Spiritual Statement
I have always been inclined to like such chanting
musicality, probably first enthused by Quintessence, some George Harrison, then
a host of others who over the past 40 years have taken on the ‘Krishna’ mantra
from its most natural [just chant] to psychedelic wrappings.
This collection from over those same years by Alice Coltrane is
therefore inherently beautiful to me, but it is also a gorgeous collection of
ensemble chanting and musical embellishment, like opener Om Rama that is bathed
in sweeping electronica, like spiraling sirens to pun a little, before moving
into solo male vocal chant, echoed by the vocal ensemble, before ending on a
heightened synth, so to speak.
Alice Coltrane leads on the second Om Shanti, a church organ
setting an ironic, though not badly so, background for her beautiful chant, a
fulsome and soulful wording. This then merges into the ensemble whole which is
simply gorgeous, again. Third Rama Rama is similarly sweet with more
orchestration and sitar with synth running the focal strain; fourth Rama Guru
returns to an ensemble, with handclaps, setting. It is the mix of ‘studio’ and ‘live’
sounds that give variation, though it is all naturally set, naturally.
Further chants have a more distant sound, but the whole is
exquisite and conveys such a wonderful sense of joyous community delivered
through faith and music, a spiritual state of seemingly fundamental innocence as
opposed to the fundamentalist proclivities elsewhere in our world today.
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