section -- CHO being one of them. After listening to bits of all three, this is the one I took home -- I can't recall being so touched by a piece of music in a long time.The voices on the recording are mostly those of Choying Drolma and her 'fellow' nuns from the Nagi Gompa Buddhist nunnery in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Multi-instrumentalist Tibbetts delicately underscores the natural beauty of their songs and chants with grace and imagination -- all the while remaining in a respectfully supportive role. Too many Western artists, attempting this same project, might have overstepped -- hats off to Steve for not doing so.
I would gently offer that I have a small 'bone to pick' with a review below, which mentioned that Steve did this recording as 'a favor to the nuns', never intending it to be released to the public, the reviewer also questioning if the album 'works'. Respectfully, I would say that the album 'works' immensely well -- but I would agree that it's not something for general popular consumption. The tastes of too many listeners in the West have been numbed by the LCD (lowest common denominator) music shoved down our throats for years by commercial radio. This recording offers something far above that, creativity and cooperation by differing cultures on a whole other level. I would also like to state that I agree with the reviewer's assessment of some of Steve's work being a little jarring -- my tastes run more toward the gentler, subtler works in his catalogue, but to each his or her own.
The album shows that East and West can meet and co-exist, with respect and dignity felt and shown on both sides. There are translations supplied for four of the pieces in the booklet, as well as some very interesting and relevant background information on both the music and the school of Tibetan Buddhism from which it springs. This is one of those priceless recordings that can be enjoyed with rapt attention or in an ambient setting -- it's equally rewarding either way.
