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Kirtan is ... the yoga of using the heart to connect to the divine

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The Monthly Aspectarian: Talk a little about the path you took to becoming who you are.

Jai Uttal: Just a small, simple question, right?

[laughter]

TMA: I take a conversational approach.

JU: I grew up in New York City. My father was in the record industry. He was a record executive in pop music, R&B, and even disco for a little while. So I grew up in a very musical household, but it all focused on pop music. Sometime when I was a teenager, I started getting into old time folk music and I played banjo. But I was also into psychedelic music and listened to Jimi Hendrix and all those guys, until I found Indian music.

I went to Reed College in Oregon, and the night of Fall registration I heard Ali Akbar Khan perform and I was really knocked out. Shortly thereafter, I dropped out of college, came to the Bay area, and started studying with him. I was also drawn to India to get closer to the source of where that music was coming from, as well as the whole spirituality that the music was coming out of. So, when I was nineteen, I went to India and, wow, lots of really intense things happened. Definitely the most important was that I met my guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who many know as Ram Dass’s guru as well. The whole axis of my life was shifted to an internal, spiritual focus.

Years and years went by. I was studying Indian music, and absorbing the folk music of India and the devotional music and the Kirtan, as well as still being really involved in playing electric guitar and being in the pop music field. Writing songs and being in bands. Those two sides of my musical life were very separate, though. Footprints, my first album, came out about fifteen years ago and, somehow or other, all of the different sides of my musical personality and who I am started to come together. I began to create music that drew from the Indian, drew from the devotional, and drew from the pop music that I was raised with.

TMA: I was very interested in the fusion movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. John McLaughlin’s My Goal’s Beyond and all of that that was going on. I was really excited by it and bitterly disappointed when it faded out. My take on it at the time was that the music just got too good, and too few people could appreciate it. Not enough albums were sold.

JU: Yeah, it’s hard to say. I think there might have been an overemphasis on technical wizardry. But what you said is probably true also, it lost its audience, or it was too refined to keep a mass audience. I also do think there was an overemphasis on technical virtuosity. After a while, it gets tiring because the emphasis has to be on the heart, in whatever the form of music.

TMA: Well, I was very excited when I came across your album Beggars and Saints because it’s a really interesting fusion. I’ve got it in my car and I play it all the time.

JU: I was really operating on a belief that I had no rules in my music except to be true to the inner voice and to the spirit. Because there was no genre that I was really in. I had no thoughts that my music was going to be listened to or accepted by anyone, and I didn’t care that much.

TMA: Well, you put out Footprints, what happened then?

JU: Footprints was a real surprise because I was just kind of playing around. I don’t mean that just casually, I was very passionate about it. But I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be released. I was just exploring and was so surprised that Footprints received so much critical praise. Of course, it didn’t sell tons of CDs, it’s too far out of the mainstream. But I think that in some ways it was one of the first CDs to initiate a movement of fusing Indian music with western music and with technology. I was really surprised at the accolades I got for that.

TMA: It’s very interesting that you are incorporating the real chants with the music. How is it received by more traditional Indians?

JU: To answer that, I’ll share a little story. In January of 1999, I was invited to come and perform at the Ms. India Beauty Pageant in Poona, India, where there were 7,000–8,000 people in the audience. It was televised pretty much all over the world, except the U.S. I did a few of my songs and the Indian people, from old, old traditional people to young punk rock Indians from Bombay, so many people came up to me and thanked me for turning them on to their own tradition through a modern interpretation. It was received really well. And my teacher Ali Akbar Khan, who is probably the most critical person I ever met, always encourages me. He also encourages me to keep studying and practicing and developing, but he’s always very enthusiastic and warm to me about my own work and career.

Traditional western people or Europeans who are very involved in traditional music are the ones who have not been open to what I do, because it is non-traditional. But I’ve always felt really good energy from the Indians.

TMA: Talk a little bit about kirtan. Yoga is so big right now. You can’t swing a dead cat and not hit a yoga class. It’s in park districts, it’s everywhere. Kirtan is kind of growing up within the yoga community.

JU: Kirtan is one of the very ancient forms of devotional yoga. It’s the yoga of using the heart to connect to the divine.

TMA: A branch of Bhakti.

JU: Kirtan is the practice of Bhakti. For many years it was ignored by the yoga movement in the west because the yoga movement was really about creating beautiful bodies. But now it’s certainly coming up in the yoga world, and I think a lot of the yoga practitioners are becoming aware of the wider view of what yoga really is, instead of just physical fitness. I think that’s great.

Kirtan is chanting. It’s usually call and response chanting of very powerful ancient mantras that are names of the divine energies, the divine beings, gods and goddesses in a repetitive manner. Sometimes the melodies can be very simple and the rhythms relaxed and slow, and other times the melodies can be complex and magnificent and the rhythms can be super driving dance rhythms. So the musical form has huge variety, but the essence of it is the repetition of the mantras. Hopefully, touching and the digging into the heart is what permeates the whole practice.

I first went to India in 1971 and I’d already been pretty involved in Kirtan for several years, so I’ve been doing it most of my life. The time I spent with my guru, we were doing Kirtan all the time, so it’s become pretty much my main spiritual practice, my main spiritual anchor. In recent decades it’s really the heart of the music that I do, too. Even when I’m drawing on tons of different musical influences for most of my songs, not all of them, but most of them, the content still does come from a Kirtan vibe, a Kirtan feeling or melody.

TMA: Even your western songs?

JU: No. The western songs still come from a devotional place, but it’s not using mantras and stuff.

TMA: I thought you might have a crossover with “I Want to Be With You Again.” Did it get any airplay?

JU: No.

TMA: Thats too bad.

JU: On Mondo Rama I did “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the Beatles song, and combined it with a Sanskrit chant. It’s pretty cool.

TMA: What’s important to you in these days?

JU: What’s important to me is living my life in a way for healing myself and for helping other people. I’m hoping that the music I do brings a healing energy to other people. I feel that we live our life ... most people live their lives with so much pain, emotional pain, usually. And then, in turn impart that pain to others. There’s a way to really turn that pain around by focusing on healing oneself and helping others. That’s what I’m trying to do with my music and I don’t mean it to come across as pretentious.

TMA: I don’t think anyone will take it that way.

JU: Good, because I’m as much of a mess as anyone and I’m just trying to turn things around. I find that the kirtan is such a great tool for that, such a great tool for healing the heart.

TMA: What will you be doing in your workshop in Chicago?

JU: The event that we’re doing in Chicago should be interesting. It’s a combination of kirtan which I will be leading, yoga which my wife will be teaching, and dancing in the tradition of Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms Dancing. So we’re going to go through a lot of different emotional and physical openings. It should be pretty fun.

TMA: How much of a band are you going to have with you?

JU: Just me and a drummer.

TMA: In my fantasy, you bring the whole Beggars and Saints band.

JU: We’re going to do that at Ravinia in September of 2005.

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Jai Uttal will be at Mandala, 9225 Trinity Drive in Lake in the Hills, IL, July 16-18th for a
weekend workshop, “Paths to Ecstasy,” Yoga, 5Rhythms Movement and kirtan. Friday is available as a separate event. See our ad in this issue. Contact Karyn at 815-788-8553
or see our website www.Mandala-cfta.org for more information.

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