Between the Sky & Prairie

Daniel Ho is a Grammy-winning Hawaiian musician and producer, best known for his innovative work on the ukulele. On Between the Sky & Prairie, Ho is joined by an all-star cast of traditional singers and instrumentalists, performing music from the Inner Mongolian steppes. The record is essentially a fusion between traditional Mongolian music, ukulele and piano. As unlikely as this combination might seem, the intention was clearly to create something widely accessible to a global audience. While the ukulele works surprisingly well on several tracks, such as ‘Singing Magpie’ and ‘Manchurian Lullaby Medley’, it's the incorporation of piano that really grates – on ‘Golden Sunlight’ it has the effect of turning an imagined open prairie into a hotel lounge. One of the album's strongest moments comes when Ho uses a Hawaiian percussion instrument called ipu heke to imitate racing hooves on ‘Praise for Galloping Horses’, alongside Mongolian throat-singing and tovshuur (two-stringed lute) from Tamir Hargana. Excellent in parts, Between the Sky & Prairie is, overall, just a little too nice.