Jazz musicians know a lot about fine timing, but those skills do not usually extend to sensing what the next big commercial game-changer is going to be, or when and where to be spotted alongside an era's biggest celebrities. Paul Horn, the New York-born flautist and composer, who has died aged 84, achieved both, in founding that ethereal and contemplative phenomenon known as new age music (a direction that did not endear him to jazz fans), and studying with the Transcendental Meditation teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, at the same time as the Beatles.
But if Horn found himself in the right places at the right times, curiosity, concentration and musicality directed him, not opportunism. A dedicated pursuer of spiritual enlightenment and a committed internationalist as well as an artist of determined vision, he accidentally became a new age guru because he had loved the sound his flute made in big, echoing spaces built for contemplation and prayer. He was at Rishikesh with the Maharishi in 1968 because he believed in the healing power of meditation and music combined.
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