A concert with a PowerPoint presentation?</p><p>A concert where everyone goes home with a free CD?</p><p>What is Overland Park music therapist Janalea Hoffman up to?</p><p>People will find out tonight at her &ldquo;healing concert.&rdquo;</p><p>Music, with all its therapeutic properties, has been Hoffman&rsquo;s life mission for more than 30 years in the music therapy business.</p><p>One of her projects, called Sounds of Comfort, takes her into hospital rooms at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where she and other musicians play at patients&rsquo; bedsides.</p><p> Over the last three years Hoffman has presented more than 30 of her &ldquo;healing concerts&rdquo; at medical centers, churches and various public venues, for cancer patients, medical personnel and the general public.</p><p>Tonight&rsquo;s concert, a fundraiser for Sounds of Comfort, coincides partly by design with the beginning of the stressful holiday season.</p><p>&ldquo;I just think people need to take care of themselves during the holidays, and this is one way to do it, to start to de-stress and learn some information about how to deal with your stress,&rdquo; she says.</p><p>We talked about the concert with Hoffman in her southern Johnson County studio, Rhythmic Medicine.</p><p><strong>Q. First of all, what is a healing concert?</strong></p><p><strong>A.</strong> Well, it is very unique. Usually when you go to a concert it&rsquo;s kind of a passive listening experience. You&rsquo;re sitting there, and you&rsquo;re thinking of what you&rsquo;re going to do later or whatever else is on your mind.</p><p>A healing concert is part concert, part music therapy experience, part educational. I have a PowerPoint that I give about how music affects the brain.</p><p>There&rsquo;s music that affects us physically, emotionally and spiritually, and I talk about each section beforehand so people know what to listen for.</p><p><strong>Sorry, you stopped me when you said PowerPoint. I don&rsquo;t think most people expect to see a PowerPoint presentation at a concert.</strong></p><p>OK, well, that is very minimal. It&rsquo;s not like I&rsquo;m going to lecture a lot. There will be just a little bit of information so you know how to listen more actively to the music and have it be more healing.</p><p>All of us are on a healing journey of some sort. We&rsquo;ve all needed emotional healing, physical healing at some level. I talk about how music fits into that. That&rsquo;s what people want to know: How can music help me?</p><p><strong> How did you come up with this concert format?</strong></p><p>I have developed, over the years, techniques that I teach to a lot of health care professionals. But then I started doing the bedside music in hospital rooms, and that was really powerful. And yet, I&rsquo;m thinking, it&rsquo;s very labor-intensive, too.</p><p>So I thought &hellip; wouldn&rsquo;t it be great to have this concert for a bigger group of people so that a lot of people could benefit at one time?</p><p><strong>So what kind of music will we hear?</strong></p><p>Some of it&rsquo;s classical and some of it&rsquo;s popular. It&rsquo;s all live. We have a concert harpist who brings her giant concert harp. A lot of our concerts we do in small settings, and to have this giant harp up there &mdash; you really feel the vibrations.</p><p>And then we have a violinist from Poland who is fantastic. He has played in Carnegie Hall and is getting his Ph.D at KU. &hellip; We also have a singer. &hellip; And I do a little bit of native flute.</p><p><strong>I&rsquo;m sure that there are people who will read this story and think, &ldquo;A healing concert sounds kind of woo-woo to me.&rdquo; How would you encourage them to try it?</strong></p><p>We have a CD called &ldquo;Musical Biofeedback.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s music at a certain rhythm to slow your heart rate and (lower) blood pressure.</p><p>The tickets for the concert are $20, but we&rsquo;re offering to give people the CD free if they come.</p><p> We really have a mission to get this out about music therapy and how music can be helpful. And sometimes, you have to do something to grab people&rsquo;s attention.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">A HEALING CONCERT </span></strong><br /> <strong>What: </strong>Part concert, part music therapy session, featuring violinist Lukasz Lagun-Kuzminski</p><p><strong>When: </strong>7 to 8:30 tonight.</p><p><strong>Where: </strong>Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, 11100 College Blvd., Overland Park.</p><p><strong>Cost: </strong>$20 at the door includes a free CD.</p><p><strong>Information: </strong>913-851-5100 or <a href="http://www.Rhythmicmedicine.com">www.Rhythmicmedicine.com</a> to learn about tonight&rsquo;s concert or Janalea Hoffman&rsquo;s services</p><p></div>