Music Has Healing Powers for Lucky-to-Be-Alive Paul Horn

Paul Horn is glad to be alive.

When he checked into a hospital last year with a headache that wouldn’t go away, he was startled to discover that a brain abscess was the cause of his discomfort.

“The doctors told me,” he explains with a wry grunt, “that if the infection hadn’t been taken care of when it was, I would have been dead within three days.

“At first, it just seemed to be a bad headache. But it would quit, then get worse, and then when I got a fever, I knew it was more than just a migraine. So I had a brain scan, which showed something was there.”

The veteran saxophonist/flutist makes his first post-surgery appearance tonight when he headlines a five-hour concert of New Age music at the Wiltern Theatre. The program is the final event of this week’s third annual International New Age Music Conference.

Horn, who has recorded solo performances inside the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid, was playing meditative, restorative music long before the term New Age came into popular usage.

But he doesn’t feel he fully understood the healing power of music until he experienced it firsthand.

“After I came out of surgery, I was in the hospital for five weeks,” he recalls. “I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds--chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called ‘Inside.’ And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.”

Horn’s near-death close call has given him a sharper perspective on “what really is important.”

“When you come out of it,” he concludes, “you say to yourself, ‘Am I doing everything I can with my life?’ And I’m glad I had the firsthand opportunity to discover the true healing power that music provides. It’s made me want to keep on doing what I’m doing until I’m 90.”