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Ancient
to the Future: Baird Hersey & Prana On
hearing Baird hersey & Prana (a Sanskrit word meaning breath or
vital energy), it’s almost unbelievable that the group’s
music is made withjust the human voice. Each member of the nine-voiced
choir is a student of the style of diphonic or overtone singing rooted
in that of Mongolia and the Himalayas, a mystical technique that permits
the vocalist to sing more than one octave simultaneously, often with
a parallel “whistling” tone floating above the core notes.
Haunting, hypnotic, and at once both ancient and futuristic, the ensemble’s
sound ascends from cave-like guttural growls, crests and shimmers with
astonishing beauty, and washes over the listener in wave upon wave of
balming bliss. But
even though he’s known as an unshakeable pillar of calm, Hersey,
a devoted yoga practitioner and Prana’s founder and leader, just
might have a bit of a surprise for you: He likes to rock out on occasion.
“Oh, I listen to all kinds of music,” says the reflective,
shaven-headed father of two. “I still like to put something loud
on the stereo sometimes and crank it up, sure.”
In fact, Hersey, 58, got his start by cranking it up as the lead guitarist
of East Coast hard rock band Swampgas, which released an album on (quite
prophetically) the Buddah label in 1972. After Swampgas dissipated,
Hersey enrolled in Vermont’s Bennington College, where he studied
instrumental performance and composition. “It’s really ironic,”
he says. “Because before I was at Bennington I had attended [Connecticut’s]
Wesleyan University, but the program there was focused on world music,
which I wasn’t that interested in back then. Now of course with
Prana we’re doing stuff that’s very much related to Tuvan
and Tibetan traditions.” But
after college it would be some decades before Hersey would return to
studying ethnic styles. 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 then settled 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 more experienced singers.”
So in 1999, he began Prana, whose lineup has since included such leading
local performers as Peter Beuttner; Amy Fradon; Dorraine Scofield; Julie
Last; Bruce Milner; Kirsti Gholson; Julian Lines; Leslie Ritter; Jonji
Provenzano; Bar Scott and Joe Viellette. In 2004 the group released
its transcendental (in several senses of the word) debut, The Eternal
Embrace (Hersey Music), which met with high praise and resulted in a
tour of the Southwest and in several East Coast engagements. But as
artistically successful as Prana had become, yet another fateful turn
lay just over the horizon. The
following year, Viellette, a renowned luthier, was working on a guitar
that belonged to Krishna Das (nee Jeff Kagel, perhaps surprisingly once
a potential vocalist for Blue Öyster Cult), the leading American
singer of Indian kirtan-style devotional music, and invited the eminent
vocalist to one of Prana’s Woodstock performances. Moved by the
music, Krishna Das invited the ensemble to perform with him in New York and even suggested they record together. Hersey was bowled over. “It
was incredible,” beams Hersey. “In the yoga world, Krishna
Das is huge. His kirtans in Manhattan usually draw around 1200 people.
I call him ‘the Elvis of enlightenment.’” The collaboration
resulted in Gathering in the Light (2007, Satsang Music), a profound set
of seven lengthy chants, two of which are augmented by legendary Woodstock
drummer Jerry Marotta. Like its predecessor, the disc has been widely
embraced by the yoga community and has even made the meditation bestseller
list at Amazon.com. So does Hersey have any visions of overtone singing
crossing over to a larger audience? “Well, this music’s probably
not for everybody,” he says with a laugh. “Most music is about
stimulation, but this music is about the opposite—it’s about
slowing down. Not everyone wants to do that, which is fine, too. But I
hope those looking for more introspective moments will be drawn to Prana’s
music.”
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