(Please note: We will be hosting Free Music Friday on our Facebook page exclusively beginning July 1, 2011. There is a Free Music Friday app on Spirit Voyage's Facebook page, which will be valid each Friday for a different track. )
Click HERE to download the Free Song.
Say Saraswati from Queen Be: The Goddess Within
Sat Purkh Kaur Khalsa
I'm pleased to share a track from my newest album with all the Spirit Voyage listeners out there. Say Saraswati has a couple of different origins. The first is my long-time study of the sound current and my fascination with the Goddess Saraswati. Her iconography represents the higher arts: poetry, music and philosophy and I wanted to come into relationship with that kind of power and grace in my own work. Then I heard Nirinjan's version of Yogi Bhajan's poem and loved the mantra immediately. I was so excited to see some of what I had learned in other traditions incorporated into my Kundalini Yoga practice. The second was sitting in a Bela Fleck concert more than a year ago. He had just completed an album of African inspired music--the roots of his own mastery and instrumentation, the banjo. As I sat in the dark, overwhelmed by the sound he and his fellow musicians were making, I began chanting this mantra. I had always wanted to create a version of it--and here was the sound I had been searching for. But when it came to manifesting that sound in the studio, I didn't quite know how that would happen. I certainly couldn't do it on my own. Fortunately I had seen a group called Round Mountain that same year; two brothers from the Santa Fe area who play multiple instruments and like myself, incorporate different traditions into their own song writing styles. So I asked around only to learn that my engineer often played bass with them--so I had my in! What followed was a couple of phone calls and a day of magic, sitting in the studio hearing the sound that had been incubating in my head for so long come through the speakers. It felt like a miracle.
Going in, I knew how I wanted the mantra itself to sound; so that was simple enough. But I still wasn't quite clear what I wanted to do with the English bridge. I knew I wanted it to take the song in a different direction but I didn't really have any idea of what that would be until it spontaneously came forward as we were working on the main body of the song. I began a rhythm that to my uneducated ear just seemed syncopated; but in working with Robby and Jon, they let me know that I was actually speeding up the rhythm by 1/4, which is a traditional West African technique. Who knew? So with that small rhythm change, the entire bridge came together as a very traditional Malian rhythm and drum sequence and a voice over that was part poetry and part song. It felt like magic. The process of creating music is the most magical part of my life--spontaneous, full of joy and sometimes breathtaking. Working in concert with amazing musicians to create something that I couldn't on my own, almost makes me speechless; I'm so very grateful.
I hope you enjoy this track, along with Jai Ma!, it is in many ways the seed that created this entire album--my celebration of the creative, fecund, goddess within us all.
I’ve done my best to make these tracks both musical and functional within a Kundalini Yoga kriya. Three mantras are clearly for use in meditations: Sat Narayan Hari Narayan, Say Saraswati and Ajai Alai. The chanting in each is 11 minutes and the musical interludes in Ajai Alai and Say Saraswati are the length of one recitation, so you can continue chanting over the music. Jai Ma! is great for celestial communications as well as other shorter meditations (6 minutes) with the Kundalini Bhakti Mantra. The remaining songs are primarily for relaxation or individual practice of the shabad recitation meditations.
Click here to listen to and purchase the rest of the album.
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Thanks for information and links.