A Spiritual Practice

(I read this great article on www.grammy.com about Kirtan – they interviewed GuruGanesha for the article.  Very cool!  Check it out!  – Karan)

Yoga’s music movement is gaining popularity while broadening horizons and sales

This article taken from GRAMMY.com
Alan di Perna

While many sectors of the music industry are learning to live with decreased sales and diminished expectations, one niche music market that’s remarkably robust is the growing yoga/chant genre. The expanding popularity of this genre is directly tied to the explosion of hatha yoga over the past decade, with yoga studios springing up in a number of cities across the United States and Europe.

“It’s part of a whole cultural movement that includes yoga, meditation, devotional chanting, and ayurveda [traditional Indian medicine],” says Bette Timm, head of alternative music retail promotion company Bette Timm Marketing.

As a product of the yoga and spirituality boom, leading chant artists such as Krishna Das and Deva Premal are enjoying album and concert sales rivaling artists in more mainstream genres.

Deva Premal

“Deva Premal has sold, between her four albums, over 750,000 units, which is not something to sneeze at in anybody’s world,” says Parmita Pushman, owner of White Swan Records, the label that released Premal’s second album in 2001. “The highest-selling Deva Premal album is her first one [on White Swan], The Essence, which at this point has sold about 300,000 units. And I imagine Krishna Das is up in the same numbers. With all the problems in the music industry, and with so many segments of the industry going down, this is one market that has been immune to that.”

The music performed by these artists is largely based on kirtan, an ancient Indian form of rhythmic call-and-response devotional chanting that creates an ecstatically meditative mood. While the paradigm is ancient and South Asian, some of the genre’s top performers express the mantras while drawing upon other musical styles. Das sticks close to the Indian tradition and also incorporates the harmonium, African percussion and electronic influences, while Premal employs ambient New Age style synths in her music. Jai Uttal, a GRAMMY-nominated kirtan artist, explores Brazilian rhythms on his latest album, Thunder Love, and MC Yogi has created a sensation by setting mantras to hip-hop grooves on his debut album, Elephant Power.

With the genre infusing a variety of musical textures, the audience has reflected both baby boomers and a younger demographic. “I go to a concert by Krishna Das or Deva Premal and half the audience is the older spiritual crowd,” says Terry McBride of NuTone Music, a label specializing in the yoga/chant genre. “But the other half are people who have heard this music in a yoga studio and they’re all 25 to 40 and about 80 percent female.”

Yoga studios are an important component to the genre. “When my partner and I started White Swan in 1991, yoga studios weren’t really playing music,” says Pushman. “Yoga teachers have become the radio stations for this music. They’re the DJs. And that provides a vital way to reach listeners, which is one thing that more mainstream labels lack these days.”

Yoga/chant CDs are also sold at other non-traditional outlets such as New Age stores and gift shops at meditation or spiritual centers. “The problem is that a lot of the sales don’t go through [Nielsen] SoundScan,” says Pushman. “So they get short shrift on the music industry’s radar.” And while digital sales are up across genres worldwide, CDs are still a major focus for the yoga/chant genre. “People aren’t buying the music for one song they love, but rather for an experience that fits their life, such as a yoga class or meditation,” says Pushman. “So they tend to buy whole albums and they tend to actually like buying CDs.”

Compared with pop music, “kirtan music clearly has a longer shelf life,” adds GuruGanesha Singh, founder of the Spirit Voyage label and manager of Spirit Voyage’s flagship artist Snatam Kaur. “As an artist like Snatam Kaur gets embraced by more and more people around the world, they’re going back and buying the whole discography. It’s not likely to go in and out of style.”

Live performance also plays a key role in CD sales. “I really see a huge difference between the artists who are touring and the ones who aren’t,” says Timm. “It’s really hard to sell CDs if an artist is not touring. Whereas those who are out touring consistently and have been doing it for a while are doing great.”

“We’re seeing consistent increases in attendance at concerts, especially over the last eight to 10 years,” says Singh. “We’ve been averaging audiences of maybe 300 to 400 in the U.S., 400 to 600 in Canada and 600 to 1,000 or more in Europe.”

The involvement of Nutone Music’s Terry McBride is a development that may help catapult the genre to a new level. As CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, architect of Lilith Fair and an instrumental force in launching the careers of artists such as Sarah McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies, McBride began attending yoga classes a few years back and became an avid yoga practitioner. He revived Nettwerk’s defunct world music imprint NuTone in 2008 as a new outlet for yoga/chant music, signing artists such as Bhagavan Das, Donna De Lory, Wade Imre Morissette, David Newman, Uttal, and Wah!

“What I see missing and what I’m going to work on over the next couple of years is a more mainstream touring circuit for this music,” says McBride. “We’re going to market this music in ways that it hasn’t been marketed yet.”

Perhaps his most adventurous plan is to create a Lilith Fair-style festival based around mantra music, yoga and wellness. “The initial thought for this would be sort of a half-day festival, like from noon till 10 at night,” he says. “It would combine spiritual music — someone like Krishna Das or Deva [Premal] — with a more mainstream musical artist like Michael Franti. And that would be combined with sessions led by some of the more well-known yoga teachers. The whole thing would be something that resonates with what today’s society is looking for, because there will be a lot of people coming to these events searching for something. And I’d love for them to find it.”

For all the artists involved, kirtan is a spiritual practice first, and a profession second. Newcomers should realize that it is by no means a fast track to stardom.

“Unfortunately some people do try to get on the bandwagon,” says Timm, “but it’s not really what’s in their hearts so it doesn’t have the right essence. But I think the music itself tends to weed those people out.”

So while the market for this genre will continue to grow in the future, it will most likely do so on its own terms. “You can’t force a flower to bloom any faster than it’s going to bloom,” says Singh. “It feels to me that this genre will grow at a slow and steady pace, like a good spiritual practice. We’re in it for the long term.”

(Alan di Perna has been writing about music for more than 20 years and is currently west coast editor of Guitar World magazine.)

Feeling Good Today Pizza Party with Snatam Kaur

Taken from Snatam’s Blog: http://snatamkaur.blogspot.com/

Recently we went to LA to record for our new (as of yet to be named) album which is planned for release in May. This gave us the opportunity to meet the very talented and beautiful children who sang on our new CD for children called “Feeling Good Today”… to be released in just a few weeks!!! Krishan, our producer, recorded all of the children out of his studio while we were on tour. I actually didn’t know most of the kids before the recording. We reached out to the Kundalini Yoga and Sikh community in LA, and were blessed to find these kids! When Krishan sent us the first mixes and I got to hear the children sing, I was really struck by the joy and purity in their voices which gives the album so much life and love!! So the pizza party was an opportunity to meet them in person, and in some small way say thank you to the kids and their parents. Not all of the kids could make it however. So, here are some of our stars.
From left to right, bottom row of kids: Siri Guru Dev, Antonia, Cynthia
From left to right, top row of adults: Simran and Guru Prem (Siri Guru Dev’s parents), Anabela (Antonia’s mom), Sarah (Cynthia’s mom), yours truly, Krishan (our producer)

Our goofy shot… you gotta have at least one of those, right?

From left to right: Angelo, Leo, yours truly, and Antonia

Here are some more pictures of our time in LA.

While in LA, we got to stay a few doors down from Guru Ram Das Ashram, where I have for many years received musical and spiritual inspiration. This year was very beautiful. Not only did I feel the presence of God in this sacred place, but felt like I was bringing our baby in womb to be blessed. Here’s a picture of Guru Ram Das ashram, one of my favorite views, that often comes to me in meditations. If you ever want to visit the address is 1644 Preuss Rd in West Los Angeles, and the phone is 310-858-7691… someone always answers.

Here’s a picture of GuruGanesha recording his beautiful guitar. Yes, for all of those GuruGanesha fans out there… we are blessed to have the warmth and joy of his guitar and voice on the yet to be named album. We could call it “To be Named”. How about that? And by the way, if you live on the East Coast of the US and Canada, he’ll be on tour with an incredible band in just a few weeks. Check out www.spiritvoyage.com for more details!

Thomas, who is producing “To be Named”, is seen here talking to GuruGanesha, as GuruGanesha is recording in the sound booth the next room over.

Here I am singing, with the soul of my baby in womb very present. Sometimes there would be little kicks and movements, and other times just a pure feeling of presence, confidence, purity and love. I am grateful to this beautiful soul who chose us at this time.

- Snatam Kaur

Snatam Kaur shares her DVD filming experience

Snatam Kaur filming 'Feeling Good' with little yogis

Source: Snatam’s Blog: http://www.snatamkaur.com/web8.html
Here’s a good combination. Pregnant, and making a children’s yoga DVD. And yes, that was me a few weeks ago. Every time I wanted to complain I just had to look at the Director of the film, Alessandra, who is about two days more pregnant then I! We weren’t quite at the waddling stage… but close enough. I still can’t believe there is a point when you can’t see your feet when you are walking. Anyway… back to the DVD….

To give you a little background, this DVD is a combination of a yoga class, a story, and songs set to celestial communication. For those of you who haven’t heard of celestial communication, this is a kind of dance to bring emphasis to the words of a song, and incorporate the energy into the body, and in this way “communicate” with God, the angels, and divine energy. In a way, this combination of story, yoga, and movement is how I grew up doing yoga. My spiritual teacher once said that children’s yoga should be first and foremost fun. As you’ll see in the DVD we have some pretty ridiculous moments.

As we toured around the country these past seven years, children kept coming to our concerts. We would invite them up on stage to sing with us at times, because they just were so cute and beautiful. I admit it, I couldn’t resist. Pretty soon, I began to realize how much the kids were connecting with the spirit in the music, so we developed a whole children’s yoga program to give them a more direct experience of that spirit. We delivered this program all over the world, and so we decided to make a DVD out of it for kids that couldn’t make it to our programs.

We looked around our home town of Espanola and neighboring Santa Fe to find children to be in our DVD. Fortunately, the kids who came to do the video were in top form on the day of filming. A few days before the filming, we had a set of rehearsals with the kids. Mind you, I believe (in my haven’t really experienced being a mom sort of way) that we had very good children. But, it was the combination of probably our adult nerves, and the sheer fun of being kids, that created a slightly unruly rehearsal situation. We quickly realized that the sheepskins for the yoga class would become airborne on the day of the filming if we didn’t tape them down. Already, one boy had a dirt mark on his nice white yoga pants after only wearing them for 5 minutes for our fitting. My niece Siri Atma was doing the Def Leppard hand symbol (we think it came from her father) during the celestial communication for the song “I am Happy, I am Good”. At one point I told myself “At least the kids were bonding and having a good time”… as all of the children were on the floor in a massive wrestling pile completely ignoring my adult implorations to have them come sitting up to do more yoga.

The night before the filming, I earnestly looked at my husband over dinner and said, “We should probably reschedule everything, give a few more weeks to practice with the children.” I know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this… you probably would just like to see the finished DVD and just see it as a yoga class. But, hey, I thought I’d take you behind the scenes… get a little personal with it.

Anyway, my husband looked at me with his big blue eyes, and said with all of the confidence that I wish I had, “the kids will be fine, you’ll see.”

On the day of the filming, the crew showed up, and set up the lights and cameras. The kids arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and let me just say it was a new day. They walked in with all of the confidence and calm that I had imagined that they would have all of these months in preparation, and we began filming. We went through each posture, and celestial communication movement, sometimes more then once, and the children were beautiful. I couldn’t believe it… that’s why in the video I’m smiling so much… it really was because of the children… and maybe because I’m pregnant. Alessandra, in her very cheerful yet authoritative voice led us through the whole day. We finally let the children go that evening, after awarding them with special crystals.

Currently, our music producer, Krishan, is working in LA to create the final music mixes. We have some very talented children singers that came into his studio to sing. We also have an illustrator working on some amazing illustrations for the story. I can’t really tell you any more then this… top secret stuff. No just kidding. But, look out for our new DVD which plan to release this October.

Sat Nam!

Yoga Living Series: Meditative Moon – A Review in LA Yoga

Meditative Moon
by Spirit Voyage Artists
A Review by Michael R. Mollura

Meditative Moon is a compilation of some of the finest kirtan chanters living with us at this time. The album was put together under the consultation of yoga teachers, healers and musicians with the intention of producing what could be the ultimate taste of bhakti devotional music.

Starting with Mirabai Ceiba’s exquisite Kundalini “Guru Ram Das,” and Snatam Kaur’s “Ek Ong Kar,” the journey lays down the blanket and closes our eyes while opening our hearts to all that is possible. Dave Stringer & Donna Delory’s ‘Gunghata’ keeps the music flowing through our hearts and the energy soars with soft, peaceful and unconditional energy that is more than just healing.

I applaud Spirit Voyage for this collection, not only because of the artists they chose, but because the energy feels so complete and consistent. They didn’t just choose any chants, the label selected compositions that blend into one another seamlessly. Also included on this disc are Thomas Barquee, Amrit Kirtan, GuruGanesha Singh, Manish Vyas and Sat Kartar.

For yogis familiar with chanting, the overall feel of teh album is undeniably Kundalini driven. The texture is delicate, clean, acoustic and soothing. I highly recommend this collection of chants to everyone who enjoys classic chanting music that is so melodic it feels like you’re sailing right into the sun itself.

Michael Mollura is a writer, sacred music musician, event producer and keeper of the bhakti flame. michaelmollura@gmail.com

Snatam Kaur in Mystic Pop Magazine

A Prevailing Peace
by Naila Francis
Source: Mystic Pop Magazine: http://www.mysticpopmagazine.com/newsite/July-aug08/page40july-aug.html

It’s an experience Snatam Kaur offers in her music — and embodies in her life.

She is one of the world’s most beloved New Age artists, performing at more than 100 venues from across the U.S. and South America to Asia and Europe each year, and selling more than 50,000 albums annually, all of them retaining an impressive perennial hold on the Top 20 lists of New Age Retailers.

Yet Snatam Kaur, chant artist and peace ambassador, takes little credit for her success. That the music she performs, a blend of traditional Sikh mantras and contemporary sacred songs, has profoundly affected thousands who’ve heard her — one, a veteran of the Iraq war, wrote to Kaur confessing that it was through her music that she was first able to cry over her experiences — she attributes to a power well beyond her talents.

“Our music is dedicated to opening the heart and healing and giving people the opportunity to sing and to pray for peace on the planet,” says Kaur, who performs her Celebrate Peace concerts with guitarist and vocalist GuruGanesha Singh, master tabla player and composer Manish Vyas and multi-instrumentalist Ram Daas Singh. “The experience of praying for peace has very, very deep effects. When that prayer comes from your heart, you not only feel its energy in what you’re praying for, but you heal yourself in the wake of the wave.

“It’s completely within the sacred chants and I know that,” she says of the presence that seems to pierce right through the heart of listeners and connect them with the Divine. “That’s why I keep very humble. I keep my head bowed.

“There’s a real magic that happens when we chant these words and I don’t question it anymore. At times I’ll sing the translations or be inspired to sing lyrics that relate to the translation, but for the most part I just let the sacred chants do their work. It’s kind of a medicine balm, a healing balm. I believe that we bring these sacred chants to life when we sing them and that these chants have lived for thousands of years before me and will continue to live for years after that.”

Kaur, who was raised in Trinidad, Colo., and Bolinas, Calif., grew up in the Sikh lifestyle, practicing yoga, meditation and chanting from a young child and studying with the late Yogi Bhajan, renowned for introducing Sikhism and Kundalini yoga to the West. It was Bhajan, in fact, moved to tears after hearing Kaur sing when she was 18, who encouraged her to continue spreading the Sikh teachings and lifestyle through music. Yet for Kaur, the chants she grew up with were such a natural part of her every day that she never considered sharing them as a career, even though she also studied music, taking up classical violin in school and teaching herself guitar.

“I was fortunate to grow up in a household where my mom sang the Sikh chants every day. So I grew to know that hearing and listening and saying the sacred chants would bring me joy and I grew to know that when there were times of challenge, I could go to those sacred chants for healing,” she says.

A trip to the Golden Temple, the spiritual and cultural center of the Sikh religion, in Amritsar, India, when she was just six years old reinforced those beliefs.

“Growing up in America, I went to public schools and generally I was the only Sikh child in the whole school but through these experiences of going to India and listening to the sacred music and just feeling the heart and the warmth of the people and learning about the Sikh history, I gained a real sense of my identity,” she says.

Since her father served as the manager for the Grateful Dead for several years, music remained an influential part of her upbringing beyond the Sikh tradition. She even wrote and performed a song, “Save Our Earth,” with the help of the Dead’s Bob Weir, at an Earth Day concert in San Francisco before thousands while still a teen. But with her intentions set on a career in health care, Kaur got her degree in biochemistry and landed a job as a food technologist with the Oregon-based Peace Cereal after college. Inspired by her commitment to bring the practices of her tradition to others outside of her work and by her voice — Kaur would often sing on the factory floor — the company’s management encouraged her to embark on a recording career.

For Kaur, the process of making her first album, “Prem,” a collection of chants inspired by the sacred writings of the Sikhs on the experience of love, proved transformational.

“It was a really powerful time in my life because I realized how important it is to love yourself and to have that inner connection of love for your own soul and for the light of divinity that is within each of us,” she says. “When I got into the studio and experienced making music, it was very, very healing for me on a personal level and I just had an aha moment, an inner discovery of ‘Wow, this is something I could give to other people because of the great gifts they had given to me.”

Today, Kaur, who lives in New Mexico with her husband, serves as an ambassador for the United Nations affiliate 3HO (the Healthy Happy Holy Organization) and spends much of the year on the road doing concerts and workshops.

Her music is a stirring blend of Eastern and Western influences that both soothes and uplifts, her crystalline vocals evoking a radiant purity of heart and spirit, while her words, whether sung in Gurumukhi, the sacred language of the Sikhs, or English, resonate with the possibilities of a life of greater peace, love and devotion. Her CDs, which include “Anand,” “Grace” and the latest “Live in Concert,” are intended, she says, to allow audiences to continue that inner awakening and celebration of divinity experienced at her performances.
“I really believe in the power of people singing and singing positive affirmations. Essentially that’s what we share with people, through the music and through our prayer for peace. And it’s with those positive self-affirmations,” she says, “that we become agents of change.”

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Naila Francis is an editor and writer with a Philadelphia area daily newspaper and an ordained interfaith minister.

Get all of Snatam Kaur’s music at Spirit Voyage Music

Snatam Kaur in The Intelligencer

The Promise of Peace
By Nalia Francis

Click to See the Printed Version

There are those who advocate peace and those who embody it. Chant artist Snatam (sun-ah-tum) Kaur is among the latter, her petite frame exuding a lucent serenity, her words, measured and earnest in conversation, emanating from a contemplative depth.

A singer of both traditional Sikh mantras and contemporary sacred music, Kaur travels the globe offering kirtan concerts and workshops — the call-and-response chanting rooted in Renaissance India — as well as yoga and meditation classes. An ambassador for the United Nations affiliate 3HO (the Healthy Happy Holy Organization)­, which encourages a healthier, more vibrant lifestyle through Kundalini yoga, meditation, a vegetarian diet and a philosophy of compassion, she even includes some of those exercises in her concerts.

So when this former food technologist brings her Celebrate Peace Tour to the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia on Saturday — including her band of sacred music icon GuruGanesha Singh on guitar and vocals, tabla maestro and composer Manish Vyas and multi-instrumentali­st Ram Dass Singh on vocals, clarinet and piano — audiences should expect more of an experience than a performance.

“Each concert that we do is a prayer for peace,” says Kaur. “We’re so impacted by the general media and by the daily stress of our lives that we don’t give ourselves those quiet moments or those moments of prayer.

“My feeling is that every single moment that we in our lives and in our minds have a vibration of peace, that is affecting the planet around us and that our collective way of thinking and existing has created the reality that we live in today. Maybe it’s harder to measure, harder to see, but I feel it’s really, really important and powerful to have inner peace.

“It’s such an important mission and I see a lot of other people starting to realize that, even though they’re working for Greenpeace or are working in Darfur or working in a homeless soup kitchen, that
we’ve all got to have that inner vibration of peace because that’s really what spreads and that’s really what will help us to change the vibration of the planet so we can make more conscious decisions as
builders, more conscious decisions as consumers, more conscious decisions as neighbors and friends. That’s really the work that we’re doing.”

It matters not that most of the chants are sung in Sanskrit, passed down from gurus in the Sikh tradition, taken from ancient texts or learned from her own late teacher Yogi Bhajan, renowned for promoting Sikhism in the West. Set against buoyant rhythms and mellifluous layers of sound, with Kaur’s crystalline vocals occasionally weaving in devotional lyrics in English — she also plays harmonium, violin and guitar — the chants brim with a quiet, though infectious, joy.

“I believe that we bring these sacred chants to life when we sing them. These chants have lived for thousands of years before me and will continue to live for years after that. There’s a real magic that
happens when we chant these words and I don’t question it anymore,” says Kaur, 35. “It’s kind of a medicine balm, a healing balm. They come from the yogic meditative tradition where the idea is you can sit down and chant these sacred words and be healed.”

She points to a letter received from a veteran of the Iraq war as an example of their inherent power.

“It was from a woman and she said, “I finally came back from Iraq and when I listened to your music, it was the first time that I could cry and begin to heal from what I had been through.’ For people who
haven’t been exposed to our music, our music is dedicated to opening the heart and giving people the opportunity to sing and to pray for peace on the planet,” says Kaur. “We believe that the power of prayer is the greatest power we have as human beings.”

Hailing from Trinidad, Colo., and later Bolinas, Calif., she was raised in a family that practiced yoga, meditation and chanting as part of the Sikh lifestyle. Kaur even traveled to India at age 6 where she met one of the master chanters at the Golden Temple in Amritsar and later returned there to study with him. But her musical exposure extended well beyond the sacred, especially since her father for several years served as manager for the Grateful Dead.

Click to See Page 2

“I got to go backstage before I really knew what they were all about. I wasn’t so much into the music but they had great candy bars back there,” recalls Kaur, who also studied violin and played in her high
school orchestra. “Today in our concerts, we do a lot of improvisational musical interludes and a lot of that comes from my inspiration of hearing the Grateful Dead.”

A budding songwriter as a youth, she performed her song “Save Our Earth” at an Earth Day concert in San Francisco before thousands, the Dead’s Bob Weir shepherding the project. Still, Kaur planned on a
career in health care, and with a degree in biochemistry, landed a job formulating cereal flavors — “behind every cornflake, there’s five Ph.D.’s,” she jokes — for the Oregon-based Peace Cereal company after college. Her singing on the job, however, inspired the management to support and serve as an early sponsor of her recording and performing career. Today, she enjoys international appeal as a New Age artist, her albums, which include “Live in Concert,” “Anand” and “Grace,”
selling by the thousands each year.

“When I started on my first tour, I wasn’t sure if this was the right thing,” says Kaur, who lives in New Mexico with her husband Sopurkh Singh Khalsa, now touring with her for the first time as her road
manager. “In the past couple of years, I really feel that I am answering an inner calling and really doing the work that I’m meant to do.

“My name is Snatam, which means “universal,’ and I always learned that your name is something to live up to, to live by, so I’ve been really inspired to reach out to people of different faiths, different paths
and different cultures. … For me, my bottom line is whatever opens the heart and gets people to sing, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Sound Stage appears every Tuesday. Naila Francis can be reached at (215) 345-3149 or nfrancis@phillyBurb­s.com

Click here to see all of Snatam Kaur’s Music