On 450 acres of inspiring desert land, embracing the powerful forces of yoga and kirtan [devotional music] together, a transformational community will converge for BHAKTI FEST on September 11-13th, 2009 in Joshua Tree, California.
Bhakti Fest is a three day music and yoga festival of devotional celebration through chanting, yoga, meditation, workshops and community. Bringing together teachers, students, kirtan performers and enthusiasts, eco-conscious businesses and curious explorers of the sacred arts; Bhakti Fest is a cross-section of burgeoning culture and marketplace.
Beginning at 10am on Friday, Kirtan plays around the clock through 10pm on Sunday night with such phenomenal artists as Jai Uttal, Dave Stringer, Donna De Lory, MC Yogi, Wade Morissette, Shayamdas, Suzanne Sterling and WAH!
Also included are yoga classes every two hours from a host of gifted teachers including Shiva Rea, Saul David Raye, Sarah Ivanhoe, Mark Whitwell and Joan White.
Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash on 'Sun Gospel' CD - "It has long been assumed that Sun Records founder Sam Phillips didn't like gospel music because he discouraged his greatest discoveries, including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, from recording spiritual music for his Memphis label in the 1950s. But it turns out Phillips loved gospel music -- he just didn't think he could successfully market it in the mid-1950s when his rock and country records were exploding onto the charts." (latimesblog.com)
The Sacred Elements of Kirtan (with Jai Uttal) - Yoga and chant singer Jai Uttal on "his experience as a kirtan musician and the sacred sounds he brings to the world." (visionmagazine.com)
Celebrity yogi Madonna shares spiritual awakening in Israeli paper - "Celebrity yogi Madonna is revered as a singer, a dancer and a music idol to some, but for today she will also be known Israeli newspaper correspondent, the below article from Contra Costa Times writes." (examiner.com)
Today we bring you three new feature interviews with celebrated artists whose music is very distinct, but who are nonetheless connected by a burning desire to share their joy through music.
"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 As Kindred Spirits (which Jai Uttal calls, "Simply the most wonderful kirtan band in the Western world"). See RockOm's interview with Gaura, An Instrument of God's Peace.
The New York Times says, "Liking Brooklyn Qawwali Party doesn't depend on if you know what Qawwali is. Nor does it depend on how you feel about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, its most revered practitioner. This is an 11-piece band... that piles texture into Mr. Khan's melodies, ultimately transforming them; it's joyous music, and this band adds all the extra fun and funk it knows." Get ready to rocket into musical orbit as we get, High on Sufi Jazz Grooves.
You could say that Sara Watkins' solo debut has been a lifetime in the making. The 27-year-old singer-songwriter, fiddle player and one-third of the Grammy Award winning group Nickel Creek sets out on her own and as you'll discover in her interview with RockOm. Watkins can't quite explain music's ability to bring us all together, she only knows that it does and that music is unavoidable. For Watkins, "Music is everywhere."
We couldn’t let the week go by without briefly mentioning that it’s RockOm’s first anniversary. A year ago we set out with an intention to serve others through music and along the way we discovered something extraordinary - the music we were presenting began serving us, changing us for the better in ways far beyond our wildest expectations.
Our very first interview was with bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs wherein he spoke about the power of music to change people. There is no other force like music that can reach out, create unity among different people and cultures, and heal souls as music does. In that way, music is quite literally prayer. Thousands of years ago prayers were sung so they would be remembered and passed along to future generations. The music we’ve been fortunate enough to present to you over the last year has found its way into our being and has become part of our prayer and our meditation.
We want to thank the many gifted musicians and artists we’ve worked with over the past year. To those artists such as Ricky Skaggs, Zakir Hussain, Abigail Washburn, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Steven Halpern, Futureman (Roy Wooten), Chuck Leavell of The Rolling Stones, Trevor Hall, Jai Uttal, David Newman (Durga Das), the late Ms. Odetta, The Wailers’ Aston "Family Man" Barrett and so many others who have opened their homes and their hearts to us we say thank you. To each of the "break-out" artists we've help introduce in our Featured Track of the Week spot, we say thank you. We also want to acknowledge the support and management as well as the PR people behind the artists who allow us to connect and bring each new feature and interview to you. Finally, we can’t leave out the many guest writers who have lent us their reviews, interviews and stories making for compelling reading on matters of music and spirituality each week. We want to thank our families as well for supporting our many long hours of work and believing in our love of the power of music.
Lastly, we want to thank you - you who are reading these words right now. We created RockOm for you and we hope, perhaps in some small way, you have been blessed and changed for the better through the power of music.
Whether singing the ancient Sanskrit mantras of India, the traditional folklore songs of South America, or performing his original works of divine inspiration, Shimshai's music invokes a sentiment of ancestral devotion and a dedication to higher consciousness. A self-proclaimed seeker of truth, described by many as possessing the voice of an angel, Shimshai is gifted with the innate ability to deliver his message flawlessly in several languages - most profoundly the universal language of Love and Oneness.
All this week, we're pleased to bring you Shimshai, who graciously welcomed our request for his song "Great Mystery" to be this week's RockOm Featured Track of the Week. Hear his song "Great Mystery" on the homepage all week long. Also, be sure to follow the links to his home page where you can find information on Shimshai's upcoming tour up the eastern seaboard. You can pick up his latest album, Alianza at CD Baby.
Surrounded by music from birth and formally trained on piano in his native state of Washington, Shimshai has had the honor of opening for and sharing the stage with such luminaries as Michael Franti, David Grisman, Mickey Hart, Jai Uttal, Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, Bhagavan Das, Dezarie and members of Midnite, Jah Levi, Hamsa Lila, Sasha Butterfly, and many other gifted musicians and visionaries. Shimshai performs effortlessly on guitar, sitar, flute, and a variety of woodwinds. His most recent release, Alianza (2008), is a versatile world fusion studio CD that features multiple languages and ethnic sounds.
Featured Track:
"Great Mystery"
"'Great Mystery' was inspired by Taoist texts where I was exploring the sense of nothingness and emptiness being a profound spiritual fullness. The song embodies the nature of human yearning to comprehend that which is beyond our own understanding yet drives and inspires us to keep searching." (Shimshai)
It's a very Jai Uttal kind of week! Today, March 24th, marks the release of Nutone artist Jai Uttal's excellent new record, Thunder Love. Pick up your copy today!
Hear Jai's "Om Shanti" as our Featured Track of the Week (on the homepage until March 31st)
Jai on dreams, new directions and his latest album, Thunder Love
By Trevor Harden, trevor@rockom.net
In the world of American yoga/kirtan music, a small handful of prominent names rise to the top, one of which is Grammy-nominated musician Jai Uttal. Thunder Love, Jai's latest release (out March 24th on Nutone Records), marks a turning point in his career on both a professional as well as personal level. The album features Jai not only as a vocalist and interpreter of Sanskrit mantras, but also as an English-speaking songwriter and fuses sounds, elements and genres that are new to his ever-widening musical palette.
RockOm: Your musical/spiritual background and Nutone’s founder Terry McBride seem to be a perfect fit. How did you come to find a home at Nutone Records?
Jai: I was hearing about Terry for a while, but the last three albums have been on Sounds True, a smaller label. I’ve been really happy to not have a record deal with a major label as I’ve had very mixed experiences in the past. My relationship with Sounds True was a one-off, distribution deal and it felt really good to not be tied down to any label – to be totally free, totally independent. I was working on Thunder Love and because there was no label I spent a long, long time on it for a variety of reasons. But somewhere toward the end of the process I started to wonder, “What’s going to happen with this album that I’ve spent so much time making? How am I going to put it out?” Around this time I started to hear about Nutone, Terry and Nettwerk records. My first thought was, “Oh I don’t want to be on a label that has every other kirtan singer in the world on it.” I didn’t want to just be another part of the big soup pot. But I started thinking about it more and communicating with Terry and I saw that he’s a really beautiful guy with really good intentions, as well as a really solid [placement] in the marketplace. He’s very experienced and knows what he’s doing. He heard Thunder Love and really liked it and we said let’s do it – it sounds really fun! So far he seems very attentive, very respectful in a way that many people in the music business aren’t. As I’ve researched, I see this has always been his history, his M.O. – being really respectful of the artist.
RockOm: You’ve gone a fresh direction with this album – moving not away from kirtan, but delving more into Americana, roots, Brazilian, and electronic sounds. What inspired you to go this new direction on Thunder Love?
Jai: If I exclude the Sounds True recordings and look at all my Pagan Love Orchestra recordings, I feel like every album has been a pretty new direction but still rooted in the previous album. But on Thunder Love there are some really new elements for sure – one of them being the Brazilian. About nine years ago I met my wife Nubia and I feel like I married into another culture. She’s been drawing me so much into the Brazilian music and it’s been a great journey. Brazilian music is also so much more varied than most of us here in North America are aware. It’s not just bossa nova and samba and stuff. I have been so immersed in Indian music for so long that getting this fusion of this new world of music has been really inspiring to me musically. I started studying and listening, going on lots of trips to Brazil and I started taking Brazilian guitar lessons.
Then [regarding] the Americana side of Thunder Love… my first real, real musical love was old-timey banjo music when I was a teenager. All these years later I still play and love banjo. I don’t do it professionally, which is probably one of the reasons why I love it so much. It has popped up in a lot of my albums, but on Thunder Love I allowed it to come out more. One of the songs, “Down on My Knees,” is a mixture of an old-timey banjo tune with Brazilian rhythms and Tibetan chanting – how fun is that? And the rock, Indian and psychedelic aspects of my music have been there all along.
About five or six years ago, on one of the trips down to Brazil I was doing some shows with the guy who plays tabla and percussion with me. He was so happy and excited about how the Brazilian percussion can work with the Indian percussion. I tried to bring that out on Thunder Love and I think we can expect many more experiments in that realm from me in the future.
This album is also very different than the others in that there is so much [sung in] English. All of my Pagan Love Orchestra albums have one or two English songs, so certainly I continued over the years to be somewhat involved in that realm of songwriting but part of [doing a full album in English] was the feeling comfortable enough inside my own skin to go into a place that was scary – expressing myself with English words. It’s a whole different level of vulnerability and security that I finally felt able to explore. I pray in Sanskrit but the continual facilities of my mind think in English. I’m always writing stuff in English but have always felt a little too insecure to put it into a song. I negatively compare myself to Bob Dylan, John Lennon and everyone in the world – so I just wanted to take a chance. It was a big step; I don’t know if people are going to like it but I’m very happy with it.
RockOm: The album’s first track, “Bhavani Shankara,” uses a lot of these Brazilian sounds and lyrically it seems to speak of being lost in the divine and also the absence of the divine (“where have you gone?”). Can you share about your inspiration for this song?
Jai: My whole life I’ve had nightmares and very difficult sleeping experiences. I spent many years addicted to sleeping pills and thank goodness I’m not anymore. I used to bemoan it – "poor me, poor me, I can never sleep, I’m always having nightmares." Now I try to use this weird phenomena of strange dreams as a kind of self-exploration. It’s obviously my mind telling me something. I got into some dream therapy – and I don’t want to get into that too much right now – but that helped me explore what these dreams were for me. “Bhavani Shankara," and a couple other songs on the album, come out of that dream exploration and that feeling I’m so familiar with of waking up in the morning and feeling lost, alone, and afraid. But very quickly I look at my life and say, “Well, I’m not alone, there’s no reason to be afraid, everthing’s ok.” There’s a deep eternal dichotomy in life with such beauty, fulfillment and gratitude [alongside] this deep loneliness. I don’t know where it comes from – but I also know that in the tradition from India of bhakti or devotion, where all the chanting comes from, that the overlay of the feeling of separation and the feeling of oneness is very much is embraced. The times when you feel alone and stuck in longing are revered as much as the times you feel ecstatic. All of that goes into that song. I’m telling in English about what I’m feeling in my dreams and then offering it all to the Spirit in the Sanskrit prayer part. And also Shankara is called the Lord of Dreams.
RockOm: One of the other songs I wanted to ask you about, since so much of what you do is based on Indian spirituality, is the track “Adonai” (the Hebrew word for God). It sounds like something that could have come right out of the Christian and Jewish Psalms. Can you tell us what led you to write a song from that perspective?
Jai: I guess it was 14 years ago or so that I went on my first trip to Israel to perform. I am Jewish, my family was Jewish and I feel Jewish, although I don’t do many Jewish practices. [While in Israel,] I felt suddenly so connected to this ancient tribe and I composed this song “Shalom” and put it on the album Mondo Rama. I guess I’m a Hin-Jew [laughs]. I don’t feel that connection or participation in Jewish spiritual practices day to day, but I still feel part of it. So the song “Adonai” also came out of one of these dream therapy sessions where I was remembering some dreams based in Nazi Germany – that’s how this song started. But “Adonai,” it’s a beautiful word and [could be considered] just like a kirtan; all kirtan is is repeating the names of God.
By the way, one day before Hanukkah my three-year old boy was in the backseat of the car saying, “Adonai, Adonai, Adonai, Adonai…” It looked like he was in bliss and I asked him what he was doing. He said he was praying to Adonai and I said, “what are you praying for?” He said, “A police car!” [laughs] So that’s what we got him for Hanukkah and he said that Adonai had gotten it for him.
RockOm: Will you be hitting the road in support of the new album?
Jai: I hope so; I always seem to be hitting the road anyway. I want to figure out how to make a concert that is partially kirtan - because firstly I just love kirtan and secondly I love the way it brings the audience in, suddenly there’s no audience - but also present some of the songs from Thunder Love, which is more of an audience/performer type of thing. That’s the next challenge.
The kirtan thing is so amazing, going around the world, around the country. In doing kirtan the concert presentation is very simple – it’s usually just me and a tabla player. Just seeing how the group energy of the kirtan explodes – it’s so great and yet it’s not the only thing I do musically, of course. The album [now] gives me a chance to really explore some other musical sounds. So we’ll see how the gigs in the next few years evolve!
We couldn’t let the week go by without briefly mentioning that it’s RockOm’s first anniversary. A year ago we set out with an intention to serve others through music and along the way we discovered something extraordinary - the music we were presenting began serving us, changing us for the better in ways far beyond our wildest expectations.
In the world of American yoga/kirtan music, a small handful of prominent names rise to the top, one of which is Grammy-nominated musician Jai Uttal. Thunder Love, Jai's latest release (out March 24th on Nutone Records), marks a turning point in his career on both a professional as well as personal level. The album features Jai not only as a vocalist and interpreter of Sanskrit mantras, but also as an English-speaking songwriter and fuses sounds, elements and genres that are new to his ever-widening musical palette.
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