Snatam on Tour, Worldwide

[Guest guest]

Tickets for Snatam's concert near you still are available, at

www.SpiritVoyage.com.

 

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/81-03042008-1497809.html

 

The promise of peace

 

By NALIA FRANCIS

The Intelligencer

 

There are those who advocate peace and those who embody it. Chant

artist Snatam (sun-ah-tum) Kaur is among the latter, her petite frame

exuding a lucent serenity, her words, measured and earnest in

conversation, emanating from a contemplative depth.

 

A singer of both traditional Sikh mantras and contemporary sacred

music, Kaur travels the globe offering kirtan concerts and workshops —

the call-and-response chanting rooted in Renaissance India — as well

as yoga and meditation classes. An ambassador for the United Nations

affiliate 3HO (the Healthy Happy Holy Organization), which encourages

a healthier, more vibrant lifestyle through Kundalini yoga,

meditation, a vegetarian diet and a philosophy of compassion, she even

includes some of those exercises in her concerts.

 

So when this former food technologist brings her Celebrate Peace Tour

to the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia on Saturday — including

her band of sacred music icon GuruGanesha Singh on guitar and vocals,

tabla maestro and composer Manish Vyas and multi-instrumentalist Ram

Dass Singh on vocals, clarinet and piano — audiences should expect

more of an experience than a performance.

 

" Each concert that we do is a prayer for peace, " says Kaur. " We're so

impacted by the general media and by the daily stress of our lives

that we don't give ourselves those quiet moments or those moments of

prayer.

 

" My feeling is that every single moment that we in our lives and in

our minds have a vibration of peace, that is affecting the planet

around us and that our collective way of thinking and existing has

created the reality that we live in today. Maybe it's harder to

measure, harder to see, but I feel it's really, really important and

powerful to have inner peace.

 

" It's such an important mission and I see a lot of other people

starting to realize that, even though they're working for Greenpeace

or are working in Darfur or working in a homeless soup kitchen, that

we've all got to have that inner vibration of peace because that's

really what spreads and that's really what will help us to change the

vibration of the planet so we can make more conscious decisions as

builders, more conscious decisions as consumers, more conscious

decisions as neighbors and friends. That's really the work that we're

doing. "

 

It matters not that most of the chants are sung in Sanskrit, passed

down from gurus in the Sikh tradition, taken from ancient texts or

learned from her own late teacher Yogi Bhajan, renowned for promoting

Sikhism in the West. Set against buoyant rhythms and mellifluous

layers of sound, with Kaur's crystalline vocals occasionally weaving

in devotional lyrics in English — she also plays harmonium, violin and

guitar — the chants brim with a quiet, though infectious, joy.

 

" I believe that we bring these sacred chants to life when we sing

them. These chants have lived for thousands of years before me and

will continue to live for years after that. There's a real magic that

happens when we chant these words and I don't question it anymore, "

says Kaur, 35. " It's kind of a medicine balm, a healing balm. They

come from the yogic meditative tradition where the idea is you can sit

down and chant these sacred words and be healed. "

 

She points to a letter received from a veteran of the Iraq war as an

example of their inherent power.

 

" It was from a woman and she said, " I finally came back from Iraq and

when I listened to your music, it was the first time that I could cry

and begin to heal from what I had been through.' For people who

haven't been exposed to our music, our music is dedicated to opening

the heart and giving people the opportunity to sing and to pray for

peace on the planet, " says Kaur. " We believe that the power of prayer

is the greatest power we have as human beings. "

 

Hailing from Trinidad, Colo., and later Bolinas, Calif., she was

raised in a family that prac-

 

ticed yoga, meditation and chanting as part of the Sikh lifestyle.

Kaur even traveled to India at age 6 where she met one of the master

chanters at the Golden Temple in Amritsar and later returned there to

study with him. But her musical exposure extended well beyond the

sacred, especially since her father for several years served as

manager for the Grateful Dead.

 

" I got to go backstage before I really knew what they were all about.

I wasn't so much into the music but they had great candy bars back

there, " recalls Kaur, who also studied violin and played in her high

school orchestra. " Today in our concerts, we do a lot of

improvisational musical interludes and a lot of that comes from my

inspiration of hearing the Grateful Dead. "

 

A budding songwriter as a youth, she performed her song " Save Our

Earth " at an Earth Day concert in San Francisco before thousands, the

Dead's Bob Weir shepherding the project. Still, Kaur planned on a

career in health care, and with a degree in biochemistry, landed a job

formulating cereal flavors — " behind every cornflake, there's five

Ph.D.'s, " she jokes — for the Oregon-based Peace Cereal company after

college. Her singing on the job, however, inspired the management to

support and serve as an early sponsor of her recording and performing

career. Today, she enjoys international appeal as a New Age artist,

her albums, which include " Live in Concert, " " Anand " and " Grace, "

selling by the thousands each year.

 

" When I started on my first tour, I wasn't sure if this was the right

thing, " says Kaur, who lives in New Mexico with her husband Sopurkh

Singh Khalsa, now touring with her for the first time as her road

manager. " In the past couple of years, I really feel that I am

answering an inner calling and really doing the work that I'm meant to do.

 

" My name is Snatam, which means " universal,' and I always learned that

your name is something to live up to, to live by, so I've been really

inspired to reach out to people of different faiths, different paths

and different cultures. ... For me, my bottom line is whatever opens

the heart and gets people to sing, that's what I'm going to do. "

Sound Stage appears every Tuesday. Naila Francis can be reached at

(215) 345-3149 or nfrancis.