Ancient
to the Future: Baird Hersey & Prana
by
Peter Aaron
..In the mid ’70s he formed Year of the Ear, a jazz-rock
fusion big band that released a handful of LPs on Arista,
and in the ’80s he dabbled in synth pop and modern rock
with the bands FX and Artificial Intelligence, making his
first forays into overtone singing with the latter outfit.
“David Moss, a drummer I’d made an album
with, showed me how to approximate the vocal technique I’d
heard on a record of Tibetan monks, and I just took it from
there,” Hersey recalls. “So I’m pretty much
self-taught.” By thensettled in the Woodstock area,
Hersey was earning a comfortable living writing incidental
music for ABC-TV, but still felt a lacking. “It was
incredibly lucrative work,” he says. “But it was
horrifying to me as an artist to know that far more people
would be hearing some barely noticeable theme song I did for
a commercial or news program than had heard all of the other
music I had ever done. So even though the money was good,
I wasn’t happy doing that.”
But
the path to happiness was just around the corner. In 1988,
Hersey offered to make a custom recording of synthesizer-generated
meditation music for yoga instructor Marcia Albert in exchange
for a few lessons. He spent the next several years getting
deeper into the age-old meditative art, and, in another music-for-knowledge
barter deal, this one in 1997 with top Ashtanga-style instructor
and author Beryl Bender Birch, he recorded a few solo overtone
vocal tracks for use in her classes. After cutting a few more
such pieces, Hersey issued them as Waking the Cobra (1998,
Hersey Music), a meditation CD that proved a hit on the yoga
circuit. He toured to promote the disc, but again something
was missing.
“I’d
get the audience to chant along with me but what would come
from them would be this cluster of tones that were, um, not
exactly harmonious,” says Hersey.
“By that time I was also singing in [Western harmonic
chant pioneer] David Hykes’s choir, so I knew there
were greater possibilities if I were to do something with...
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