≡ Menu

Five for the Ride: Car Kirtan (Use with Caution)

by on February 7, 2012
Share

Who shall we take along on the ride today?

You know when you’ve got one of those seemingly endless drives ahead of you?  Four, five, six hours in the car with nothing to do but drive drive drive?  Well, silence may be golden, but throw in a couple bhakti-rockin’ CD’s and the miles will just flyyyy by.  Trust us.

Having just endured a 6-hour drive home from Cape Cod, we know this.  I was about to crawl out of my skin from sheer boredom when I discovered Om Spun (the latest release from Wynne Paris’ all-star band Groovananda) in a crevice of my car and popped it into the CD player.  Immediately I started bopping and singing along with the gospel-infused chants and multi-layered instrumentalism.  I was grooving to Groovananda and loving life.  And apparently, driving faster.

Suddenly, there were blue lights flashing in my rear-view.  Talk about a buzz-kill.

“Is there any particular reason you were speeding, Ma’am?” the baby-faced rookie officer asked me in that official, you’re-busted tone.  Me: “um, uh….”  I thought about taking out the CD and handing it to him, but didn’t know how that would go over.  Plus, I still had three hours to go — I needed that CD!

I’m thinking that there are a lot of kirtan CD’s that need to come with a warning label like this one from Krishna Das’s Chants of a Lifetime CD:

Caution: This CD features chants that render it inappropriate for use while driving or operating heavy machinery.

Warning label or not, here are a few of our favorites for car kirtan.  Please use with caution.

Five for the Ride

1. Om Spun, by Groovananda.  This is “raga rock kirtan,” brilliantly fusing world beat, jam-band, rock, jazz, kirtan, folk, Indian, trance and gospel. Whew!  Featuring Wynne Paris on vocals and sarod, Rick Allen on drums, JT John Thomas on organ and Doug Derryberry (Bruce Hornsby band) on mandalin, plus Mark Karan, Krishna Das, Badal Roy, Perry Robinson, Girish Cruden, Dave Stringer, Kim Waters (Rasa), Ramesh Kannan and many others. (2011) Get it here.

2. This IS Soul Kirtan, by C.C. White.  By now everyone’s got this on their playlist, right? C.C. White’s debut solo album is a sweet, rollicking joy ride of classic chants reinvented with a Southern Gospel and soul-shaking exuberance.  I’m in love with the reggae-style Hare Krishna maha mantra punctuated by a deep, thunderous — and alltogether too brief! — Krishna rap by Bob Wisdom.  Chills.  Every time.  Co-produced with Matt Pszonak, with Patrick Richey, Denise Kaufman, Cooper Madison, Steve Postell, Richard Hardy, Michael Jerome Moore, Jeff Young, Arjuna O’Neal, Vasu Dudakia, more special guests and the Soul Kirtan Choir. (2011) Listen & buy here. 

3. Thunder Love, by Jai Uttal.  Queen of Hearts, Jai’s reggae-kirtan CD released last fall, would easily fit the bill here too.  But Thunder Love, released in 2008, has occupied one of the slots on my car CD changer since I bought the disc.  Jai’s trademark heart-soaring vocals will make you forget you’re stuck in a car and take you right with him into the inner chambers of the heart.  Please, put it on cruise control before Bolo Ram (Track 2) comes on…Produced by Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach for Nutone Records.  Get it here.

4. Love Holding Love, by Wah!  Of all the Wah! albums I love, I love this one the most.  (Of course, I haven’t heard Loops and Grooves yet, which is due out any day now.)  Maybe it’s the chill, almost trancey lounge feel, or the heart-pumping electronica beats, or the soft-rap riffs of love-centric lyrics that never fail to remind me that it’s all love baby, even if you’re stuck in the worst traffic this side of the 405.  It holds a near-permanent slot in the Baja’s player.  A two-year collaboration with Paul Hollman, with guest artists that include Elijah Tucker (drums), Katisse Buckingham (vocal percussion, flute), Ryan Pate (drums), produced for Nutone. (2008)  Get it here.

5. Live Your Love, by SRI Kirtan.  Make sure you’re buckled in when this one cues up; it sweeps you up in Track 1 with a hard-rocking Govinda/Hare Krishna medley and carries you on that current of bhakti love right through the duo’s signature Rock the Bhakti and on to the final track, a joyous tribute to the sacred Ganges River.  SRI Kirtan is the fusion of Sruti Ram and Ishwari, whose collective musical background spans punk, opera, Gregorian chant, electronica and doo-wop.  It shows.  With Steve Gorn on bansuri flute, Visvamhar from the Mayapuris on mrdanga, the sacred-rap genius of SriKala Kerel Roach , Charlie “Govind” Burnham on violin, Noah Hoffeld on cello, Kyle Esposito on bass and electiric guitar, and Curtis Bahn on dilruba and sitar. Co-produced with Julie Last for Mantrology/Ishwari Music. (2010)  More info here.

That’s our Five for the Ride today.  What’s playing in your car?

(Oh, and the baby-faced rookie cop?  He let me off with a warning.  Maybe it was the music…)

Share
{ 9 comments }

Amazing Grace by Krishna Das after Bhakti Fest Rain-Out

by on September 21, 2011
Share

Sanctuary from the storm

It must have taken amazing grace to pull off what Krishna Das accomplished on Saturday night of Bhakti Fest.

Rained out of the main stage by a rare desert thunderstorm that began at exactly the moment he was sitting down at his harmonium, his set was reconvened in the Joshua Tree Retreat Center’s sanctuary hours later, near midnight. Everyone who had converged for the headline act of the weekend — a thousand? two thousand? — were now jammed inside a sweltering, airless room designed to hold 500.

It was hot. It was late. Some of us had been up for three days straight. Personal space was at a premium, even for KD and his band. Dozens of artists and Bhakti Fest bigwigs, who would normally have been seated back-stage, were huddled around and behind the stage. Deepak Ramapriyan and MC Yogi had the best seats in the house, tucked into alcoves above the alter on which Krishna Das played.

Their view must have looked something like this picture snapped by Kimo Estores, guitarist for Larisa Stow and Shakti Tribe (actually, five photos brilliantly stitched together in Photoshop):

Later in the set, when MC Yogi left to get ready for his own performance following KD, CC White climbed into the perch next to Deepak. The two together — she in her signature red turban and he in his signature shirtlessness — looked every bit like kirtan royalty gazing with adoration upon the kingdom’s most favored musician.

But I digress. The real king of this night was KD, who delivered what the people came to experience: classic Krishna Das, just like you hear from the CD in your car stereo. Except in this case there were a couple thousand bhaktas gyrating along. It was a pretty standard set (based on my experience having chanted with him 30 or so times), and was delivered in substandard conditions, but somehow the end result was very super-standard. He would begin each chant low and prayerful, just like always, slowly upping the tempo bit by bit with a nod to Arjun Bruggeman to kick those tablas up a notch. But this night he seemed to take every song a notch or two beyond usual, as if feeding on the energy of the swarm before him and sending it right back to them, times 108. A 30-minute-long Hare Krishna Maha Mantra went right over the top when Grammy-nominated David Nichtern laid into a guitar riff that whipped the crowd into an ecstatic frenzy. If you weren’t dancing by then, you might as well have been in bed. (Or maybe you were deep in Samadhi…)

Despite the hour, the lightning storm wash-out, the oppressive heat and the over-stuffed space, Krishna Das proved again that he can flow through just about anything with the grace of a guru.

Maybe that’s why, on Sunday afternoon, in a much less crowded, much cooler workshop in the same sanctuary space, KD broke out spontaneously into a verse of Amazing Grace toward the end of a sweet rolling Maha Mantra. Play this all the way through to hear it…

mmmm…how sweet the sound!

Share
{ 7 comments }

This site rocks the Classic Responsive Skin for Thesis.

WP Admin