RockOm

A round-table discussion with Shantala
By Tom Crenshaw and Trevor Harden

Benjy and Heather Wertheimer are simply two of the most amazing and dedicated artists RockOm has had the opportunity to meet. Both lead kirtan (sacred chanting) worldwide as the duo Shantala (sometimes as a trio with Brent Kuecker) with soul-stirring vocals, sacred lyrics and exotic instrumentation. Shantala has performed and recorded internationally with such sacred music luminaries as RockOm alums Krishna Das and Jai Uttal, as well as with Deva Premal & Miten and others. In summer 2008, they were named as one of the top "Wallahs to Watch" by Yoga + Joyful Living.

Heather Wertheimer is a singer, songwriter and guitarist who combines her special love of both music and yoga to lead devotional chanting for yoga workshops and spiritual gatherings internationally. Heather's debut CD with Shantala, Church of Sky, was named by New Age Retailer as one of the top ten albums of 2004. It has been aired on radio stations nationwide. In April 2003, she and Benjy released The Love Window, a beautiful and well-loved collection of sacred chants. In 2007, they released Sri, their second popular kirtan CD, and their first live CD LIVE in love was released in 2008.

Benjy Wertheimer is an award-winning songwriter, vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist (playing tabla, congas, percussion, esraj, guitar, and keyboards). Benjy has toured and recorded with such artists as  Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Deva Premal & Miten, Walter Becker (Steely Dan), and virtuoso guitarist Michael Mandrell. He has opened for such artists as Carlos Santana, Paul Winter and Narada Michael Walden. A founding member of the internationally acclaimed Ancient Future world fusion music ensemble, Benjy also toured the U.S., Canada and Japan with renowned bamboo flute master G.S. Sachdev. He has studied Indian classical music for over 25 years with some of the greatest masters of that tradition (including Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan and Z. M. Dagar). Benjy's CDs receive extensive airplay around the world and his CD Circle of Fire went to #1 on the New Age radio charts in November 2002.

RockOm recently sat down with Benjy, Heather, Brent and Kelley Boyd (owner of Savannah Yoga Center in Savannah, GA) for an informal round-table discussion on kirtan, yoga, Eastern music, the evolution of kirtan and sacred music, and much more.

---

Tom: Shantala just recently came from Bhakti Fest [a yoga and music festival in Joshua Tree, CA]. Tell us about your experience.

Benjy: It felt like a milestone that marked the beginning of a different level of engagement of people in this country with bhakti yoga. A lot of people were only half jokingly referring to Bhakti Fest as the Woodstock of kirtan. There's this critical mass that's being reached that is moving towards shifting the consciousness of a lot of people in this country. It was an incredible honor to be there. Bhakti Fest is a place where history is being made as far as bhakti yoga. We’ve been to a lot of yoga festivals with a lot of people present and the focus is very much on asana. In this case it was very clear the focus was on kirtan.

Heather: I don’t know how many kirtan artists where there. Some of them were well known, some weren't and some of the most well known artists weren't there. The feeling at Bhakti Fest was fantastic, so good natured, calm and friendly as well as peaceful and loving.

Tom: Yeah, we looked online and saw some photographs of the events and it seemed so intimate.

Heather: It felt personal.

Benjy: It sure did.

Tom: When and how did you two form Shantala?

Benjy: Probably as many people know us as Benjy and Heather as they do Shantala, but now that Brent is with us it really feels like we have a special kind of synergy that we’ve been able to grow over time. Now we’re writing chants together.

Tom: And Brent gets to help with Barkley [Benjy and Heather's dog].

Heather: Barkley is our inspiration.

Brent: Barkley does everything really. Everything is a manifestation of Barkley. We're just pawns. [Laughter]

Heather: We're just servants of Barkley. [Laughter]

Benjy: I was thinking I should change my name to Barkley-Das. [Laughter] It is quite interesting though, Barkley is a very important part of what we do because every day we are reminded of bhakti through him because his love is so absolute. I think there is something we can all learn through the love of a dog. It is really unswerving and truly unconditional. Secondly, very much what is at the heart of bhakti yoga for me is being in the moment and I can't think of anyone who is a better teacher of that than a dog.  It's [about] 'right here, right now'; not what's happening tomorrow, not what happened a few days ago. It's 'right here, right now'.

Brent: You know how dogs love you no matter what you've done to them? It's kind of the same way that Heather talks about when we're in kirtan that no matter what we think about ourselves while we're practicing kirtan Ma is always loving you no matter what, and when you get a glimpse of that you start feeling better.

Heather: We begin to focus more and more on the force of grace and everything that's holding us. It's so easy to step from your normal funky world of being lost in your thoughts and riding the ups and downs of your thoughts, your latest emotional swing and it's just one easy step to have a total awareness of grace with you. That's an important part of this practice that we're able to make this step into contact with a realm of beauty and sacredness and joy.

But back to your question - how did we get started in Kirtan? People just asked us to do it. I was doing some things as a singer-songwriter; that was an important part of my life. Benjy had been full time in music and had an extensive Indian classical background, so when we got together and I was teaching yoga we began to be very involved in the Anusara yoga community. Benjy played for savasana on the esraj for John Friend and John fell in love. The short story is John Friend exposed Krishna Das to Benjy's esraj music and Krishna Das invited Benjy to perform on his Breath of the Heart album. Krishna Das discovered Benjy also plays tabla so when Krishna Das needed a fill-in tabla player he called on Benjy to come to the Inner Harmony Yoga Retreat Center with John Friend. We did that for a couple of years. I just tagged along. I was a yoga teacher; I just wanted to do yoga with John and it was a bonus to be able to sing with Krishna Das. We would fill in when Krishna Das wasn't available and ended up doing music for savasana. Then people started asking us to chant and we had no idea… or intention to go down that path. Once we started, we fell in love with it.

Benjy: I feel in a very real way we were guided. It was almost like we didn't have a choice. We kept encountering circumstances starting with meeting John Friend back in 2000, going into this thing with Krishna Das and falling in love with the practice of kirtan completely, and finding place after place where that was the best way we could serve. As for my own religious background, I'm a Quaker, but I feel there's no dissonance between my Quaker roots and what I’m celebrating, especially from a Hindu-tantric perspective, which is the realm John Friend works in. There's this beautiful melding of [my Quaker roots with Hindu-tantric] and in the kirtan it’s a part of this celebratory element of yoga that's at the heart of a lot of the tantric practice.

It's quite incredible too that at this point, 32 years ago I started my practice of yoga but not asana yoga. Everyone thinks of asana right away when they think of yoga but my teachers, Ali Akbar Khan and Zakir Hussain would refer to it as nada yoga: the yoga of sacred vibration and sound. It's considered a very high yoga going back to some very ancient texts. In the process of learning from Heather when she was a yoga teacher and from John, I stated to see how this could all come together with nada yoga side by side with bhakti yoga in the kirtan practice. That's a very big part of what we always hoped to be able to share with people.

Tom: Benjy, you grew up playing classical music starting with piano?

Benjy: That's right. Yeah, my very first instrument starting at age five was piano. My parents tell me I was singing before I could talk. I played violin as well, my interest shifted, and I later started studying flamenco guitar.

Tom: How did your study gravitate towards Eastern Music?

Benjy: Well before I started studying piano my mother told me I used to always bug her to keep playing Babatunde Olatunji's Drums of Passion. She literally wore it out. I was very much into African drumming and by junior high school I was studying Afro-Cuban drumming. In my high school years I came into contact with Indian classical percussion and it just blew me away. I had never seen anything like it and I realize, particularly when I saw the one who was going to become my guru on tablas - Zakir Hussain - when I saw him play what he could do with these two little drums was way beyond what I could ever imagine. So I knew that's where I wanted to go. As soon as I could after high school I went out to California where Zakir Hussain was living so I could study with him.

Trevor: If Drums of Passion hadn't been made we wouldn't have anything to talk about! [Laughter] Because most every single person we talk with talks about how instrumental that album was.

Benjy: Oh, there's no doubt!

Heather: [Without Olatunji's influence] so much music would have never made it over to this part of the world probably!

Tom: What's the hardest thing for Western musicians to grasp about Eastern music?

Benjy: One of the things is cultural. In Western culture, music is seen as a diversion or a source of entertainment, whereas in Indian classical music it is a spiritual path. I think some people have difficulty finding ways to reconcile themselves with that and the expectation of the sadhana of that path is mind-blowing. As an example my guru in the raga side of things, Ali Akbar Khan, would play or practice music 14-18 hours a day over the period of decades. It's very hard for us to even imagine that level of sadhana in our culture. Part of it too is because there's a very different orientation; there's a way we have to make our way in the world, or I guess you could call it a renunciation of sorts because you have to renounce the world to a degree to engage in that level of practice. What's interesting is that it's not renouncing the Divine, in fact you are trying to engage yourself fully with that essence of sound, which Ali Akbar Khan did so beautifully, which Zakir Hussain and his father Alla Rakha (who was Ravi Shankar's tabla player) did as well. They embodied the essence of the soul of music because they focused so strongly on that.

Tom: Heather, what are the unspoken elements between musicians while you're performing kirtan? What transpires that is unspoken? How do you communicate with each other while you're performing?

Heather: Well, we've spent so much time together that we're basically joined at the hip. [Laughter] But I think that we have a common purpose as performing musicians in kirtan, which is we are supporting the energy of the group to move in particular directions, to help people have a deepening experience throughout the course of the kirtan. So we have an energetic wave that we're riding together and we're all supporting that wave. There are times that we want [the music] to move slow, deep and more inward and there are times we want [the music] to come into a much higher energetic state and we  know approximately when that is going to happen, but it's a little bit different every time. Musically, Brent takes his cues off of what I'm singing but occasionally we have an eye contact that we make that we know we're going to switch parts. I use that eye-cue;  Benjy and I just look at each other and we know we’re going to do another repeat. Occasionally I'll mouth one word to him but it doesn't happen very often. We're also very connected to each other. We've done this so much that we know what's going to happen and we all have a sense of where it needs to go and where it should go.

Tom: So Benjy, if Heather is entranced in a part and you know she is in a blissful state but you feel it may need to go in another direction, how do you judge what needs to happen and make a change?

Brent: You don't ever take the women out of her bliss! [Laughter]

Heather: No, he doesn’t have control of that. I do! [Laughter] But we do have subtle ways that we all push the tempo or slow down slightly.

Benjy: I have a deep sense of trust to Heather's connection this practice, so generally speaking I’m going to go with the flow that I feel happening there. That said, the degree of acceleration at any point is up to me; I'm driving it as the drummer in many cases and so figuring out where that next level  should be is kinda up to me…

Heather: Yes it is…

Benjy: …And these two follow me in that. Sometimes I'm leading the chants too. There's a couple of high-energy chants that I lead and I have to figure out where that energy is for me. It's a dance. The other thing is that if Heather is going into a blissful state it is almost always accompanied by a similar state on the part of those participating in the kirtan. They are really coming into this synchronized way of being with each other. They are really tuned in and Heather is tuning into a kind of energy… I know if she's going there the group is following in her wake and I don't want to mess that up. It's such a different mindset because of the participatory elements and because it is a co-creation in a very real way with the group present.

A lot of the kind of things you would see in a performance doesn't really apply [to kirtan]. There are times I want to bring in elements of Indian classical music - for example a tabla solo - or something that's played on the esraj that is mirroring a raga that I know well. Or if we have other great Indian musicians playing with us, which we're blessed to have sometimes, to give them a moment to completely shine out in the middle of the kirtan because to me it's all part of that same expression of divine sound and devotion.

Heather: Also, we all three have a talk every day about what we're going to do for our set list. We'll talk about that for a while and then sometimes we'll often end up changing it mid-stream. The other night we were thinking of keeping the kirtan more down-tempo, but when we got into the up-tempo part Benjy said, "Let's do another up chant," because that was going to serve the group better. So we all talk about it.  Anything you want to add Brent?

Brent: I think there's really one word and you touched on it a couple of times; it's all about service. I feel like, what can I do to serve directly first and foremost with what is happening with Benjy and Heather and us, as a whole, and the energy in the room? I usually play with my eyes closed so I'm mostly feeling the room as opposed to seeing the room. I feel like I can get a lot more information that way. See, it's like this… Kirtan is like a bliss-bus [laughter], no… no… dig this. Benjy is the drummer, as like the engine and the gas pedal; I’m the bass player so I'm the wheels, keeping it going; and Heather is the driver. Everybody in the room are the passengers and they're just singing on the bus. [Laughter]

Heather: That's a great way to put it! We’ll have to use that for our next tour, The Bliss Bus Tour. [Laughter]

Trevor: One of our "go-to" questions we ask a lot of people just to get their different perspectives is, "What is it about music that connects us with the Divine in a way that other things don’t?"

Benjy: There's a term that comes to us from an ancient text that embodies it completely: Nada Brahma, which is basically translated as Sound is God. The nada yoga is your effort to go so deeply into that ocean of sound, through music, that you connect with all the auspicious principles of the Divine in the music and it is considered in many occasions to be completely beyond words. The second part of it is that because music does not necessarily require words, the raw music itself, that vibration is something you can feel regardless of the language you speak in your day-to-day life. It truly is a universal language. You can evoke feelings in people at a very, very deep level almost instantaneously with music. For me, the highest compliment I could give anyone who does a soundtrack for a movie is that you don't notice it because it is so perfectly integrated with what is going on that it doesn’t stand out on its own. It's a part of an integral whole. In that way too, music can be a soundtrack for our love and devotion to the Divine.

Heather: I would add that when we’re making music it vibrates our whole body, it resonates inside of us. It resonates in the heart area and as you know, it also releases chemicals [and causes] interactions in the brain.

Benjy: There’s a wonderful book out called This Is Your Brain On Music that is actually from a neuro-scientific vantage point about what happens in the brain when people are engaged in either playing or listening to music. To grossly oversimplify it one of the points is there is no other activity outside of being engaged in music that engages more parts of the brain simultaneously.

Trevor: Speaking to what you just said about music engaging different parts of the brain and enhancing other activities, there is some debate about asana practice and whether or not you should accompany it with music. What are your general thoughts on this?

Heather: I’d like to get Kelley's [Boyd, owner of Savannah Yoga Center] opinion on that. Kelley?

Kelley Boyd: It goes right back to what Heather and Benjy were talking about which is the practice feels totally different when there is music playing. Sometimes some moments do call for no music. There's plenty going on internally. I think that music is a beautiful addition to an asana practice. You can engage people in a different kind of way with music in their practice depending on the songs that you play, the message you want to convey to your students. I've heard of stories where students listen to a particular kind of song for 10-20 years and then they heard it in a yoga class and they picked up on specific words and it really opens something up for them.

Heather: Brent teaches yoga as well. Anything you want to add about yoga and music Brent?

Brent: I don't use music, except for savasana yoga. For me I would love to have musicians in the room playing with me and reading the energy of the room, supporting what is happening. So often I find unless I've spent hours and hours on a play list it's not in sync with the mood or actions in the class that I am intending and feeding. It’s a personal thing. I don't want to be teaching something that is more introspective and have some rockin' music just because the play list didn't happen to sync up.

Benjy: One of the great blessings in our lives is that for a decade or so now Heather and I have been providing live accompanying music for John Friend's yoga classes with as many as 800 people in a class. He is like a conductor and we are this orchestra that needs to be able to stop on a dime. For example if he needs to stop and give a technical instruction we are happy to stop playing because it would be totally distracting. If the flow changes we need to be able to turn and completely shift that.

Tom: Where are you going as a group and as individuals? What does the future hold?

Heather: We have a really fun and meaningful focus coming up for our 2010 tour in many cities across North America. We’re going to be doing events that we're going to be calling "Unity in the Community" which means we're going to be bringing together different groups at yoga centers, different non-profit groups and church groups to work together to do fund raising for local and regional charity causes. We love doing fund raising events and helping others through our events. For example, we sold handmade African necklaces for about a year and raised $17,000 for Ugandan women and children. So it's really powerful what you can do in the course of your offerings.

Brent: I'd just like to close by offering one thing. What kirtan is and what we're doing is truly an experience of the heart because you don't get done listening to any kind of music and say, "Wow, that just made my brain feel good." You don’t hear that. People say they actually felt something [in kirtan]. We are transported into our heart and what we find there is good, blissful, amazing. What we can say by this on a universal perspective is that at the essence of our self and at our heart there is just goodness.

Heather: I agree and to add to your really good question Trevor about how music gets us closer to the Divine. I think part of it is when you come together with a common intention, as groups and as individuals, we can consciously create that experience together and it's beautiful. We're just opening a doorway into something that can sweep us along. It's really beautiful.

Trevor: And that communal aspect is representative of a Divine thing going on because it's bringing people together.

Benjy: For sure.

Heather: Absolutely. That's why it was so powerful at Bhakti Fest with 2500 people coming together with a common intention. I really believe it ripples out into the world.

Benjy: Can you imagine what it's going to be like in 10 years? I am really excited to see what is happening. Culturally as asana [hatha] yoga has taken hold here in this country and you see many styles represented many of them are very new even though some of the yoga practices go back 5000 years. There are new practices being invented every day.  We’re finding in kirtan a complete expansion of the definition of the term. That is happening in large part because of the melting pot culture that we're part of here in the States whereas someone [elsewhere] may not know how to deal with mantra or how to celebrate in kirtan but they totally resonate with reggae. It's like the opening of a doorway that many people might not have known and that's part of what we hope to facilitate in what we do. There are so many different kinds of kirtan now available for people. It's really exploding and I think it's a beautiful opportunity for more and more and more people to find that connection to the Divine.

LINKS:

www.shantalamusic.com

Shantala Amazon link to latest CD available on Amazon

An Interview with Mickey Hart
By Tom Crenshaw tom@rockom.net

As a child, Mickey Hart used to stand out in thunderstorms listening to the patterns and sounds of the rain as it fell. He recalls some of his neighbors saying quizzically to his parents, "That boy of yours, Mrs. Hart, he's a strange fellow!" That rhythmic inquisitiveness as a child led Mickey deeper into the mysteries of sound as he grew older, becoming one of the world’s most celebrated percussionists and authoritarians on world music and music's healing abilities.

For nearly three decades Mickey has performed on drums and percussion as part of the Grateful Dead (along with fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann) but his accomplishments don't end there. Through his tireless study of world music Mickey has gone on to contribute more than most any other musician to the study of sound, rhythm and the incredible healing aspects contained within.

Mickey has also written four books documenting his lifelong fascination with the history and mythology of music. These include Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, and Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music. He’s appeared before the United States Senate to discuss the healing powers of music and rhythm and is a member of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Hospital where he continues his investigation into the connection between healing and rhythm and the neural bases of rhythm. Mickey has also been appointed to the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress where he heads the subcommittee on the digitization and preservation of the Center's vast collections.

In addition, Mickey Hart has composed music for movies, television and celebrated events including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the PBS special Vietnam: A Television History, and The 1996 Summer Olympic Games to mention a few.

RockOm had the extraordinary opportunity to spend some time with Mickey recently to discuss his early initiation into sound and rhythm, his role in the Grateful Dead, his various Grammy Award-winning albums of percussion and world music, and the incredible reality that there are new, healing rhythms being born into the world every day.

---

RockOm: What are your earliest memories of music and drumming?

Mickey Hart: That all depends on what you call music and what you call drumming. I was always interested in the nature of the rain, loud sounds of the city, trolley cars – so the rhythmic tattoo of New York City first captivated me, the rhythm and the noise of things – buildings being torn down, a lawn mower – pretty much "loud stuff." I love the loud in things. The rain especially was transfixing because it came down so rhythmically. I would stand out in the rain and let it beat on me and it went deep into the subconscious and inner self. It felt really good to be out there. Those were my first thoughts of rhythm and noise.

Then of course the radio would captivate me. My mother had Folkways records tucked in the middle of a Duke Ellington collection. I started listening to pygmy rainforest music and listening to indigenous musicians as the first real turn-on to membranophones, or drums. And Latin music was really taking over at that time in New York City – Tito Puente and Machito – and that was coming out of every radio and every phonograph around the city. Before Rock N’ Roll there was Latin music which was full of syncopation and  got my ear. My dad and mom were both rudimental drummers and when my dad had left when I was an infant, he left a practice pad. That practice pad was my key into the other side. When I heard the report of the practice pad, that sealed the deal. There was nothing more beautiful than the short, sharp sound from the pad; I could listen to it over and over again. It became like my radar. That was the beginning of it all. I was a strange, unsettling boy.

RO: Tell us about meeting Babatunde Olatunji and how that impressed upon you.

Mickey Hart: Olatunji came in about 1959 much later; what I’m talking about is the early and mid-50s. But when I heard Olatunji's album Drums of Passion I had never really heard drums played at that level and I certainly had never heard a talking drum – a variable pitched instrument. Here you had the powerful trance loops of Western Africa. I mean people didn’t know that’s what they were experiencing but here you had trance rhythms played in New York City in a fine recording studio with CBS. And Baba was a great vocalist so here you had chant over these powerful, magical rhythms. So when I heard that album that sealed the deal as well as far as the power of raw percussion and voice. It changed my life, no doubt.

Then of course I was fortunate enough to run into him in 1985 and when I asked him to open up for the Grateful Dead, he didn’t know who we were. He said, “Ya, ya, ya…” and left. Someone then must have told him who I was and he called me back. We got to be friends and he opened for the Grateful Dead and the fans loved him. He became my best friend and the godfather of my daughter. So he was another major influence to me as well as to hundreds of thousands of practitioners and musicians from around the world – Coltrane knew him. All kinds of people were being sucked into this powerful rhythm snake.

RO: When did you first recognize your experience with rhythm and drumming going from beyond the ordinary into a mystical or spiritual realm?

Mickey Hart: I didn’t know what to call it when I was young but I was going into trance when I was alone. I played alone a lot and so it became a meditation and I was definitely moving in and out of trance. Looking back on it now I would play for hours and not eat. I was totally in the zone and that is a sure sign of a trance. That was unconscious. But then when I started playing in the Grateful Dead, I started really seeing the ritual unfold. It was out of control. It was a wondrous thing, going into a new soundscape that no one had ever been to. Well, I had never been to it, nor had anyone else around me. So I figure we were moving into realms of consciousness by taking psychoactive drugs simultaneously and playing for hours and hours. Again, this was a deep trance. People would just lose themselves in the groove and dance for hours and copulate and everything. It was a quite a scene. That also made a big impression on me, seeing a new ritual being born – you know, with white kids on the edge of the Western world.

Then as far as the health part of all this, I saw that music reconnected you with the infinite, vibratory universe when my grandmother had Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t spoken a word in six months and I isolated her once in the car when I taking her somewhere. I just happened to play my tar, my single-membrane tar, for her for about 20 minutes. She was looking at it and all the sudden she spoke my name and I thought, “Wow, this is powerful.” This is somebody who was disconnected from speech, who was motor-impaired saying my name. Then when I stopped, she went back into the darkness. That was a moment for me and I realized that rhythm has to do with life and the giving of life and the taking of life. When the rhythm stops, you’re dead. When the rhythm is good, you live a good life. It also can reconnect some of the connections that are broken in the brain using certain rhythms at certain volumes. It was then that rhythm therapy came into view and the music therapists started appearing. I appeared in front of the Senate in 1990 and testified on the power of rhythm in front of Harry Reid on the Committee for Aging. Harry gave me and Oliver Sacks a million bucks to kick-start music therapy here in the West.

RO: You mentioned in earlier interviews that the Grateful Dead were in the business of transportation. What was your role in transporting your fans and listeners?

Mickey Hart: I made the traps. I was in the engine room. Me and Bill Kreutzmann made that feeling that allowed you to go to those places that laid the foundation for the melody and the harmony and the song.

RO: So in a sense of the word do you and Bill Kreutzmann consider yourselves modern day shamans?

Mickey Hart: You could say that. I would say we’re more “seat-of-the-pants” kind of shamans. But we are practicing the art of shamanism for sure. We’re transporting people into other consciousness and that’s what shaman do. Yeah, we don’t have a license [laughs] but we do it!

RO: In your role of being a transporter, where are you wanting your listeners to “arrive”?

Mickey Hart: It’s certainly a state of bliss, of being centered, of happiness – where you can make sense of everything around you. That’s what consciousness is all about. Everybody has a different consciousness but the idea is to elevate the consciousness to a place where you can feel who you are and how you fit in. That’s what spirituality really is – it’s a tuning system, to tune you and the universe. Part of the universe is the people you live with, the people you love, your children, your self! If you can’t have this feeling within yourself you can’t give it to anyone else.

So it’s a constant maintenance and practice. I play every day to maintain a level that I can share with others. How do you share the precious, invisible feeling of spirit with someone? Well you have to change it into a form. In this case, it’s music; it’s vibratory. The universe is vibratory, you are vibratory, the things you create in culture are vibratory. How these rhythm worlds all work together, that’s the yoga of sound. That’s why music is such a great vehicle. It’s not really about the music, it’s what the music does to you and the feeling it creates in you and what you do with that feeling. Music is important!

If you talk to Michael Jordan, he will tell you that going to the basket and being up there for four or five seconds -- that’s God. He’s in an absolutely perfect, rhythmic entrainment with himself, the people around him and the universe. It doesn’t happen all the time; it only happens in moments. It’s not like you can tune yourself in and stay in this place forever, it’s a constant ebb and flow in and out of these wonderful states of consciousness. But if you don’t go for these moments, then you’re just in the music business and I never thought of myself in the music business. It wasn’t about that. When I went after a groove and the music, it wasn’t necessarily to entertain. When I get lost in it, it might not even be interesting on some levels, it may be self-serving. But I’m trying to create some kind of a feeling that’s relevant to the moment.

You can’t really judge these things in those terms of good or bad, you have to judge them in other ways such as what do they do? Are they positive? Are they negative? Like love, compassion, all those good things are positive. War, hate, racism, murder, people who take more than they give – that’s bad rhythm. Health is good rhythm. Disease means you’re out of rhythm. I’m sure all musicians want to play technically good and so do I, but I try to separate the ritual from the technical. You have to be technically good to create good ritual. These are very gray lines – one person’s spirit is another person’s non-spirit. So this is a very individual thing.

RO: You’ve been exposed to a wide variety of spiritual influences from that found in Indian and African music, to Tibetan monks, to the shamanistic spirituality of Carlos Santana to the mythological and bigger picture spirituality of Joseph Campbell. How would you describe your current spiritual worldview.

Mickey Hart: Well I know who my God is. If there is a Creator, it’s a rhythm. In the vibratory universe, the seed sound is the creation of everything. And in that sound, in that rhythm, you find what some people would call spirituality or the sacred dimension. There was nobody up there that said, “make this [life] happen.” This came out an arrhythmic event 10 billion years ago like I write about in the books. Now I’m really starting to really study the planet and listening to what they say through radio telescopes – making music with the universe. It’s led me back to the seed sound and that’s what I’m exploring now – dealing with the fabric of the universe and how to make contact with it and interact with it intelligently.

RO: Last year we spoke with your friend Zakir Hussain and he went into some details about rituals and cleansing before performing. You say you practice every day to stay in shape, is there anything ritualistic or ceremonial in regards to your warm-ups or preparations to perform that you’d be willing to share with us?

Mickey Hart: Sure. I always feel my heartbeat. I work out in the morning doing my cardio routine and then on the way to the studio (which I go to everyday) I start focusing on me and my heart beat, my rate. Even when I’m walking I feel the pulse. That gives me a place to start. Like as I’m talking to you now, I’m feeling my pulse. It’s something that I refer to from time to time. I always try to start there. I warm up a lot for long periods of time before I actually commit to the drum. I prepare myself and warm up really slow and long. I like taking an hour and half in my warm-up before I really go after a drum.

RO: Let’s talk about 1991’s Planet Drum CD where you convened some the world’s finest percussionists and musicians together. What were your intentions in gathering these particular artists to record that groundbreaking album?

Mickey Hart: I knew them all individually but they didn’t know each other. One night in the middle of the night I popped up and realized that I’m sitting on top of the mountain here. This is the Promised Land. I made the calls and one by one I introduced them to each other. They all showed up, turned on the microphones and let it all pour out. It was certainly musical magic. All the tracks were first takes, one person started playing and the next person related to it. I told them the mission was that we weren’t going for solos, we were going for the deep drumming groove and to entrain. They all could relate to that and that was history. That was really percussive history.

RO: Was it surprising the response the CD received?

Mickey Hart: Not in my world! [laughs] I thought everything we did could sell a million records. No… yes, of course it was. Winning the Grammy and being 26 weeks at #1 and touring and selling hundreds of thousands of CDs was gratifying. It also elevated percussion into a whole new realm where it was respected as an instrument equal to melody and harmony. It was musical.

RO: So you repeated it again this year with your Grammy for Global Drum Project?

Mickey Hart: Yeah, we did it again this year and now we’re working on a new one. That’s what I’ll be doing as soon as finish this interview.

RO: Earlier this year the Tibetan Chants for World Peace album you produced with the Gyoto Monks Tantric Choir was at the top of the Amazon and iTunes charts…

Mickey Hart: [laughs] Yeah, can you imagine that! I thought when that happened, I had seen everything. Here we’ve got a choir of monks from Tibet singing three notes each that is on the top of the charts. I never thought I’d live to see this. It made my day!

RO: What did that experience teach you, bringing the monks into the studio?

Mickey Hart: Well I’ve been doing it since 1987 and it’s rewarding beyond words, sitting there letting the chants wash over you. I think it’s very self-serving on my part. In some ways isolating them and listening to them for hours, having the privilege of being with these wonderful people, turns you into a speck of dust. It puts you in your proper perspective in the universe and is always a thrill. But this one was over the top because they allowed me to overdub themselves on themselves. We created a choir of over 110 or 120 voices. That hasn’t been heard outside the monasteries of Tibet since the 50s because there aren’t that many chanting monks now and they don’t do these giant rituals in Dharamsala, where most of them reside. Any day listening to the chants of the Gyoto Tantric Choir is a good day for me.

RO: Do you believe there’s still music and rhythms on the planet that we haven’t been made aware of yet?

Mickey Hart: There are rhythms being born as we speak - new rhythms being born in places we know of and places we don’t know of. That’s the way of music. That’s the way of things – they either grow and become relevant and serve the community or they die. Yes, there are new rhythms being born constantly and they’re mutations actually. Almost all music on this planet is a mutation or hybrid of something else that came before.

RO: What’s next for you, Mickey?

Mickey Hart: I’m after the sound of the universe, that’s where I’m going now.

www.mickeyhart.net

www.facebook.com/mickeyhart

Special thanks to Rose Soloman and Dennis McNally

Mickey Hart photo by John Werner