Sally Block, 57, who grew up in Mandan, and who knew at about age 5 that she wanted to play the flute, has been several places with her flute since then.

Her gigs have included playing in a Seattle band, and for a dance and theater company in New York, and providing music for hypnotherapist sessions at a California retreat.

And years ago, after discovering Asian Indian music and bamboo flutes during a concert, she began studying in India.

She could afford to do that by working half the year as an estate manager in the Hamptons - a lucrative profession where duties in 20,000-square-foot New York mansions could include everything from maintaining wine inventories, shopping for such unique groceries as squid pasta or staying up all night fermenting flowers needed for an exotic gourmet dish.

With her estate manager earnings, she has been able to afford to spend the other half of her years living in India where she studies music and plays with countless other musicians worldwide who also travel to India to soak in the music.

"It was like an international flow-through (of musicians)," she said about her base in India, the town of Pune. "It became the cooking ground for a lot of musicians."

Along the way, she made friends with a devotee of that type of music, musician Chinmaya Dunster, who plays an ancient Indian instrument called the sarod and performed at wedding of musician Paul McCartney.

Recently, joint musical moments of theirs became permanent.

Block's and Dunster's recent collaboration with other musicians has produced a new CD, "Halfway to Midnight," which includes traditional Indian music as well as Block's own creations. The CD includes a Moroccan drummer who also plays the one-hundred stringed Kashmiri santoor and was completed with the help of sound engineer skills of Michael Conrader who has worked on Alicia Keys' platinum albums.

Dunster told the Tribune he has deep respect for Block as a musician, "one of the rare Westerners with a true 'feel' for Indian music."

"It was an honor to be chosen by her to help her manifest her first solo CD. I love the melodies on it, and hope that my chordal accompaniments do them justice."

Block's musical journey started out in a Mandan family where everyone played an instrument - with much devotion. Her grandfather, Rudopho Stehno, practiced his trumpet the night before he died, she said.

She inherited the family's intensity for music. She remembers an incident in Mandan at about age 13 where she started crying during a disappointing rehearsal and her music instructor, Ernest Borr, asked her to come into his office. She remembers being embarrassed about crying.

"He said to me, 'It's OK if you cry, all artists do cry.' "

To be considered an artist by him, "When someone thinks of you as an artist, it's such a touching thing … He just really encouraged me," she said.

Initially, in childhood, she envisioned, not sure why, that she and her flute would end up being employed by Philadelphia's Symphony Orchestra, but in college she began to yearn to drop the music sheets and learn to improvise.

A few years later, she heard G.S. Sachdev playing Indian classical bansui with a bamboo flute.

"I knew then that it was this sophisticated and meditative music I wanted to study next," she said.

For more information, go to www.sallyblock.com.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com)