Good Company

The best company is the the company of your good self and the company of the people that are good influences in your life. Every time i enter the space of the recording studio with Thomas Barquee, my producer, I feel the power to reach out to all of you through the sacred and healing music of Mantra and Shabd. It is a very transformative experience to enter into a process of creativity as we dedicate and to open up to the Infinite. We start with a prayer and an attitude of surrender. We have worked together on 15 cd albums to date and the process of recording is definitely a spiritual experience. My friend, Dave Douglas, who happens to be one of the world's best trumpet players as well as a Kundalini Yogi, played on track #5 called WAHE GURU. I could not imagine trumpet accompany Mantra music. But I knew if anybody could make it work it would be Dave. He has studied Indian Classical Raga and traveled to Calcutta with Pundit Samir Chatterjee, the famous tabla master. So this is one of my favorite tracks as it exudes such joy and originality. The sweet facile voice of Sirgun Kaur joins me with some wonderful aria or Alaaps. Sirgun is a wonderful female singer with a great gift of expansiveness in her singing. You may not know that I love Deva Premal's music when I need to relax, and I love to bike ride to Prem Joshua's DANCE OF SHAKTI. So I really put my heart into putting down some Sikh Shabds with all the bells and whistles of funky percussion of Tripp Dudley, sweet flute of Steve Gorn. So there is a lot of musical variety and merging of the Indian classical Raga type sounds and Western classical sounds. The track of "Ray Man eh Bidh Jog" is an old remake of the Shabd Yogi Bhajan asked Guru Shabd Singh Khalsa to compose for healing and for guiding the mind into understanding Yoga. There are so many memories of groups of us going to the bedside of someone needing healing that we would sing this "Re Man...." for. This is a sweet collection of what I call empowering music. You can sing, dance, certainly meditate and do yoga to this music as well as just relax and rejoice. We are all better people because of the good company we keep.