Our Beloved Land

by Stewart MasonA duet album with guitarist Keola Beamer, R. Carlos Nakai's Our Beloved Land is one of the singer and flutist's more traditional albums. With a track list composed mostly of traditional songs and arrangements that tend toward simple acoustic guitar and reeds, with occasional electronic coloring to fill in the sound, Our Beloved Land isn't as sonically rich and exciting as Nakai's more fusion-oriented full-band records, but there's a pacific stillness to these 11 songs that's perhaps more in keeping with what the average music consumer thinks of as "Native American music." This in no way belittles the obvious craft of Nakai and Beamer's work here, nor the evident joy of their collaboration, both on traditional songs and the small handful of originals in the style such as "El Kano (The Shark)."