The summer season doesn’t just mean outdoor sports and gardening.  We can welcome the lazy days of summer by joining in the relaxation. With this in mind here are two music collections designed to soothe your hard-worked nerves and start your summer celebration. Quiet Days www.realmusic.com Real Music presents Quiet Days, one of three CDs in their Sacred Spa Music series, and a compilation of pieces from previous releases. Artists include Hilary Staff, Kevin Kern, Hilary Stagg, Michael Hoppe, Tim Wheater, Paul Machlis, and Bernard L’Hoir. While most are instrumental (piano, harp, flute, and keyboards), there are vocal pieces too. Quiet Days begins with The Calling, a soft, slow piece that eases you into a relaxed state of mind. The second track, Pastel Reflections, is sentimental and pleasing. The third track, Pleasant Dreams, sounds just as its title suggests: it is a soft, cool sound that lulls the listener into a deep relaxation. So Far Away, the fourth track, adds a bit of sweet sadness to the previous track but maintains the pleasant relaxed mood. The next track, musician and inspirational speaker Tim Wheater’s Dark Falls the Night, has a haunting quality with beautiful vocals. The piano performance in track six’s Love's Story suggests a love lost, but is nonetheless pleasing. Track seven is Hilary Stagg’s tinkling rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D; a staple. Track eight, Quiet Days, features the flautist Bernard L’Hoir (former accompanist to Celtic band Orion). With its slow and repetitive strains, it really lulls the listener away. This mood is picked up in the next track, Realms of Splendor, which has a delicate ‘uplift’, a carrying quality. Eventide – track ten – sets the listener down gently again, but in a soft place. After the Rain (track eleven) sounds much like it’s still sprinkling outside with a tinkling piano sound. The last piece, Reflections of Love, offer a blissful means of waking up again with soft harp music and a slightly faster beat. Quiet Days retails for $15.49; the three-CD set is $45.00. Tranquility www.realmusic.com Tranquility is a Real Music sampler of fifteen tracks by eleven different artists, including harpist Hilary Stagg, Anastasi of Real Music’s The Pachelbel Canon with Ocean Sounds, and pianists Bernward Koch and Kevin Kern. Some of the pieces are a bit faster paced than Quiet Days’. Track one opens this CD with a gentle piano piece, Land of Forever, followed by Fairy Wings from In the Enchanted Garden by Kevin Kern. Hilary Stagg’s sunny Reflections of Love shows up again in this CD in the third track. Royal Lake by Mars Lasar (track four) is one of my favorites with its sounds from nature in the background. Track five is Hanalai Bay by Govi; an upbeat guitar piece. Appalachian Sunrise, from The Music of the Great Smokey Mountains by Gary Remal Malkin, is extremely evocative. It is a longer, slower piece that changes tempo at the light of the sunrise changes. Track seven, Flowing Blue, is a shorter but faster-paced piece that sounds like gentle falling rain. Track eight’s A Voice in the Night is deep and haunting, perfectly followed by the delicate sounds and the deep background music of In the Realm of the Summer Stars (track nine). Kevin Kern’s In the Realm is wonderfully light after the depth of the two previous pieces. Track eleven is The River by Ayman (from the CD Moon Shines Last), more exotic and slightly eerie with its heartbeat in the background. Govi’s Sky High (twelfth track) is a happy awakening, a contemporary guitar piece. The yearning A River Runs Through It, from CinemOcean, is performed by Anastasi in track thirteen. Track fourteen, Brian Bec Var’s Prayer for the Wind II is soft and slow, and includes beautiful guitar strains. The CD ends with Pleasant Dreams (also on Quiet Days), from Sweet Return by Hilary Stagg. It is wonderful how placing this piece at the end gives this CD a perfect note of closure, whereas it creates the flowing continuity between tracks on Quiet Days. Tranquility retails for $14.95. Check out Real Music at www.realmusic.com for more information or to purchase CDs.