Emmanuel Jal is a former Sudanese child soldier who has gone through a massive transformation, transmuting his angst and pain into positivity through music. What follows is a testament to music's power to overcome the darkness and aid in true transformation.
Here are two excellent videos with Emmanuel - first his interview with CNN, followed by his talk to the TED audience.
LINKS: Emmanuel Jal's WARchild album on Amazon.com
Look around the homepage today for a new Featured Track (and free download) called "Born Again" from Cory Chisel and The Wandering Sons. In addition, see the Featured Articles area in the right column for our all new interview with world music and jazz percussion great Airto Moreira about how his music bridges the gap between the spiritual and material world!
An interview with Airto Moreira
By Tom Crenshaw, tom@RockOm.net
Airto Moreira is one of the most endearing and influential percussionists in the world today. Born in South Brazil he began playing percussion even before he could walk. By the time he was six years old Airto had won many music contests by singing and playing percussion. He moved to Sao Paulo at the age of sixteen and performed regularly in nightclubs and television as a percussionist, drummer and singer.
In 1965 he met the singer Flora Purim in Rio de Janeiro. Flora moved to the USA in 1967 with Airto following shortly after and began playing with musicians such as Reggie Workman, JJ Johnson, Cedar Walton and bassist Walter Booker. It was through Booker that Airto began playing with the greats - Cannonball Adderley, Lee Morgan, Paul Desmond and Joe Zawinul to name a few.
Mr. Moreira's impact in the drumming world has been so powerful that Downbeat Magazine added the category of Percussion to its readers' and critics' polls in 1973 because of his work. Airto has gone on to win this award over twenty times since then. In the past few years he was been voted the number one percussionist by Jazz Times, Modern Drummer, Drum Magazine, Jazzizz Magazine, Jazz Central Station's Global Jazz Poll on the Internet, as well as in many European, Latin American and Asian publications.
Airto Moreira has been advancing the cause of world and percussion music as a member of the Planet Drum percussion ensemble alongside The Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Heart, master conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, Flora Purim, Babatunde Olatunji, Sikiru Adepoju and Vikku Vinayakram. Airto has contributed to two Grammy Award-winning projects, the album Planet Drum, which won in 1991 in the World Music category, as well as his work with the Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra, which received the award for Best Live Jazz Album.
In September of 2002, Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso named Airto Moreira and Flora Purim to the Order of Rio Branco, one of Brazil's highest honors. The Order of Rio Branco was created in 1963 to formally recognize Brazilian and foreign individuals who have significantly contributed to the promotion of Brazil's international relations.
Also, Airto was a professor for three years at the Ethnomusicology department of UCLA and broke new ground in musical concepts and creative energy.
Currently he divides his time between recording studios, workshops and clinics, and creating new projects as well as researching new materials for future releases and live performances in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Airto's latest album is Life After That and was released on Narada Records.
Airto: No, not really. It probably has nothing to do with the music. There was no music. My parents didn't sing, dance, or play. [Laughs] My father was a spiritist. He, along with about 10 other mediums, would sit around a table and get in touch with the spirits and the spiritual world. They would talk to the spirits and solve problems for people. The medium, acting as a bridge between the spirit and material world, would talk with the spirit of the person and straighten a lot of things up because there's a lot of people who [after they die] feel good about their [past] lives, but most of us, we don’t. We feel like we wasted a lot of time in our life. We feel, "I shouldn’t have done that," or "maybe I should have done this instead of that." We keep those problems and other problems after life. When I say "after life," I mean after our material life. As spirits, we are immortals. We never die; we just spend some time around the spiritual world (which is actually right here) and is the universe. It's God's universe that he is creating. We might have to come back here to solve some problems we left and to learn to do other things and so on.
When I was about five years old I used to watch my father. We weren't supposed to watch but we watched anyway. [Laughs] I saw my father many times writing prescriptions for people. Some of the things he used to prescribe for others to take were from nature, from the forest. Other things he would write were to be taken from a pharmacy. He used to work with a spirit of a deceased doctor who had died 20 years earlier. My father was illiterate. He couldn't read or write but I saw him writing many times. Later on in his life he had diabetes and he lost his vision and was a blind man for about the last 10 years of his life. But he was completely happy! It was really beautiful to see that - the spiritual part of my family.
My sister does a lot of what my father used to do. She learned a lot from him. She is beautiful and happy as well. When others see her they say, "Wow, she is so nice!"
Now talking about death and music, I am in some ways a medium. I also make the bridge between the spiritual and material world. When I play, I do that. The musicians who play with me - including my wife, Flora [Purim] - they know when that comes on me and it's just a beautiful thing. We are helped by the spirits. The music becomes high as far as energy. It doesn't have to be a very fast kind of rhythm. Whatever we do is really rich in energy - universal energy that keeps all the planets and stars together and balanced. This energy is around us too; it's the primal energy that God uses to create the universe. The more you study the more you know. It's not a complicated thing; it's basic, really. I feel the energy when I change, when I am playing something and right at the beginning when it actually happens. I open up for whatever energy is there and then something happens; it clicks and the whole band knows. We look at each other, laugh and smile and we keep playing. It's a beautiful thing, man.
Tom: It seems you were bound for great things as a musician from early on. You had your own radio program in your home city as a preteen and then at 13 you began drumming and singing in local dance bands. Where did this drive, this passion for music come from?
Airto: I don’t know because we didn't have that many musicians in our family. My mother's side of the family was from Italy. I always loved music and I started playing some percussion instruments that my grandmother gave to me and that was it. I just kept playing. My mom gave me other percussion instruments and I just kept playing. This is what I do today; I keep doing the same thing that I use to do when I was a little kid. Now I have a lot of knowledge about different kinds of music - commercial, non-commercial, playing for money or not. Thank God I don't have to play for money. I did when I was younger but if the music wasn't good, if I didn't like it, I didn't play.
Tom: Your wife Flora moved to the USA in 1967 and you followed soon thereafter. Was that a move you intended to make no matter what or were you waiting to see what Flora discovered as far as the music scene was concerned before you decided to leave?
Airto: I had a plan, you see. I was in love with Flora. Really in love with Flora, mainly because she was a fine human being and she had a good education. She was from a family in Rio and I was from a family in South Brazil and we were very poor in our little village. When I met Flora I had never met a woman like her before. She was incredible! She was like a princess. She liked me and we started taking. It was like “Wow.” In the beginning the only thing I would talk to her about would be music. [Laughs] We used to talk a lot about music; she was a singer already. I was thinking this is something very, very special - this is incredible. I couldn’t believe it. We stayed together two years and she decided to go to the States and spend some time there, meet some people, say hello to her friends from Rio who were already there like Sivuca [Dias de Oliveira] who played accordion and was musical director for Miriam Makeba (a great African singer) and Sérgio Mendes. She told me, "I'm going to go and try and sing for a while. I'm really not sure what is going to happen." I said, "Well, I can't go right now. I’m playing with this great band, the New Quartet, and we're successful." I told her I was sorry but I couldn't go.
She went anyway, so we would write to each other. Sometimes we would talk on the phone, but we would write every day. I was so much in love with this woman that I decided to go to California, stay for a couple of weeks, and then bring her back to Brazil. So, I went - and here I am! I'm not in Brazil. [Laughs] Of course, we went back to Brazil often. I don't like the word "career" because I think music is much more than career - music is a lifetime commitment.
Tom: Who were the first musicians you met upon arriving in the states?
Airto: I met Moacir Santos, who was a master teacher from Brazil and a great arranger and tenor saxophonist. I did some gigs with him and studied with him, but not enough. I never really liked study. Unfortunately I can't read music. I started playing in LA with some Brazilian bands and then Flora was invited to go New York to sing with Miriam Makeba. A few days after Flora went to New York, I followed her there and we lived in New York for almost nine years.
It was in New York that I met everybody. I met Cannonball Adderley and we liked each other so much, even though we didn't understand each other. I was speaking Portuguese and he was speaking English. He was our mentor and sponsor in the states and signed our working papers and told his manager, "I want Airto and Flora here legally." I started playing with Cannonball, Lee Morgan and Paul Desmond. Then everything started to happen.
Two and a half years later I met Miles Davis. I met Miles through Joe Zawinul, who was very close friends with Miles. One day Miles said to Joe, "Joe, I’m recording this album - a new kind of music. It’s more electric. I need a percussionist that plays something different." Joe said to Miles, "Well I know somebody that I met at Walter Booker's house." Miles asked Joe what kind of person I was - if I was old, young, or what. Joe told Miles, "He's kind of young, but he has some incredible percussion instruments that no one's seen before. He plays them all, plays jazz, bossa nova, samba; he plays anything. He's able to hear something and just play it." So, I started playing with Miles and recorded Bitches Brew with him.
Tom: Did you believe Bitches Brew was going to be the phenomenon it became?
Airto: No. I knew practically nothing. It was all like a dream to me, a movie that I was in. Everything was happening and I didn't speak English. I came to understand English better soon after. The first three years was like I was on an acid trip and being in a crazy movie. It was a very strange feeling; I was not afraid at all. It was like I knew these musicians for a long time and we were just going to play some music - that was it. All the other musicians warned me about Miles and said, "Listen, Miles can be real nasty but go and play with him. He's going to like you. But never get into any kind of negative stuff with him because he likes to play with you and try and scare you." I was careful in that area. I had two and a half years with Miles. One of the greatest experiences in my life.
Tom: The sidemen on Bitches Brew were extraordinary: Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Chick Corea.
Airto: Yeah, I played for probably a year and a half with those guys. Then Miles started changing the sound. He wanted to get into the "funk/wah-wah" thing. He loved Jimi Hendrix actually. They were going to do an album together. Gil Evans was going to write the arrangements but it never happened because Jimi died. Yeah, we used to go down to the Village in New York with Miles, into Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios and jam there. Miles would be talking with Jimi about the wah-wah pedal; He was crazy about it. He wanted to use it with the trumpet.
Tom: Following your stint with Miles Davis, you jumped right into Weather Report with Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Miroslav Vitous and Alphonse Mouzon.
Airto: Actually it was during my time with Miles. I was still playing with Miles when Joe Zawinul invited me to form the band. Joe said, "This is going to be the best group in the world. You’re going to play with us." But I told him, "I'm still playing with Miles. Some people are leaving the band and I think Miles needs me." Joe said, "No, Miles doesn't need anybody. Come and play with us." It wasn't that I was skeptical about Weather Report, I just didn't want to leave Miles' band. I wanted to go into that change with him and give him my sounds and soul. I never went on the road with Weather Report. I recorded with them and I played one concert at CBS for the release of our first album on CBS Records. I told Joe after that concert that I was not going to leave Miles.
Tom: In our interview with your wife, Flora gave us her thoughts of Chick Corea and Return to Forever. I want to hear from you about your experience with Chick and Return To Forever. You all pretty much made history in this band.
Airto: Chick had a drummer before me. But he asked Flora to ask me to come in on the next rehearsal they had so I could show some patterns to his drummer and I said, "Sure." I met them all, met the drummer and showed him some stuff. The drummer asked me to take a break with him, go next door to a bar and have a drink. When we got next door he said to me, "Do you want to play this gig with Chick?" I said, "Yeah, I want to play drums for Chick but you're already playing with him." "I’m a jazz drummer; I don’t want to play this gig," he said. I told him, "Well, we have to talk with Chick because he never really invited me to play with him." So we went back to the practice and the drummer said to Chick, "Chick, Airto and I were just talking and you've got a new drummer." [Laughs]
Tom: When we interviewed Mickey Hart and spoke with him about the Planet Drum album and his intention in recording it he said he realized on day he was "sitting on top of the mountain" with regards to his percussion friends. You and Flora joined him on the Planet Drum album and were in fact co-producers, along with the other musicians performing on the album. What are your thoughts on how this all came to be?
Airto: Flora and I met Mickey Hart with the Grateful Dead. We went to see the Dead one time at the Oakland Coliseum just to see what everyone was talking about with this band. That was some "down to earth" music: singing, playing and tripping. It was a big party with thousands of people! Flora and I went backstage after the concert and they were like, "Oh, Airto and Flora!" They invited us to perform with them the next two nights, to jam with them. Ornette Coleman was sitting in with them, playing this crazy stuff on saxophone. Flora picked up a microphone and started singing with Ornette Coleman, doing free-form stuff, really beautiful stuff. That's how we met Mickey. Mickey then called me and Flora to play on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack and we worked in the Dead’s studio in Marin County for six days and nights straight.
Tom: Was this the first time you had worked with Zakir Hussain?
Airto: Yes. [Pause] Maybe I played with him in the Rhythm Devils. I wasn't a part of that group; I just sat in with them. Apocalypse Now was the first time we collaborated and it was just beautiful. Zakir is one of the most incredible players on earth.
Tom: We agree, but I must add that when we spoke with Zakir Hussain last year in San Anselmo one of the first things he spoke about was Bitches Brew and how that was so inspirational to him and everyone, and how it changed everything. He was taken with your work as well.
Airto: Zakir told me he was a classical percussionist playing classical Hindu music, and that's what he did. Then he saw me play with Miles Davis and said, "Wow, I can do that too. I can play some other stuff." Zakir can do anything, really. He's an incredible musician. Then Zakir started opening up, playing with different people. He's one of the most respected musicians in the world.
Tom: Tell me about your album The Other Side of This, from 1988. It was an exploration into the healing powers of music and the spiritual world.
Airto: I always have ideas for sound. I have a lot of ideas for things I haven't played yet. I am young; I'm only 67. [Laughs] Some of the sounds I had been thinking about for many years were sounds for healing, for relaxing and for energy. I never really thought of myself as a shaman to be working with spirits. Spirits are free to come and visit when I am playing and each day when I jump in, they are welcome.
One day when were working on Planet Drum with Mickey and all the great percussionists who performed on that album I said to Mickey, "Remember that project that we talked about of co-producing, that healing music album?" He was about to head out of town and said, "Why don't you start it while I'm gone." So, I stayed in the studio and did about half of the album in five days. When Mickey returned we began rehearsing Planet Drum again and he asked, "Well what have you been doing while I've been gone?" So I had the engineer play the recordings in the studio and Mickey said, "What? What is this?" I said, "That's our project that you are producing." [Laughs] He said, "Oh, you bet I am! Let's keep working on this!" So we would rehearse Planet Drum in the day and then work on The Other Side of This until the early mornings.
Tom: How do you see music and especially percussion evolving in the near future?
Airto: Percussion was probably the first ever instrument. People would play and not even know they were making music. I think it is always going to be a part of humanity. Right now there's a lot of synthesized music and percussion, but at the same time there are percussionists and drummers such as Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, myself and others who are playing all over the world. There is space for acoustic percussion, for the real thing. It will never die. I think that percussion will always grow together with the music. It doesn't matter what kind of music it is because the percussion will always be there. Percussion evolves with the music and with the human race. One doesn't need to be a professional - you can go and play some with the guys and it's OK. Percussion started the music, in the beginning. Percussion is a beautiful exchange, a melting pot. It will always exist and if they keep sampling, they're going to be sampling forever.
LINKS: www.airto.com
by Cory Chisel And The Wandering Sons
Visit Cory at...
Main Website
MySpace
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Death Won't Send A Letter, Chisel's full-length debut for Black Seal Records is a dark and urgent rock and roll vision. The album takes a romantic albeit gutsy stance on the meaning of love and spirituality that begs the listener to consider the confines of what is morally acceptable and the pitfalls of blind devotion.
Watch for an interview with Cory on this week's episode of the RockOm podcast, due out Thursday.
Cory Chisel: "'Born Again' is a recapturing of my own youth spent in the church. A lot of those images used in the video were really painful and in order to not reject that time completely I had to re-purpose them for my own use. But its also an exaltation of life, the kind of exaltation you sometimes only see in church."
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OR Right-click THIS LINK as "Save As..." for the free MP3
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By Trevor Harden, Trevor@RockOm.net
Writer and Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has said that it is "better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart." This is certainly true, but it could be argued that we, in fact, cannot be set apart except through our own misunderstanding. We are all inseparable from the whole, an integral piece of all that is. In Calculus we pick a point on a line and then observe things from that perspective. But there really is no point on the line; it is arbitrarily chosen so that there can be discussion. In the same way, you and I - as well as every "thing" in the universe - is simply a "point in the line" of the cosmos. We are all intricately connected and can no more be separated than a wave can be separated from water.
And yet, for many different reasons, there are times when we feel alone. Separate. Isolated. Unconnected. We feel we have no community, no place to belong and we don't feel accepted by people or the world around us. This is no doubt a mental construction, but it certainly doesn't feel anything less than real. Therefore we often need to be encouraged and reminded that we do belong, that we are accepted and that we are a part of something far bigger than our loneliness.
For those times, here are a few songs that may help...
EXCERPT: "Pool reflects an orphan child / Dirty, lost, alone and wild / Fatherless and nameless still / Fallen heart and broken / will there ever be a place where I belong?"
REFLECTION: This song by Chris Rice both poses the question (Will there ever be a place where I belong?) as well as answers it as the song develops. Chris come to find his answer in God - that by seeing himself as a child of God and as a brother of Jesus, he recognizes his grand divine inheritance and part in the universal family. Perhaps this will mean something to you as well the next time you feel as though you don't belong.
SONG: "A Place in this World" by Taylor Swift (Listen)
EXCERPT: "I'm alone, on my own and I'm starting off / I'll be strong, I'll be wrong, oh, but life goes on / Oh, I'm just a girl trying to find a place in this world"
REFLECTION: Although this song doesn't exactly answer the problem, empathizing with the suffering of others often allows us to move through our own suffering. In this song, Taylor Swift speaks to her loneliness and need to find her "place in this world." Perhaps in the sharing of someone else's search for meaning and belonging, we can begin to understand our own.
EXCERPT: "Tina’s losing faith in what she knows / Hates her music, hates all of her clothes / Thinks of surgery and a new nose / Every calorie is a war / While she wishes she was a dancer / And that she'd never heard of cancer / She wishes God would give her some answers / And make her feel beautiful"
REFLECTION: When we take the position of being a separate being in a cold outside world, we often look long and hard for our place and where we belong, even going to destructive means to try and fit in. But if we can come to understand and accept just how connected we already are with all that is, we can relax into the peace of a divine and universal acceptance.
YOUR TURN: What songs speak to you about belonging, connection, acceptance and battling loneliness?
RockOm Round-up is a quick glance at what's going on around the world in the areas of music and spirituality...
By Carl McColman
I’m a beginner with the bass guitar. I bought an inexpensive Ibanez bass the January before last and took about four months of lessons, but then stopped as I got more involved in writing my book on Christian mysticism. Now, over a year later, the book is on my editor’s desk and I’ve resumed working with the bass. Thanks to a rather lucrative freelancing job I had earlier this year, I’ve upgraded my gear and am now learning with a Rickenbacker bass (I am not worthy to be playing such a wonderful instrument, but when we say “life’s not fair” sometimes that works to our advantage). I’m going to start back on my lessons, and who knows? Maybe some day I’ll be good enough to at least pluck along with a church praise band. Or not. We’ll see. My commitment to the bass is entirely to have fun.
But of course, learning a musical instrument in midlife is about a lot more than just having fun. I’m facing all the demons of insecurity and low self-esteem that prevented me from picking up the bass (or some other instrument) 30 or 40 years ago. Yes, I can say that my parents never encouraged me to play an instrument and without that kind of external support/discipline, I probably wouldn’t have made it very far; nowadays I can be my own “parent” and pull the self-discipline up from within me. I suppose that’s true (although every professional musician I know had the self-discipline at age 13; in fact, usually they got in trouble with their parents because they were more interested in playing the guitar than in doing homework, but I suppose that’s another story). However we slice it, the bottom line is that I’m doing something now, rather awkwardly, that many other folks pull off successfully before they learn how to drive. I suppose there’s some humility in there.
But there’s also all the “I’m not good enough” stuff. “What’s a guy with gray hair and a less than svelte physique doing trying to learn a rock and roll instrument?” that snarky voice whispers within me. “Isn’t this just some weird midlife phase?” “Sell the bass, act your age, and invest the money. It would be a wiser thing to do.” Every time I try to learn a new riff and I make a loud buzzing noise or a string of flat notes, I have to breathe through the temptation to get angry or feel defeated. “I’m doing this for fun,” I keep reminding myself. “This isn’t about becoming a professional musician, or being cool, or proving anything to anybody. It’s just about having fun.”
And I’m discovering that, for me and my Rickenbacker, “having fun” means taking baby steps. By the end of my fourth month of classes, I was just barely beginning to be able to play eighth notes without totally screwing up. Over a year later, that’s still where I am. Baby steps? Hah! I’m still crawling.
The other night on PBS there was footage from the Crossroads festival a few years back, and Jeff Beck performed with an amazing young Australian bassist named Tal Wilkenfeld. Fran and I both were amazed at her playing chops; I looked her up online and discovered she was born in 1986, meaning she was barely 21 during that performance we saw (indeed, we made the apparently common error of thinking she was Jeff Beck’s daughter). Watching her fingers fly over the fretboard, I felt all my “I’m not worthy stuff” flow up like some sort of psychic acid reflux. But then I remembered that it’s all about fun, and I don’t have to worry about comparing myself to someone less than half my age who had already “made it” in the bass world. After all, I’m not trying to “make it in the bass world.” But, still, the snarky voice mumbles in the background, because part of me is toxically ambitious and feels like anything I do I should be the best at, period — or else I’m just a worthless pile of you-know-what.
Reflecting on these silly but persistent inner dynamics, I had a flash of insight the other morning. Isn’t the practice of contemplation a lot like learning a musical instrument? Perhaps many other people will see this as pretty much a no-brainer, but for me, having never seriously pursued a disciplined study of an instrument before, it came as a revelation.
I can only speak for myself, but I certainly do the same silly things with my meditation practice that I do with my bass playing. I sit to be silent, and I attack myself for how lousy I am at it. I come up with all sorts of excuses to undermine my discipline — and then, my discipline having been undermined, I accuse myself of bad faith. When I play my “eighth notes” of rather short and not-terribly-focused meditation experiences, I judge myself as unworthy because I am not engaged in the kind of consciousness alteration that (I assume) characterizes the practice of a “true” master.
Practice makes perfect. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. These may be little maxims that parents use to keep their kids at their daily hour of piano playing, but they also are solid pointers to the reality of contemplative practice. Of course, the kicker here is this: contemplation, like my approach to the bass, is not meant to be anything other than its own reward. Even if we feel like we don’t “succeed” in contemplation, we’ve succeeded anyway. Of course, success is a not-very-useful category by which to describe contemplation, but since we live in a culture that worships the idol of success so pervasively, we (or at least, I) can’t help but see contemplation as something we might or might not succeed at. So what is success in contemplation: feeling God’s presence? Noticing deeper serenity and calmness throughout the day? Making it through 20 minutes of centering prayer without a single distraction? (yeah, like that is going to happen!)… we can evaluate our contemplative practice any way we want, and if we try to evaluate it, chances are we’ll just stack the deck so that it comes up lacking. Sigh. So we try not to judge ourselves — even our judging self — and we try, try again. We take baby steps. We play eighth notes and we try not to wince when the string buzzes. And somewhere in the midst of it all, we have fun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carl McColman is a blogger and author of several books on Celtic, earth-based, and contemplative spirituality. He is just beginning to learn to play the bass, and having all sorts of fun with it. Visit his blog at www.anamchara.com or his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/carlmccolman
This article was originally posted on Anamchara.com HERE.
Our audio interview with Brazilian Jazz legend Flora Purim comprises this week's audio podcast episode. Don't miss this exclusive, in-depth interview with one of the world's greatest vocalist to hear first-hand her experiences on the world jazz scene. Flora also elaborates and reflects on music's spiritual properties and her Bahá'í faith.
CLICK HERE to visit our Podcast page to download this and other episodes of the RockOm Podcast. Grab it for your drive home and be sure to tell a friend we're here exploring the bond between music and spirituality!
By Tom Crenshaw, tom@RockOm.net
Who are the The Mayapuris? They are an eclectic group of talented musicians who share their love of the sacred culture of kirtan through their music.
Where do they come from? The question is better answered in their own words:
"Where do we come from? Is it an esoteric question? Externally we as the Mayapuris are the product of our upbringing. Vish has an Indian father and an Italian-American mother, Kishor and Bali are brothers, one year apart, born from Colombian parents and Jagi is Venezuelan with Israeli descent. We grew up in temples, on farms, in villages, in cities surrounded by Krishna culture, playing mrdanga, singing, dancing, reveling in the joy of kirtan from birth until now. This is where we come from."
The Mayapuris are Vishvambhar Das (Vish), Balarama Tirtha Das (Bali), Krsna Kishore Das (Kish), and Jagannath Kirtan Das (Jagi). The group has been touring around the world performing with RockOm alum Gaura Vani & As Kindred Spirits on the Mantralogy Tour 09 and recently performed at the Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California.
RockOm recently sat down with Kish and Vish of the Mayapuris to learn more about the group, the history of kirtan and to discuss why kirtan is so popular around the world. We also spoke about their upcoming time in the studio where they will begin recording their first CD on Mantralogy Records. Mayapuris dancer Vrinda Devi Doherty also joined us in this interview.
Tom: Tell us about your name, Mayapuris.
Vish: Mayapur is a place in west Bengal, on the banks of the Ganga where the sankirtan movement as we know it originated some 500 years ago. Mayapur is where Caitanya Mahaprabhu utilized kirtan as a non-violent response to the oppressive cultures in place as well as a protest to the caste social system. The people would take to the streets, sing and dance with the mrdunga drum. It was spiritual; anyone could join in and did. The Muslims, Hindus and all levels of social caste joined in. We took our name in honor of Mayapur. Most of the members have spent some time in Mayapur studying and going to school learning more of our instruments, visiting holy places and bathing in the Ganga.
Tom: You say on your website: “Finding our way home, to our true selves is a process.” How can music help us in that process?
Vish: Sound vibration is one of the most subtle elements in this world. Who we are as spiritual entities is beyond these material bodies made of the five gross elements. The strongest way to connect with that spiritual entity that we are is through the subtle vibration of sound. The mantras cut through the material elements and connects us with the spiritual elements. That connection is what is called yoga, that linking. So we are actually practicing a type of yoga, but it is kirtan - the yoga of sound, of becoming so close to that spiritual sound vibration that it removes those coverings, those layers and one realizes oneself in that process.
Kish: There are so many modern day distractions as the age we are in now progresses - the Kali Yuga age. It is very difficult sometimes to sit down, connect with yourself and get strength for meditation. The prescribed duty for this age is Yuga dharma sankirtan. Kirtan and sankirtan means “in union with people”. It’s the easiest and most fun way to surpass all material nature.
Vish: It’s joyfully performed. It’s really a blissful process. It’s a great way for everyone to come together and even though it’s such a serious thing - connecting with the Divine - it’s a fun process. Those who participate in kirtan automatically feel their soul stirred. Not only is the voice calling out but the soul is calling out as well in that love.
Tom: Vrinda, tell me what you feel when you are dancing.
Vrinda: It’s a progression. When I first start out dancing I’m dealing with how I feel while everyone is watching me. I’m suddenly vulnerable performing this spiritual dance. But as the music takes over I go beyond the vulnerability. I lose myself and it becomes a spiritual journey. Those who are in tune with their energy who have watched me say I am channeling diverse energies. I do that unconsciously because I am embodying the music and the energies come through me and are allowed to shine out.
Tom: Why is kirtan so popular? It’s resonating around the world. Why is that?
Kish: One of the main reasons is that kirtan is different. 40 years ago reggae wasn’t popular but through food, philosophy, music and lifestyle it clicked into society. I feel like with kirtan it is something that is naturally happening.
Vish: 500 years ago Caitanya predicted that this chanting would spread and be accepted in every town and village around the world. It’s happening. Caitanya also said that the sound of the mrdunga drum would resonate everywhere as well. We’re just part of that flow. We’re in the kirtan river wherever we go.
Vrinda: Also, Kirtan is based on audience participation and is not really a performance as much as trying to create the sacred space all together. The audience is such a crucial part of what we do. There is this call and response, so we all create the sacred space with everyone’s sound vibration and people love to be involved.
Tom: You’re about to go into the studio, so tell us about your new CD. What will you be working on?
Vish: We’re really excited to start work on our very first CD. It’s going to be a process for us.
Kish: The basic thing we want to capture is the energy that we represent. We want to put our energy of rhythm into the process because growing up playing the mrdunga is what inspired us. We want to try and adapt to the music that is popular and incorporate an “East meets West” sound, but at the same time keep the strong, traditional aspect of the mrdunga throughout the tracking.
Vish: We instill a lot of passion and energy into our live performances and want to capture that mood on our CD. We don’t hold back at all. We want it so that it makes your heart want to dance.
Just a quick note to say that a brand new Featured Article was released this morning, an interview with legendary Jazz vocalist Flora Purim. See her insightful discussion with RockOm, Music Itself Becomes God, in the Featured Articles section of the home page all month or check out the Podcast tomorrow for an audio version.
On a related note, watch next week for an interview with Flora's husband, Airto Moreira.
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