An Interview with Kirtan Artist Gaura Vani
By Tom Crenshaw and Trevor Harden
“I was given the gift of devotional song from birth, raised with the music of the temple, taught to sing and play beautiful instruments and dance... for love and for God,” says Gaura Vani, the heralded musician and leader of what Jai Uttal calls, “Simply the most wonderful kirtan band in the Western world.” Gaura Vani & As Kindred Spirits has released their second CD entitled Ten Million Moons and are in the midst of a prolific year. Not only has the band been featured at the sold-out Obama Presidential Inaugural event Chant4Change, they have also recently been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and seen in the CBS Television Special, Faith, Music and Culture.
At the age of six Gaura Vani left the US to study sacred music in a gurukula or temple school in the timeless town of Vrindavan, India. He learned ancient prayers in Sanskrit and Bengali and to sing and play ethnic instruments like the harmonium and mrdanga. Twenty-five years later he continues to share the magic he received and performs extensively with his kirtan ensemble, As Kindred Spirits, throughout the world from Europe and Asia, to the Americas.
The kirtan sub-culture is a lotus growing from the mud of materialism. Kirtan refers to the ancient practice of gathering for musical worship in the ancient traditions of India. It’s still very alive today. Empty rooms quickly transform into a churning mass of bodies, dancing feet, eyes flashing, hands striking two headed mrdanga drums. This is the epicenter of the kirtan subculture. Gathering together in yoga studios, temples, ashrams, homes (in the basement of your seemingly average neighbor) this vibrant spiritual and musical subculture thrives.
Gaura Vani founded As Kindred Spirits in 1998 with percussionist/multi-instrumentalist, Shyam Kishore, who studied classical Indian music directly from living masters like Zakhir Hussein. Together they have created a special style. Rooted in the Indian kirtan tradition, their diverse influences span the musical spectrum from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jai Uttal, Jagjit Singh, and Axiom of Choice to Beck, Bjork, Peter Gabriel and DJ Cheb I Sabbah. This group brings a fresh take to sacred world-music.
RockOm: What was the inspiration behind Ten Million Moons and how is it different than your past CD?
Gaura: Well my last CD was almost like it fell on my head. I've lived in Washington, DC for the past 10 years and a friend of mine called me up from California and said, "I got a hold of some recording equipment. What are the chances of you flying out to California so we can make an album together?" So we got together in a friend's bedroom in a house full of people and tried to record during the times when no one was making noise. We did basically the whole album, give or take a couple of tracks, in a week. We threw a couple more songs on, some live recordings, and that was the first album. It had a lot of raw energy and was really from the heart and was coming from the love we all share as musicians.
This album, although I tried my absolute best to maintain some of that love, energy and spirit, was from a very different place. It was a much deeper place and I was going through some very tough times in my life. I was working at a job as a filmmaker doing training films for the US government, the Department of Homeland Security. It's a very politically-charged environment, very difficult for someone who's more artistic. It's very hard to function sometimes. I put everything I had into my music whenever I could. I would come home from working a 10, 12, or 14-hour day and put in one or two hours in the studio before falling asleep at the soundboard. Myself, along with my business partner Rasa Acharya, just put everything we could into this album after hours. It was such a personal creation, an exploration, and I honestly didn't know if anyone was going to like it. First of all, I didn't even know if the musicians on the album were going to like it because they come from such a wide array of influences - everything from very classical Indian to very modern and funky Western. I just was trying to use my sensibilities to honor their contributions while at the same time trying to create something brand new. Little by little I started showing it to some of the musicians who were on it and started to get a good response from them. Then I started to show it to other friends and record labels, and people liked it. I'm just so grateful and thankful.
The two albums come from such different places - the first was just a pure joy of creation with friends and the second one was more of a yearning, a longing for a more free and innocent time to be able to create like that, which didn't exist for me during the creation of this album.
RockOm: You founded As Kindred Spirits in 1998 with your percussionist and associate Shyam Kishore, who had studied under [RockOm alum] Zakir Hussain at the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music. What was the intention of starting As Kindred Spirits?
Gaura: Shyam comes from an Indian family. I come from an American family who converted to Hinduism and Krishna worship in the 1960s. So we came from two very different places and at the same time we were meeting in the middle, trying to find a way to take an ancient tradition and live it in a real, honest modern world. I think the reason we chose an English name as opposed to a Sanskrit name or a Hindi name is that spiritual life - whatever denomination, if you're a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist - we feel like it should be a living piece of your life, something that you don't only do on Sundays, something you can do 24-hours a day. You can live it at work, you can live it at private times and it shouldn't be something you're divided about. The idea of creating As Kindred Spirits was to take some of our influences - especially spiritual influences - and mold them and push them in a way that challenged us and that we could live by, and that our friends could live by, that could actually be the soundtrack of our lives. I feel that it is an important thing for our generation to say, "You know what? My religion is not something I'm doing for someone else. My spirituality is not something I'm doing as a social pressure. I'm doing it because this is my expression of my soul calling to the divine. And this is what I do, whether I do it at church or do it at home. It's a real expression of my heart."
RockOm: At the age of 6 you left the states to study sacred music at a temple in India. What was the catalyst for your move?
Gaura: During the tumultuous 1960s, there were people from all over the world who were away from where they had been raised, looking for something that made sense to them on their own terms spiritually. My mother and father were some of those people. I grew up in ashrams, which are like yoga schools, and temples throughout the world. There's a very traditional school in a small temple town called Vrindavan, which is where Krishna was born. It was like a boarding school that was connected to a beautiful, marble temple. Myself and a bunch of other kids from all over the world grew up there including the study of sacred music and sacred ritual. That was really an important time for me in my life. I was only there for a year or so, but that kind of experience is very formative. It changes your perspective on the world. I continued to study at ashrams until I was 10, then went to standard American schools. So those two worlds - having the ancient Indian spiritual education along with a regular old American upbringing - created a very interesting synergy in the mind and in the heart.
RockOm: Speaking of young people and changing the world, tell us about your experience and involvement in Chant4Change.
Gaura: Everyone was starting to feel enlivened by Obama's campaign. Even if you didn't feel Obama was the candidate, the idea that something like this was in the air was inspiring and exciting to everybody; that the old systems, the old boundaries, and the old ways of doing things were not necessarily how they were always going to be. And then for myself and a lot of my friends, when Obama won, it was really a sense of - wow, what will the future be? What is possible? What are we going to manifest through this opportunity?
We were in New York shortly after Obama won and after the initial fever died down, one of my friends said, "What are you going to be doing during the Inauguration, because I'm going to be in Washington?" I swear to you, it felt like a ton of bricks fell on my head and shoulders. I thought, "Oh, my Lord. There's no big chant event, no big kirtan event going on during that time. Conscious people from all over the world are either going to be in Washington or going to be focused on Washington. I just knew at that moment, standing on that street in New York City that we have to do something. So for that evening's concert and other concerts we were doing in the city, I started telling people that we are organizing an amazing event in Washington, DC that's going to be held on the Inauguration. Everyone around me just looked at me and said, "Are you sure you know what you're doing" But I just felt it, I knew it had to be done. I felt like it was an opportunity I couldn't pass.
That next week when we came back to Washington we had two months to organize this event, all the locations in Washington were sold out. There were rumors that even Oprah Winfrey and MTV couldn't find a location. We just did a lot of praying, did a lot of phone calling and seeing what was possible and we started to pull together like a coalition of friends: yoga teachers, conscious people, artists - everyone who was into it that found it realistic, possible and exciting. Chant4Change ending up being a totally sold out, star-studded event: Jai Uttal and Shiva Rea were there, very influential yoga and kirtan people, other yoga teachers and activitists, Grammy-award winner Toni Childs was there. It just became an event unto itself. We had a small church within sight of the White House on 16th street, so we were within sight of the focus of that evening's attention. [We were there] to chant, to empower and uplift the new administration, to bless ourselves and the city and the country and bless the outgoing administration. Somehow sending out blessings, we could take this energy and transform it for an even greater purpose. It was a real unification of body, mind and soul beyond the boundaries of country or race and was very, very successful. One of the Yoga Journal bloggers called it a prayer meeting meets a dance club in a church or something like that. People were singing at the top of their voices and dancing in the aisles. The video is online as well as photographs. It was truly amazing to all of us.
RockOm: Perhaps it should be an annual event now.
Gaura: We're working on a Chant4Change on the West Coast, in Los Angeles or San Francisco before the holidays. This event is going to be focused on the other ecstatic traditions, other than kirtan. So we're going to take kirtan, which is India's ecstasy chant and devotion tradition, and we're going to have it meet Sufi music, the Islamic ecstatic chant tradition, and gospel, which is the Christian ecstatic chant tradition. So at least those three traditions are going to come together for an evening of both traditional music from those faiths, as well as joining together to create a totally new unique sound. So that's very exciting.
RockOm: What are the similarities and differences as you lead kirtan in different parts of the world?
Gaura: Each place has its own flavor. Kirtan ultimately is described as like a scrubbing, a cleaning of a heart. Sri Chaitanya [Mahaprabhu] - who is the founder of kirtan as we know it and who brought kirtan to the streets 500 years ago during the first documented non-violent social reform movement in India - brought the chanting out into the streets to erase some of those boundaries like castes and creed and class. He says that the holy names of God, of the divine, have the power to clean the heart. And when the heart becomes clean, we can see. He's comparing it to a mirror, that we can see who we are in relationship to the Divine. A dirty mirror doesn't allow you to see clearly but as you clean it you can see clearly, "Who am I, who is the Lord and what is our relationship?" So the kirtan experience is unique to the individuals and it's unique to their own experience.
In some places our kirtans are very meditative. When we were touring in South Africa, we performed at the Ghandi Hall in Lenasia, near Johannesburg, and it was mostly an older Indian audience. There was not a lot of clapping, not a lot of singing, and we were sweating bullets there on stage. We thought, they don't like it; they hate it. And then afterwards, everyone came up to us and said, "It was so beautiful... you did a fantastic job... we were so touched." It was their way of appreciating, just meditating. Other places, like when we perform in New York City, people will go wild and start dancing like whirling dervishes and it's just intense with people yelling, chanting and laughing. We did a kirtan in South Carolina and I didn't have a drummer, it was just me on the harmonium. It was very, very quiet. People were just singing along very peacefully and, little by little, people started crying just from the depth of their own prayer as we chanted. It's a totally unique experience depending on the mood of our heart or the way we approach chanting.
These names have all the power that the divine Lord and divine world invested in them. Whatever tradition - if you look at the Bible, David says in the Psalms to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord." The chant tradition runs so deep. This Chant4Change that we're tyring to do around the holidays this year is based on the idea that there is one underground river that all of the traditions of the world are drinking from. They're all being fed by this raging river underground which is God's love for us.
RockOm: Let's talk about some of the songs on Ten Million Moons. What prompted you to include the song "Surrender" on an otherwise straightforward kirtan CD?
Gaura: [laughs] Well, that is a question I asked! Kirtan is an expression of the soul calling. The saints and teachers of the kirtan tradition say that we should cry like a child for his mother. Rumi, the Sufi poet from a different tradition, says that we should be like the whining dogs calling for our master. This mood of a genuine heart cry is essential to the kirtan tradition. So the song "Surrender" was my attempt to write a song that does that in a language we're familiar with in English. I really put it out there in a way that people could understand the mood that I'm trying to cultivate in my heart, which is "Lord, make me an instrument." There are so many songs by great saints like the Prayer of Saint Francis, "O Divine Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love." It's a very beautiful prayer and it really embodies what they call a bhakta, someone who's trying to cultivate devotion. And that's what kirtan is all about, bhakti or devotion, and that mood that St. Francis embodies, that was what I was trying to bring to a song.
RockOm: Another great uplifting song is "Sleeping Soul (Jiv Jago)." How did gospel find it's way into kirtan?
Gaura: Like I said, I think gospel, qawwali music, kirtan and other ecstatic music are all the same thing. Not the same in the sense that everyone's exactly the same. Everyone has their own unique differences and it's our differences that create that beautiful diversity. But in the sense that they're all being fed by the same divine source, that underground river. I've grown up my whole life, since before I can remember, doing kirtan so kirtan is in my blood. I think and feel in kirtan. But when I go to a gospel concert, that same energy reverberates in my body and I want to get up and sing and dance and chant, just like I do when I'm in my own temple. They're the same call, that call from the heart to the Lord. "O Lord, make me an instrument. O Lord, bless me and know me. O Divine Lord, let me engage in service and devotion to you." I feel like gospel music is a sister tradition and there are some amazing gospel and Shaker songs that are undeniably personal.
There's this one gospel song that goes, "If you can use anything Lord, you can use me. And if you can use anything Lord, you can use me." And the verses talk about how God inspired David to pick up that little stone and that small stone took down the giant, Goliath. And if he can use that stone, then certainly the stone can use me. Then the chorus comes in again. "If you can use anything Lord, you can use me." So that tradition is really connected to kirtan. When I did "Jiv Jago", which is based on a 100 or 200-year old composition by Bhaktivinoda Thakura, I started hearing these overtones in the background. I would hum lines and then I started hearing this gospel choir. I sat in the studio late one night and found myself singing these gospel lines. I listened to them afterwards and thought, "This is ridiculous. It's 3 o'clock in the morning and that's why I think this sounds good." And so I shut the computer down and then the next day I came back and thought, let me just mix it down and listen to it in my car and see what I think. I thought, my voice sounds ridiculous but there's something here. I started showing it to some of my friends and some of my friends laughed at me. Other friends really loved it and so I thought something has to be here if people are this divided about it. At Chant4Change, C.C. White heard our group perform, heard Acyuta Gopi, our female lead singer, and said, "This is amazing. I want to do something with you guys." And then it hit me like a lightbulb. I said, "C.C., would you be willing to record?" She agreed, came to the studio, took the tracks that I had, redid the leads, added solos and harmonies and used my old tracks to mix our voices together. Though it's only two voices it sounds like an entire gospel choir. She was so sweet and kind and comes from a Christian background. She's a professional singer who has performed with Ben Harper and some of the great musicians in the world. I told her that I didn't have a lot of money, only a tiny bit I could offer and although she took the check that I gave her, she never cashed it.
RockOm: So our diverse RockOm users should not be afraid of the word kirtan, because even sitting in the pews of a church, they are practicing a form of kirtan?
Gaura: For sure. The word kirtan means "to glorify." It just means to make glory unto the Lord. That's what we're doing in kirtan and that's what most of the traditions already do. I think this is the time for us put aside everything that we disagree on and say, "We could spend an eternity fighting or we could spend an eternity cooperating, uplifting, and empowering each other in whatever way we can." That's what I think is the essence of every "religion" of the world.
RockOm: What are As Kindred Spirits' plans for the future?
Gaura: We're about to go on tour of the left Coast, then to London, then we'll be at Bhakifest. We're touring the Northeast after that, then Australia and South Africa. We are to tie a garland around the world of God's holy names. Aside from that is Chant4Chant around the holidays. All of these things are being put on in cooperation with our brand new record label, Mantralogy. Mantra is a sanskrit word which means to transcend or deliver. It's the idea of sound as a way to uplift and deliver our hearts and minds from our bondage. So Mantralogy is the name of our new record label and the producers of Chant4Change. We're bringing new artists on to our label now starting with an amazing group from South Florida called The Mayapuris. They're a kirtan group who do hip-hop music and pop-rock music. It is a very exciting time for us and for our projects.
www.westcoastkirtanyogafestival.com (BhaktiFest)
Tags: As Kindred Spirits, Chaitanya, Chant4Change, divine names, ecstatic, Gaura Vani, glorify, Goliath, Gospel, heart, India, Kirtan, music, Names of God, Obama, Qawwali, religion, Saint Francis, Shyam Kishore, spirituality, Temple, Ten Million Moons, Washington, Zakir Hussain
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