There’s an previous saying that “writing about music is like dancing about structure.” It’s meant as a dig at music criticism, however beneath that, there’s a deeper fact: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s common but nonetheless deeply private. And whereas science and math are concerned in its creation, there’s something undeniably mystical about it.
Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and somebody who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for many years — although, final 12 months, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.
When he was younger, Laraaji experimented with performing, together with a job within the landmark experimental movie Putney Swope, and hung out within the Nineteen Sixties standup comedy scene. After that, he turned occupied with religious communities, found the autoharp, and devoted his life to creating music. He’s been a really prolific artist ever since.
I just lately invited Laraaji on The Grey Space to speak about music, meditation, spirituality, and the therapeutic energy of laughter. As at all times, there’s a lot extra within the full podcast, so pay attention and comply with The Grey Space on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you discover podcasts. New episodes drop each Monday.
This dialog has been edited for size and readability.
I’m so intrigued by all of the inventive pursuits you’ve had in your life. You’ve finished standup comedy. You’ve finished performing. Clearly, ultimately, you gave your self over to music. Did the expertise of performing and doing comedy make you a greater musician? Or is it simply creatively a completely completely different factor?
It’s the identical factor, Sean. It’s wherever I select to open and provides expression to. I’m practising the artwork of surrendering and spontaneity.
I believe that’s why I’m a awful musician. I’m too in my very own rattling head.
I say observe your physique language when you could have your subsequent orgasm.
I don’t suppose anyone — together with myself — needs to see that!
Severely, have a look at your breath. Have a look at your physique language. Look how centered you’re into surrendering to this energetic expression. And I see a few of that expression carried over into the best way individuals sing pop music, rock music. They get into the extra orgasmic, passionate degree of launch.
Do you consider your self as primarily an improvisational musician for these causes?
I rely extra on improvisation than I do on set scores. I discover that improvisation is aligned with what I name my religious perception that each second is new. And to belief that what I want on this second is right here.
Musicians at all times speak about that, feeling extra like a conduit than an creator. Is that what it’s like for you on stage?
Sure, and it’s magical and mystical and a transportive place since you’re one way or the other past linear time movement. You’re within the midst of native time, however you’re additionally witnessing an unbroken, fixed current time. It’s talking by means of me and it’s talking as me. I’m sound, I’m area, I’m timelessness. That is like music I can dream up. A part of my artwork is understanding when to get out of the best way, find out how to arrange a musical movement or a musical occasion, after which to step to the aspect of it and let it converse by means of.
You additionally sing but it surely appears like a part of the music, like there’s little distinction between the devices you’re enjoying and what’s coming out of your voice. Do you consider your voice as one other instrument and never one thing separate?
Sure, I do like doing every thing on the identical time. Spontaneous, unified movement.
Create a movement with a number of devices on the identical time, utilizing the voice with out calling the psychological course of into linear pondering. And utilizing a voice as an emotional expressional instrument. That’s what I’ve been exploring, particularly with meditation or deep contemplation of contacting altered planes of acutely aware current time. And so to speak about it’s to take the thoughts out of it.
Then there’s sounds of ardour, passionate immersion. The voice can be utilized to precise witnessing within an awe-inspiring notion. So the entire physique turns into the voice and the breath and the motion and grow to be a conduit.
Invented or improvisational language could be the proof of an individual or practitioner in complete immersion, complete submission, getting concerned with a complete notion that’s past linear description. So the mind is given a trip, and in that trip or place, it may be freed as much as have another space-time expertise. And that may be the message the artist needs to convey, that there’s another method of being acutely aware right here and now.
I’ve heard you speak about music as a device for complete presence. Why do you suppose music has that sort of impact on us?
Music generated or channeled by the suitable musician or artist? The artist is in a state of contemplation or meditation or a suspended time consciousness. And within the languaging that happens with their instrument, their interplay with their instrument and with their voice can convey this repurposing of the human instrument, repurposing it from a conveyor of native human-based emotion to a conduit of exalted emotion, direct notion inside this timeless current second.
It’s at all times accessible. Sure sounds. Drones can do this. Music that’s very spontaneous, that may pull the thoughts out of linear thought, may permit the perceiver, the listener, to all of the sudden immediately discover the truth of everlasting time and the infinite area.
Sound can level to the invisible and sound can recommend the flowing of vitality, the flowing of blood, the flowing of breath. It may possibly recommend the mixing of seemingly separate and discordant. Within the case of a harp, all 36 strings are vibrating on the identical time and producing this synergetic tonal occasion. So, as you say, that sound can throw a suggestion. It may possibly level to the invisible, it might probably level to the transcendent. It may possibly direct the emotional physique out of heaviness so {that a} lightness, a extra ethereal resonance could be immediately witnessed.
As soon as we begin speaking and utilizing phrases, we’re already on the planet of concepts and abstractions. However music is extra major than that, proper? It touches one thing in us that existed earlier than we invented phrases.
Sure. Music would possibly be capable of say greater than what speech can say. My common mode of operation is to organize earlier than a efficiency or recording by means of simply dropping right into a refined sense of the meditative area. Do some yoga postures, some respiration workout routines, some optimistic affirmations, after which sculpt this area or level to this transcendental area and let it transmit itself right into a sound repetition by means of me. When this occurs, I are likely to name it a sound tub. A celestial sound tub. It’s an immersion expertise. And as soon as once more, right here we’re away from the phrases and we’re into the pure impacting power of sound.
Do you truly discover a significant distinction between music and meditation, or is all of it simply completely different manifestations of the identical apply?
My final reply is that they’re one and the identical, which means that within the second of deepest meditation, I think about meditation to be the very best romance and that romance is the very best meditation. This meditation is simultaneous with music. It couldn’t be separated.
When did laughter grow to be such an essential factor for you?
It shifted the energies of the bullies in my neighborhood once I was younger to make use of humor. I wouldn’t be so afraid of their presence once I may use humor. And in church, we use humor as a result of it may get so boring. And since I used to be in the suitable place to make use of it, we’d use it to get different friends to chuckle in the course of a critical sermon. However I discover the facility of laughter to change, to interrupt the sense of rigidity and separation. I started writing scripts in highschool and doing state of affairs comedies for expertise reveals as a result of I loved seeing individuals lose it to laughter. The household I grew up in, the uncles, aunts, the cousins all have been laughter pleasant, so laughter was at all times on the menu. I can’t bear in mind even a funeral the place laughter was outlawed.
You actually do see it as a transformative power?
Effectively, after doing standup comedy I made a decision to let standup comedy go for some time and simply concentrate on music. It was a e book by Rajneesh, Osho Rajneesh, that helped me to comprehend that I may entry the laughter expertise with out doing comedy, and that I may information different individuals into the laughter zone and benefit from the deliciousness of laughter with out utilizing humor and on the sacrifice of one thing.
And now, by means of laughter — play outlets, I name them — we use laughter to get individuals into the play zone and to get them into contact with their interior little one and to get them into deep leisure. Yeah. And I actually get pleasure from laughter now as a result of it might probably come up out of individuals with out it having to be nervous. Yeah, the whole physique can become involved. The whole breath could be open, and it’s getting sweeter and extra scrumptious each time I do considered one of these.
So laughter is one other approach to transcend the pondering thoughts?
Sure. Rajneesh identified that if you’re laughing, actually concerned with laughter, that you just or us or whoever is laughing will not be pondering, they’re not concerned within the thought strategy of linear thought. Which may be so in the event you’re into pure, open laughter. If it’s a nervous laughter the place you’re conscious of a threatening state of affairs, that will be a special state of affairs. However actual, full physique, cathartic laughter, you’re releasing sooner than you’ll be able to suppose. So there’s no thought course of processing what it’s that’s being launched. It’s only a yummy, open, nurturing launch.
You’ve been knowledgeable musician for many years, performing everywhere in the world. You’re entangled with the enterprise and the industrial aspect of music. I assume I simply surprise the way you navigate that component, of being knowledgeable musician and being a religious individual on the identical time?
Effectively, I did a few years in the past get that except I combine my religious nature, I’d by no means be completely completely satisfied, content material, or expertise decision as a result of I can’t get it from the bodily world. I’m not hating the bodily world, however issues within the bodily world are short-term and always we’re reminded that issues come, they keep, after which they depart. And a few issues are simply too lovely for us to just accept that they’re ever going to go away.
And I grew to grasp that behind the world that’s altering, there’s this religious area that if I discover ways to embrace it always, even whereas I’m embracing my outer wealth, that when the outer wealth shifts, I’m not bent out of practice as a result of I’m nonetheless related to this interior religious platform that doesn’t get bent out of practice when the outer world shifts. So for me, staying fixed and staying with my religious apply permits me to be extra playful and fewer afraid of the bodily world, and fewer afraid of change and fewer afraid of shedding. And so I discover that the religious aspect helps me to be extra current, extra experimental, and extra risk-taking with my musical expression.
I’ve additionally heard you say that you just suppose our core religious downside is our misidentification with our our bodies. What does that imply?
I’m not going to do that. I wouldn’t consider doing this to you, Sean.
Wait, what are you going to do to me?!
I’d amputate your leg. Your ft. You’re nonetheless there. Your torso. You’re nonetheless there. Your arms, your elbows. You’re nonetheless there. That’s only a head. And also you’re nonetheless there. Your ears and nostril goes. You’re nonetheless there. Your lips and tongue. God remains to be there. Instantly your head disappears. However you’re nonetheless there. And also you’re saying to your self, wait a minute. I assumed I used to be that physique. Look. I’m timeless. I’m invisible. I’m wingless. What do I do with this?
And I imagine that identification with the bodily physique, which is beginning, that lives and dies, and we get hooked up to it, and we get sentimental with it. And we attempt to get pleasure from its 5 senses, and we neglect, or we don’t entry the enjoyment that we will have, the extra expansive pleasure we will have by means of the infinite self that’s at all times right here.
Maybe your buddies have had an epiphany by means of using sure ceremonies. The place you’re all of the sudden in one other sense of current time and area, a special sense of expansiveness, a special sense of how time is unfolding, slower or by no means. And to have this expertise is to be profiting from a special type of physique. The deepest sense of happiness and pleasure I really feel comes from having an intimate, communing expertise with my everlasting current time-self. The religious presence which is at all times right here, at all times in every single place. It simply must be completely current, to dig it in, to catch it and to put on it and to behold it.
You’re 80 years previous. You’ve been making music for over 40 years. You’ve lived such an fascinating life as an artist and a contemplative. As you sit right here now, at this time, what’s your religious mission? What will get you away from bed daily?
I’ll undergo what I’ve to do the second I get away from bed. Often what will get me up is a way of a day by day agenda, which is completely different daily. One thing that I’m going to try this day that I’m going to essentially get pleasure from, whether or not it’s music, efficiency, or designing, new tuning or attending to know a brand new piece of apparatus, or sitting for an additional time period in meditation, both in lotus place in my home or going for a stroll in Central Park or Riverside Park and sitting on a bench within the solar, entering into meditation.
What retains me enthusiastically concerned in life and passionately concerned with life is the feeling of an everlasting non-human intelligence that’s producing this factor known as creation and is permitting me to take part in it and to co-witness and to co-collaborate with it. After which within the midst of this, it’s remaining invisible and remaining infinite. And I’m feeling it by means of my reference to it. And so it’s not a lot what I’m getting away from bed for, however as I’m getting away from bed there’s this sense of acutely aware improvisational collaboration throughout the divine alternating intelligence. However once I’m doing excursions and I’m put in a pleasant, lovely resort, I’ll fortunately get away from bed for the breakfast.
