Spirit Voyage

You will come across ancient chants on this album, chants performed in the centuries-old language of Gurmukhi, but you'll also pick up traces of Sada Sat's childhood and college years, a time when she was immersed in bluegrass and folk. One day in the studio she leaned over to her producer, Jeremy Toback, and said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I really like country music." Voila, Toback brought in roots-music virtuoso Greg Leisz, who has graced recordings by everyone from Joni Mitchell to Lucinda Williams to Wilco, and who can be heard here exploring the astral plane on banjo, pedal steel, lap steel, and dobro. Twang chant? Hey, maybe the Ganges and the Mississippi aren't so far apart, after all.

Sada Sat Kaur's voice has a way of simultaneously calming and invigorating you, and that makes sense, too. "One thing that I love about Kundalini yoga chants is that they're not only bhakti energy, which is devotional, but they're shakti, which is the power," she says. "They're juicy. They're gutsy." Doing yoga is not necessarily a prerequisite for appreciating it, either. For anyone who feels bombarded by noise, stress, and distraction at every corner-and isn't that the habitual plight of the 21st-century humanoid?-the chants of Sada Sat Kaur act as something of a sonic antidote.

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.