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Music
Interview with Dave Stringer
YM:Who is Dave Stringer?
DS: I have been singing and practicing yoga for many years to try to answer this question. And when it truly becomes clear to me, I don’t think it will possible to convey the answer in words.What is Kirtan? Kirtan is a folk musical form that arose from the devotional Bhakti yoga movement of 15th century India. The primary musical feature of kirtan is the use of call and response, a figure that also deeply informs Western bluegrass, gospel music and jazz. The form is simple: a lead group calls out the melodies and the mantras. The crowd responds, clapping and dancing as the rhythms build and accelerate. The intention of Kirtan is consciousness-transformative, directing the singers to vanish into the song as drops merge into the ocean. The mantras are primarily recitations of names given to the divine. But perhaps the true understanding of the mantras can be found in the sense of unity, well being and timelessness that they elicit. The mantras quiet the mind, and the music frees the heart. Ecstasy is both the process and the product. Mantras are intended as a tool with which the spirit can release itself from the prison of attachments that the mind creates. Yoga doesn't ask us to believe; it asks us to practice, examining our experience until we can witness the truth in the book of our own heart. No one else can read it for us, or tell us what it means. Ultimately, whether mantras are ancient wisdom or psychological metaphor or complete nonsense depends on the intention and experience of the participant. � The Bhaktis wrote ecstatic love poems, and went around singing all the time. Their message was simple: Cultivate joy. See the divine in one another. They taught Sanskrit mantras to common people using simple melodies, accompanied by handclaps and finger cymbals and drums. The Bhaktis had no use for orthodoxy. They saw the expression and form of the divine in every direction they looked. YM:What have you been up to lately? DS:I have just finished leading a chanting and yoga retreat in Bali with Jivamukti teacher Alanna Kaivalya. The retreat was held in the exquisite setting of the palace of the prince of Ubud. We also played a jam-packed kirtan at Yoga Barn in Ubud, and played for Daniel Aaron’s month long teacher training at the Anahata retreat center. � I am going on to play tour dates in Australia and New Zealand before returning to lead kirtans in California in July. I’m promoting my new CD, Divas & Devas, a series of duets with some of the finest female mantra singers on the planet. � Another CD will be released this fall in Europe, and I will be playing dates in Greece, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. Later in November, I will be playing for a retreat with Ram Dass in Hawaii, and a surfing, yoga and chanting retreat with Denise Kaufman at Haramara in Mexico. I will ring in 2009 with a New Year’s Eve event in Los Angeles with the Anusara teachers Desiree Rumbaugh and Sianna Sherman. We will record a live CD during my spring 2009 USA tour, and I will be back in Bali and other places in Asia in June. YM:How did you get all those pretty ladies on your new album? DS:With the exception of Karnamrita, I have known and sung with all of the artists for some time, and many of them have appeared on my previous albums. I introduced Donna De Lory to kirtan when she came to a chanting party at my house back in the 90’s. She ended up singing on all of my CDs, and going on to make her own mantra CDs. Hans Christian, who produced Divas & Devas, had known Karnamrita for some time, and had long wanted to introduce me to her. As luck had it, she was working on her own new record in a studio a few blocks away from us. We asked her to come over to listen to a track we were working on, and she ended up singing it right then and there. Kim Waters has been Hans’ partner in Rasa for many years. We had always wanted to sing together, and she came out to LA with Hans to work on the album. Suzanne Sterling, C.C. White, Joni Allen and Allie Stringer have toured and recorded with me for years. Sat Kartar and Wah have been friends and colleagues of mine for a long time. We’re frequently in touch, but usually arrange our touring schedules so our concerts don’t conflict. So it was nice to be in the same room singing together for a change! � YM:What was it like working with a different artist for each song? DS:I understood from the beginning that I would be the through-line, and chose to sing with as much restraint as possible in order to feature the women’s voices. Every singer, like every flower, has particular combinations of light and water and soil that make them bloom the brightest. So the first thing we had to do was figure that out. Some singers wanted to learn the songs beforehand. Others preferred the spontaneity of working out the arrangements on the spot. Some singers were perfectionists who wanted to work on the songs line by line with me in the control room listening carefully and making suggestions. In most instances, we recorded our parts via the old school method: two singers and two microphones in a room singing together, allowing our chemistry to determine the harmonies as we went along. Many of the vocals were completed in only a couple of takes. YM:What does chanting do? � DS:Chanting opens emotional pathways in a kind of cleansing catharsis. This has the effect of shifting one’s center of awareness from head to heart, which is one of the aims of yoga. The mind is wired to put things into categories, but the heart seeks unity. And the search for love is the same everywhere. � The neurochemistry of chanting is also very interesting. Music coordinates neural activity in many areas of the brain, helping to improve learning and memory. Singing also reduces activity in the area of the brain that produces our sense of where our body ends and the external world begins. The result is a diminished sense of separation and aloneness, accompanied by an increased sense of well being. � Sanskrit is the mother tongue of many modern languages, (including German and English), and therefore a point of linguistic unity. Sounds like Oh and Mmmm and Ah and Shhhh convey meanings that any baby ever born understands. For most people in both Europe and America, Sanskrit is experienced as an oddly familiar kind of nonsense. � Since one of the aims of chanting is to stop the mind’s identification with thinking, this nonsense turns out to be very useful. If you deprive the mind of the babble of pictures and words it is usually focused on, you become aware of an expansive and joyful silence that seems to hold the mind within itself. In this state of awareness, there is no sense of separation or difference. YM:Who is your audience? DS:I’m astonished at the diversity of people I meet at the kirtans. They range from tattooed yoga girls with rings on their toes to grandmothers who look like they somehow got lost on the way to rehearsal for the church choir. I meet ex-punk rockers and military people, scientists and surfers. Frequently, young mothers bring their kids, telling me their six year old just can’t stop singing along to my CDs. What they have in common is that they find ecstacy in singing. � YM:Why do you sing? DS:Since the beginning, singing has been a way for me to transmute whatever hurt or anger I felt into something that helped bring me closer to love. So in a certain sense, for me, singing has always been a devotional act. � Before I encountered mantras, I used to invent the languages I sang in. Writing lyrics can be intricate intellectual work, and I found that singing wordlessly gave me a much more immediate, spontaneous, and effortless way of tapping into my emotional life. I also discovered that certain sounds had the ability to transport me into a different sort of consciousness, into a place of great ecstasy or great stillness. So when I first heard Sanskrit chanted in India, although I was astonished to encounter a syllabary of these sounds, I also experienced a profound sense of recognition. My private acts of discovery were nothing compared to my first experiences of chanting en masse. A large group of people singing together intentionally, breathing together, is a cloud of intelligence, turning like a flock of birds, until the song itself vanishes into the skies of silence. It’s a mighty thing to be a part of. You feel somehow intimate with all the strangers surrounding you, bigger than your little concept of yourself, and intensely, vividly, alive. � YM:Explain the process of creating a song from start to finish. DS:The best things I’ve ever written have lept into being in a matter of minutes. They just seem obvious to me all of a sudden, and I don’t even have a sense that they belong to me. They are patterns I have suddenly recognized, but in a sense the melodies have always been there. Composing is really the process of noticing, and then organizing. Sometimes melodies arrive in the form of fragments that I can’t get out of my mind, but they’re not complete. Years can go by before they are finished, and then one day the missing piece or the unifying motif appears. � I often hear melodies arise out of mechanical drones – jet engines, vacuum cleaners, washing machines. I’ve composed many songs sitting on the edge of the pool at the Hollywood YMCA. There’s a huge ventilation fan in there with nice overtones. I’ll get a melody in my head and then work it around while I’m swimming laps, then I’ll go home and work it out on the harmonium or a guitar or a dulcimer. � With songs, I only need to please myself. But kirtans are different – unless people can learn them easily, they don’t work. In one sense, it’s pop songwriting 101 – create little hooks that people can’t forget. But not every melody produces a sense of transcendence, and not every melody that arises from within me connects perfectly, even though I might love it. Sometimes I try out new kirtans on a crowd and they’ll keep singing it back differently, and that can be the final act of composition. The crowd changes it to the way they like it, and I have to surrender to that greater intelligence. YM:What advice can you give to people trying to take up kirtan as a profession? � DS:Focus on the yoga of it and the sadhana of it and not on any particular outcome. Empty yourself of your concepts and your ambitions. Surrender yourself for a while to a teacher you respect. On one hand I want to say “don’t quit your day job”, because the financial returns are pretty slim until you get to a certain level, which will likely take years. But on the other hand, you may never get to that level unless you do quit your day job. Stay flexible, and stay focused. Try to tell the truth in your own words, and be unafraid to forthrightly make mistakes and work out your stuff in public. Presume that everyone can read your mind and your heart and act accordingly. � YMWho is on your i-pod? DS:Antonio Carlos Jobim, Astor Piazzola, Hossein Alizadeh, Charles Mingus, Caetano Veloso, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Joni Mitchell, Sigur Ros, Tom Waits, Steve Reich, Howlin Wolf, the Mahotella Queens, many things. But when I’m writing I don’t listen to much music at all. On the road I don’t control the playlist in the car, since I control it at showtime. Usually the band is turning me on to new things, or summoning some atmosphere, but mostly we listen to nothing at all when we’re driving. We spend most of the time talking about music, and then every night we play it. � YM:What is your favorite city to play in? DS:I shouldn’t really name favorites, because amazing chants have happened in some surprising places. I don’t want to slight any city, but the most melodious crowds in my experience are in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Tucson, Boulder, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, Munich, Austin, Nashville, Atlanta and Chapel Hill, NC. � YM:What kind of yoga do you practice? DS:My practice is largely derived from the Anusara and Jivamukti schools, with a healthy dose of Saul David Raye. YM:Do you have a secret spiritual name? DS:No. When I was living in India, I asked Gurumayi Chidvilasananda for� spiritual name. She responded by saying “You already have one. Dave (Dev) means bright and shining or god in Sanskrit.”� Later, when I started leading kirtan at yoga studios, I reflected on that experience, and found in it a directive to be myself and use my own given name professionally, and not try to create some simulacrum of Indian-ness. YM:Do you have a daily practice? What does it look/sound like? DS:When I’m home I get up, make a cup of coffee, and I chant about 60 of my favorite verses from the Guru Gita, and then I’ll meditate for a little while. Then I will usually transit into some bhajan or new composition I’m working on. On the road, I’m chanting every night, so that is my practice. www.davestringer.com WATCH DAVEON YOGATV! Interview 1 Interview 2 Music Video |
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