Spirit Voyage

Snatam Kaur was introduced to music and spiritual practice at an early age. Schooled in kirtan, meditation, and Gurmukhi, the Sanskrit-based language of Sikh scriptures from Northern India, the young Snatam Kaur began to develop the devotion and skills that have grown and blossomed into a compelling, profound talent.

Snatam Kaur's parents brought her up in the Sikh tradition as taught by Yogi Bhajan. From an early age, she practiced yoga and meditation daily and her mother taught her Gurmukhi. "My mother taught me the alphabet on my way to school every morning," recalls Snatam. Her Sikh community augmented these lessons with instruction in kirtan (devotional chanting). "Through these experiences, I learned the pronunciation," she says, "but also I learned the passion for what I was singing because these gatherings were so spiritual."

As a child, Snatam also had training in voice, violin, guitar, and percussion. She obtained a solid foundation in Western classical music while playing violin in an orchestra and giving solo performances. Her many opportunities to use and expand her musical talent in a spiritual setting emphasized for her the connection between her music and spirituality. "I learned about the importance of sound currents from Yogi Bhajan," she says, "but I also had the personal experience of how the energy of these sacred words can have a very real, positive effect."

Snatam further explored the power of sound in India. After high school, her love for the Indian musical tradition and for children took her to Miri Piri Academy, a boarding school for children in India. She spent time taking care of the young children, teaching physical education, and providing music for the children's morning and evening chanting. When she returned to the United States, she attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she obtained a degree in biochemistry, taught yoga classes, and shared her chants with Western audiences. But India called her back. After touring and performing Kirtan in northern India, Snatam settled in Amritsar where she studied music with the accomplished ragi (Indian master of Sikh-style kirtan) Bhai Hari Singh. This was a great honor for her, and particularly meaningful because Singh was the same teacher who had taught her mother when she was just a little girl.

Snatam embraced everything that Singh taught her, from the technical aspects of the notes, to the ability to sing with presence and awareness. The lessons took place in Singh's home, where Snatam was welcomed by the entire family--daughters, sons, and grandchildren.

While in Amritsar, Snatam lived next door to the Golden Temple, considered the world's holiest Sikh temple. Sacred music resonates from inside the temple from about 2:30 in the morning to midnight every day-sounds created by world-class masters of Sikh kirtan. This enabled Snatam to continually soak in the essence of the Sound Current.

Upon returning to the US from India, Snatam began her career as a recording artist with a band called the Peace Family. She served as the band's lead singer and, with two skilled and accomplished musicians - Livtar Singh and GuruGanesha Singh, had her first opportunity to write songs. Two years later she began to develop her own sound and style and embarked on a very fruitful solo career.

Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, 60, is the co-founder and director of Golden Bridge Nite Moon, Los Angeles' premier center for the study and practice of Kundalini Yoga and meditation. Since being baptized 32 years ago with the Sikh spiritual name meaning "One who helps people across the world ocean", Gurmukh has dedicated her life to fulfilling that responsibility.

For nearly three decades students in Los Angeles and around the world have sought her classes in Kundalini yoga, meditation, and pre- and post-natal care. Her video series, The Method: Pre and Post Natal Yoga, features in numerous publications such as Vogue, Elle, InStyle, the New York Times, and appearances on Good Morning America have introduced Gurmukh to a wide audience and to the vast, ancient teachings of the yogic tradition. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Eight Human Talents: The Yogic Way to Restoring the Natural Balance of Serenity Within You (Harper Collins, 2000).

Gurmukh is also a founding member of Khalsa Way, an organization created not only to offer Kundalini yoga but also to help people deliver and rear healthy children, as well as find success in their careers and relationships. She has been married for 21 years and has a 19-year-old daughter who attends school in India, where Gurmukh returns every year to teach and study.

GuruGanesha Singh is an icon of the yoga music genre. A musician deeply devoted to both his craft and the greater landscape of sacred sound, GuruGanesha's contribution to World Sacred Music is manifold. His three solo releases of Sikh-inspired chant music enhanced by his virtuoso guitar work, Joy is Now, Pure Ganesh and Grateful Ganesh, are beloved by his fans world-wide. Pure Ganesh put GuruGanesha Singh on the map as a solo musician, topping New Age charts in early 2007 and receiving high critical acclaim from magazine reviewers in both New Age and Yoga publications. Long before GuruGanesha Singh released his solo albums, he was the force behind many well known chant musicians, including Snatam Kaur, Thomas Barquee, and Mirabai and released several albums with other musicians including Game of Chants with Guru Singh and Grammy-Winning singer, Seal.

GuruGanesha Singh is also the original founder of the record label, Spirit Voyage Records, as well as the distribution company, Spirit Voyage Music. He founded both businesses with the intention of creating new avenues for spreading inspiring music to ever-widening audiences.  

GuruGanesha performs over a hundred musical performances per year, from the Bahamas to Singapore on the Celebrate Peace World Tour with Snatam Kaur, in addition to teaching yoga classes and prosperity workshops, and recording new music. His unmitigated joy and virtuoso guitar work make him an instant favorite with the audiences around the world.  

Nirinjan Kaur was born in Vancouver, B.C. to a Kundalini Yoga practicing, Sikh family. With two musical parents, shefound her love for singing at an early age. Her father still tells stories of how Nirinjan could be heard singing her heart out to her favorite songs, whether they were in the car going to school, or just playing around the house. As time went on, she became very interested in Kundalini Yoga and the Sikh faith, and became a certified Kundalini Yoga teacher at age 13. Sacred chanting goes hand in hand with both of these traditions, and Nirinjan quickly found a merging of two loves: spirituality and singing. She began singing among her family and community, at yoga gatherings and Sikh services.

In 2003, when she was 15, she began attending Miri Piri Academy in Amritsar, India. While in high school there, she studied Classical Indian Music with a focus on Gurbani Kirtan (sacred Sikh singing) with a master, Ustaad Narinder Singh Sandhu. After 3 years, she graduated from Miri Piri Academy with newfound experiences of life, as well as of music and singing.

In the summer of 2007 her first album Aquarian was released. Also, that summer Nirinjan Kaur and Siri Amrit Singh were happily married. Siri Amrit, as well as being born into a Sikh family, also grew up with a love of Gurbani Kirtan. They are now enjoying their new life together in Eugene, Oregon.

Sada Sat Kaur's name represents within yogic circles the alchemy of everyday custom turned into high art. For over 30 years she has toured the world, chanting mantras and singing kirtan in ashrams, concert halls, schools, public parks.

In India, audiences have been known to flock to her as if she were the Beatles. "We play to crowds of 200,000 people," she says. "They want to touch you and get your autograph. You go to these parks when it's a Sikh holiday, and they hear that these American Sikhs are going to sing, and you can't even see the end of the sea of people."

As the decades have passed, that sea of people has never managed to hoist Sada Sat Kaur toward a recording studio-until now. "The feeling inside myself was that this was all going to happen when it was supposed to happen," she says, "and it did."

In 2000 she was hanging around the watermelon tent at a Summer Solstice retreat in the mountains of New Mexico when she fell into an exchange with musician and producer Jeremy Toback. "We just got to talking and Jeremy and I were like, `Let's do an album." The result of that chance encounter is Angels' Waltz, a debut disc from a 56-year-old homeopath and yoga instructor who also just happens to be a master of a musical and spiritual form.

When Gurunam Singh graduated high school he was given a guitar and began composing simple songs. At 22 he found Yogi Bhajan and Sikh Dharma. He sang and played along with others and over time began leading chants in the early morning hours, before the rising of the sun. He spent lots of time in the solitude of his own home, and in the Sikh temple late at night, chanting to God and writing devotional songs. Gurunam's influences range from gospel, folk and country to classical Indian raag and traditional Sikh hymns to many of the current artists who sing devotional Hindu chants. He occasionally studied with some great ragi's such as Bhai Avtar Singh, from India, and Dya Singh from Australia. But his music is very simple. Anyone can chant along.

Sat Kartar Khalsa has been teaching , recording, and performing chant and devotional kirtan (music sung in call and response style) for over 30 years. Her personal journey with these potent spiritual tools was initiated in 1971 when she stumbled upon Kundalini Yoga and Sikhism, and became a student of her spiritual teacher, Yogi Bhajan.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Ga., her childhood was full of music. Both parents played piano and her father frequently performed at parties and restaurants. There was music around of every kind--musicals, standards, and classical music. Sat Kartar played piano at 5, guitar at 14, sang in an Episcopal choir at 9,and had a keen ear for picking out tunes on piano and guitar, from the Beatles to the Spanish Malaguena. She trained in ballet, and other dance forms. In college, she was doing cover gigs of singer-songwriters and folk artists. One big influence was Joni Mitchell, whose open tunings and unusual melodies were a doorway and vicarious permission to explore uncharted territory, musically. Trying to find her lyric voice, in 1971, to express the rising spiritual revolution she felt, she tried a Kundalini Yoga class, hoping for some kind of release from songwriter's block.“I thought the yoga would relax me enough to just let the songs come, or discipline me enough to just work at it.”

Actually, yoga re-routed her journey from becoming a folk-rock musician, and brought her awareness to the inner peace, focus, expansion, and clarity that the practice of yoga, breathing, and the sound current of chant bring . Sat Kartar recalls, " My first experience of chant was being mesmerized by the sound of my first yoga teacher, Livtar Singh, who sang the same words over and over, while playing a drone instrument called a tamboura. I thought I had opened Pandora's Box on some mysterious unknown world of sound. At a retreat 4 months later, I had a heart awakening, while chanting, that I have never known with any other music.” She began chanting with Livtar in yoga classes, and various events in Atlanta, and they went on to sing in two early chant bands, Sat Nam East, and the Khalsa String Band, which, in the’70s, toured internationally in India, Canada and the U.S.

During her first trip to India, in 1974, while on tour, Sat Kartar began what would be a life long study of North Indian Classical kirtan (call and response devotional singing) with numerous Sikh ragis ( who sing in Eastern mystic scales).”My first real vocal training was with my kirtan teacher, Amarjit Kaur, who schooled me in voice practice, tabla rhythms, and Eastern raga scales and the exquisite subleties of singing Sikh hymns.” After the Khalsa String Band went into a dormant phase, Sat Kartar began performing, recording, and teaching Gurbani (Sikh) kirtan and continues to this day. In 1981, she also began to evolve a unique style of playing the guitar suited to raga scales, which is called modal counterpoint accompaniment.

Sat Kartar's ongoing quest for spiritual musical expression, in the ‘90s, teamed her with Hare Krishna based techno musician-producers Akinchina Das and Lalita Dasi, and Sat Kartar had the opportunity to chant and improvise free form, over the electronica groove of the international dance music scene. “It was my first intro to the experience of Bhakti Hindu kirtan.” While she resided in Los Angeles, the chant music genre was rapidly growing through several touring bhaki kirtan artists, and she sang on more kirtan albums by Krishna Das and Wah!, and began leading chant herself, in yoga centers in Los Angeles, in 2001.

That year, Sat Kartar returned to Phoenix, AZ, formed her band, Sat Kartar & Friends, and began touring the Southwest U. S., playing conferences, book stores, yoga centers, churches, and other venues, in support of her chant CD, Daily Practice and garnered a regional following. She became involved in the Arizona Interfaith Movement, which further diversified her performance range with televised interfaith events, performing the Star Spangled Banner at an AZ DiamondBacks baseball game, to multi-faith chanting at a planning conference in Spain, for the World Parliament of Religions gathering.

With her new CD FLOW, plans are underway for a worldwide tour, retreats, sound and yoga workshops, a new product line, and much more.

Satkirin Kaur Khalsa is one of the most beloved and prolific Shabd Kirtan singers of all time. Introduced to a holy life of Kundalini Yoga and Sikhism by her teacher Yogi Bhajan forty years ago, SatKirin now serves the sacred sound current with a spiritual passion rarely seen in today's world. Her music invites the listener to merge with the space of Shunia, the zero point of stillness where one can let go of the stress of the outer world and merge with divine love. Her voice reaches deep into the heart.

Having studied with many of the world's leading kirtan masters, SatKirin now sings for audiences and festivals across the United States and around the world with her group, Mantra Medicine Band. Her many albums have a global following and have become standards in the Kundalini yoga community. SatKirin shares her expertise with fans on her Kundalini Yoga TV show, aired internationally on Jus Punjabi.

In her role as Sikh Minister, Satkirin was the first Guru Granthi of Guru Ram Das Gurdwara Los Angeles (1976-1992) and now serves the Manhattan sangat. As part of her mission to disseminate peace and service through music, Satkirin is a representative to the United Nations Department of Public Information for the NGO of the 3HO Foundation. She has had the distinct privilege of singing the opening prayer for the Opening Ceremony of the 2009 United Nations General Assembly on Climate Change.

*Testimonials:*

"Something happens inside my heart while I listen to Satkirin Kaur. The latent power within me rises with her voice to greet my soul. She sings the naad in a loving, personal way. Playing her music during my yogic practice strengthens and uplifts me and it is a pleasure to share her albums with myyoga students."

*--Ramdesh Kaur, Kundalini Yogini and Teacher*

"Thank you for your celestial music! I use it all the time at my studio in both my Kundalini Yoga classes and in the Sacred Dance Classes. Many blessings!"

*--Laura Shakti aka Ragubir Kaur, Kundalini Yogini and Teacher*