The saxophonist Paul Dunmall once told me about the time he spent living in a music Ashram of the Divine Light Mission, a spiritual movement led by Guru Maharaj Ji. Paul moved from London to America in 1973 to live and practice music in this Ashram. In this setting music was a daily spiritual discipline, a meditative exercise to be combined with the discipline of regular meditation itself. Time would be allotted for individual practice in the mornings, followed by band rehearsals. Each and every day would be dedicated to music with full concentration. What Paul described sounded quite similar to Sun Ra's residence in Philadelphia where the musicians lived like monks, dedicated to their band leader's musical visions, and where they still live and work with Marshall Allen leading the band. There are also many similarities to musicians who gathered around La Monte Young and his guru Pandit Pran Nath. Through my work with Catherine Christer Hennix I have had first hand experience of this latter scene and its musical domain, where rehearsals and concerts span over several hours, demanding a high level of mental focus as well as physical strength. A key feature of the attempts at forming and maintaining a band which Christer and I experienced, is how difficult it has been to get something like that going, and then to keep it going. The obstacles presented in the circumstances and settings in which we worked were often insurmountable, including lack of space, lack of time to set-up, soundcheck and rehearse, lack of musicians able to commit enough time to really get into the music, and a thousand other distractions, these are the distractions of an unfocused environment which always wants to move on to the next fashion and never has time to really go beyond the fleeting surface.
Tuning Monastery
Tuning Monastery
Tuning Monastery
The saxophonist Paul Dunmall once told me about the time he spent living in a music Ashram of the Divine Light Mission, a spiritual movement led by Guru Maharaj Ji. Paul moved from London to America in 1973 to live and practice music in this Ashram. In this setting music was a daily spiritual discipline, a meditative exercise to be combined with the discipline of regular meditation itself. Time would be allotted for individual practice in the mornings, followed by band rehearsals. Each and every day would be dedicated to music with full concentration. What Paul described sounded quite similar to Sun Ra's residence in Philadelphia where the musicians lived like monks, dedicated to their band leader's musical visions, and where they still live and work with Marshall Allen leading the band. There are also many similarities to musicians who gathered around La Monte Young and his guru Pandit Pran Nath. Through my work with Catherine Christer Hennix I have had first hand experience of this latter scene and its musical domain, where rehearsals and concerts span over several hours, demanding a high level of mental focus as well as physical strength. A key feature of the attempts at forming and maintaining a band which Christer and I experienced, is how difficult it has been to get something like that going, and then to keep it going. The obstacles presented in the circumstances and settings in which we worked were often insurmountable, including lack of space, lack of time to set-up, soundcheck and rehearse, lack of musicians able to commit enough time to really get into the music, and a thousand other distractions, these are the distractions of an unfocused environment which always wants to move on to the next fashion and never has time to really go beyond the fleeting surface.