THE YOGA JOURNAL
"JAI UTTAL & THE PAGAN LOVE ORCHESTRA"

by Derk Richardson

On five video screens around the stage, images of daily life and spiritual culture in India flow through a shifting visual panorama. On other walls of the nightclub, the phosphorescent glow of black light paintings compounds the psychedelic aura. The mushy scent of incense commingles with the savory aromas of simmering curries, and Indian women whirl around the stage in unconventional choreography based on traditional dances.

The entire scene is bound together by silky musical strains emanating from the stage, upon which sits a band leader pumping a harmonium or plucking a dotar and singing his chant-like lyrics in a reedy tenor voice. A mixed-age, multi-ethnic crowd sways to the beat.

The party's mastermind is DJ Cheb i Sabbah, who spins mesmerizing world beat dance mixes between sets of live music. Its called "A Night on the Ganges," but it takes place not in Benares or Bhagalpur but in a San Francisco rock club called the Crash Palace. And the multi-instrumentalist /composer fronting the large ensemble known as the Pagan Love Orchestra is a New York-born musician named Jai Uttal.

For the past five years, since the release of his debut CD Footprints, Uttal has garnered a rapidly expanding audience among aficionados of south Asian music, world beat, new age, and cross-cultural jazz fusion. On that first album, Don Cherry (the jazz master who helped usher in the era of "free jazz" in Ornette Coleman's legendary early '60s quartet) played pocket trumpet; Lakshmi Shankar sang most of the lead vocals; tabla and bass provided the rhythm section; and Uttal tapped his usual panoply of instruments little known in the West -- ektar, gopichand, gubgubbi, swaramandala -- as well as electric guitar and various electronic enhancements. In his liner notes Uttal wrote of mixing "the music of the temples, the train stations, the dusty back roads, and the Himalayan peaks." In his studies and his travels he has been moved, he wrote, by "Voices uninhibited by training but schooled by years, maybe lifetimes, of reaching for the eternal," and he seeks to meld "ancient passions with modern technology."

On his subsequent recordings, Uttal has tinkered with and refined his musical vision. His second album, Monkey, released in 1992, expanded the embrace of his instrumentation to include saxophone, violin, Hammond organ, accordion, and Western drum kit. By the time he recorded last year's Beggars and Saints, Uttal had organized a band, the Pagan Love Orchestra, to give full voice to his compositions. He had also grown more confident about his singing, so that the majority of performances now featured his Peter Gabriel- or Steve Winwood-like voice with lyrics sung in English, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali. The fluid blend of the dotar, electric guitar, trombone, violin, keyboards, bass, percussion, reeds, and voices created a mesmerizing phantasmagoria unique in the often faddish realm of world music.

"Weirdly enough, I always think of my music as Indian music," says Uttal, who speaks quietly but with engaging enthusiasm. "I know it's not really, and I know it has a lot of elements of this and that, but in my own compositional approach I really think of it as Indian music. The core comes from ragas, folk music, devotional songs, and Baul songs. All the rest of the stuff--rock, dance, jazz--comes after the heart of the song is made up."

In an era of ubiquitous world beat, in which disco grooves, drum machines, and synthesizers are all too frequently grated with little care or authenticity onto "ethnic" traditions, Uttal is one of few musicians to play Indian music in a Western context while preserving the integrity of his sources. Violinists L. Subramanian and L. Shankar have applied their tonalities and techniques to jazz; tabla master Zakir Hussain moves multicultural audiences with his exciting Rhythm Experience band; sarodist Lisa Moskow has collaborated with an electronic musician who sculpts multi-dimensional soundscapes. But Uttal works from his own muse and stirs a singular blend that may have the broadest appeal of all. Significantly, he has come to his innovations not through an exotic imagination but on the path of concrete experience.

Uttal has always taken the notion of following his muse literally. He was born Doug Uttal and raised in the heart of Manhattan with a certain amount of musical predestination. His maternal grandmother had been a singer and a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies. His father worked as a record label executive in 1960ís and '70s. "I studied classical piano until I had the choice," Uttal remembers, "and then I stopped. I started playing harmonica and banjo, and I really got into folk music, hillbilly music, and obscure -time music like Roscoe Holcomb, as well as New Lost City Ramblers and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band."

In the late '60s, as a budding guitarist, Uttal was drawn to the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix and to the deeply expressive and not incidentally Indian-influenced jazz experiments of John Coltrane. He also listened to the more avant-garde strains of modern classical music. But even in high school it was the music of India and Bali that most profoundly captured his imagination.

In 1969 Uttal left New York to enroll at Reed College in Oregon. His stay was brief. "The night of fall registration for my freshman year, Ali Akbar Khan played a concert at Reed," Uttal recalls. "I'd listened to his records so much, but hearing him live was just it. I ended up staying at Reed for two months. I was failing all my classes, even music and religion. So I dropped out and moved to the Bay Area." Ali Akbar Khan, the great Indian sarod master, had established a music school in northern California's Marin County, and Uttal transplanted himself to study with the master. But once again his formal training in classical traditions would yield to a passion for music that comes more directly from populist roots.

In December of 1970, having been given the name Jai ("praise") by his first yoga teacher, Uttal made his first trip to India. Over the next few years he interspersed return pilgrimages to the south Asian subcontinent with study in California with vina player Z.M. Dagar and others. On one trip in 1974 he experienced a breakthrough that continues to affect his music today. With the same force of will that moved him from Oregon to California, Uttal journeyed to Bengal with the sole purpose of finding the legendary Bauls. "The first I'd heard of them was on this Nonesuch record called Street Singers of India: Songs of the Bauls of Bengal. Along with Ali Akbar Khan's music, that's what I was listening to when I was still in high school back in New York," Uttal explains. "In a way it's the opposite of classical music, because it's so free and so undisciplined and so untrained. It's so passionate and so spiritual without being religious in any way."

Uttal, who is guarded about the specifics of his own spiritual practices, clearly felt a kinship with the semi-nomadic Bauls. "They don't have any temples, and they don't have any images, which is very different from Hindu India," he says. "They took elements of Sufism and tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, and they created this way of expression that is very worshipful but totally non-formalized. There are no rules, no hierarchy, no spiritual intermediaries, and no texts except their songs. They have homes, but they 'visit' them only now and then as they travel around. They don't 'get' married but they are married."

"I had read a book about the Bauls," he continues, "and learned that they lived near the district of Bolpur in west Bengal about three hours west of Calcutta. So I went there and got a place in a little village called Shantiniketan. The village had been founded as an arts community by Nobel Prize-winning poet and write Rabindranath Tagore, who had argued for Indian appreciation of the long-oppressed Bauls as national cultural treasures. I just walked around until I saw a Baul. Then I followed him and tried to talk to him, but I didn't know any Bengali, and this was a little way-out place where few people spoke English."

Fortunately a big tent concert had been scheduled for the village during Uttal's stay, and among those present were two Bauls who had been photographed with Bob Dylan for the cover of the 1968 album John Wesley Harding. "They'd been to America and they could speak a little English," Uttal says, "and so I talked to them. They asked me if I had any LSD--they were really into it--but I didn't. We hung out together and somehow hooked up with one guy who made arrangements to come and give lessons at my house. It was just great. He helped us get instruments. He would sing me songs and I would write them down and my landlord, a real eccentric painter who spoke English perfectly, would translate them for me.

"Gradually the word got out, and all these other Bauls started coming to my house, and it became a big scene. The house became kind of a hang-out for all the Bauls who were passing through. We'd play and sing and eat and drink tea--it was just incredible. It didn't last that long, only about four months, but it was one of the most fun times of my life. Then it just got so hot there I had to get out."

Those experiences, as well as further travels in India, continue to inform Uttal's musical life. Several of the instruments he plays with the Pagan Love Orchestra--such as the dotar and gubgubbi--originated with the Bauls. "On those trips I also went around in the mountains and stayed in temples, hearing all the different forms of devotional music, the chanting and singing. In the kirtan form, for instance, they repeat the different names of god over and over and over for hours and hours and hours. The words are very simple but the melodies can get very elaborate. I remember one temple where 12 men were hired to chant this one mantra from, like six in the morning to 10 at night, every day. They were so great. Even though they were singing only four or five words for 16 hours a day, there was hardly ever any repetition in the melody.

"And because the temples in some small villages use loudspeakers, you can go down the street, and from five or six different directions you can hear people chanting, in all different keys and all different pitches. Over at that temple the singer might have this beautiful singing voice, and at this temple it could be a lady with an absolute monotone, but it just blends! On 'Radhe Radheí on the newest record, I yelled a little bit through the megaphone, trying to recreate some of the feeling of hearing the prayers coming out of the loudspeakers."

But Uttal did not immediately incorporate his Indian education into his public persona as a performer, although he did "hang out" and occasionally tour with Ram Dass in the late 1970s. Instead of Indian music, he played electric guitar in punk bands and, in the mid-'80s, with a Motown group called Motophonics. That band had a horn section that at one point included saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, a noted Berkeley, California, composer and band leader. During breaks and sound checks at Motophonics gigs, Uttal and Apfelbaum discovered their mutual interests in world music, and Apfelbaum invited Uttal to join his long-standing Hieroglyphics Ensemble, a big band that combines African and Caribbean rhythms, funk, R&B, and jazz improvisation.

In the meantime, Uttal continued his studies with Ali Akbar Khan, focusing on voice as well as sarod, and dabbled with demo tapes that reflected his pop music tendencies. All the while, he says, he was grappling with the challenge of bringing his Indian music into the performance realm. "The sarod is such a classical instrument, such a complex and demanding instrument," he says, "plus I'm not that great at it, so I felt like I really couldn't work it into the presentation of the music." The dotar, the Baul instrument that is similar to the sarod but has no sympathetic strings and easily adapts to an amplifying pick-up on the bridge, proved to be the vehicle for Uttal's muse.

"When I started working on the music for Footprints," Uttal says, "I wasn't even necessarily thinking that I would make a record, it was just sort of for myself. Then somewhere in there I ran into the guys who run Triloka Records--I'd first met them in India in 1971. They were just getting their record company off the ground and figuring out what they were going to do with it. I played them some of this record and they got really excited about it. I had no idea who was going to listen to it."

Footprints, released in 1991, received favorable reviews and considerable air play on public radio. Since then, Uttal's composing has gradually accommodated two major developments. One is the prominent role his voice has taken in the music. "I've become much less shy about singing," he says, and chanting has become a major source and inspiration for his songs. "I do Indian-style devotional singing, and some of it is in the context of writing music and making records, but most of it is just for my own practice.

That's probably the constant of my life, even when I practice music. I practice my instruments and scales, but I always go back to just sitting with the harmonium and singing and chanting."

In the past year or so, spurred by inquiries from curious audience members, Uttal and his longtime friend and percussionist Geoffrey Gordon have been conducting chanting workshops. "We decided to try setting up a situation where I could teach the different chants to people and we could sing them together for long periods of time--two or three hours--the way people actually do in the temples in India." Workshop participants have numbered from 20 up to 35 or so, and Uttal encourages them to let go of their concerns about that they sound like and just dive into the experience. "It still feels sort of experimental," he says of leading the workshops, "and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it because to some extent that practice is private for me."

The other vital force that directs Uttal's writing is the ensemble chemistry of his working band, the Pagan Love Orchestra. Of the name, he says: "It just sort of came when I was in a funny mood. It isn't literal, and the band is hardly an orchestra. But I think of a pagan as one who is trying to see God in everything and love God in all kinds of forms. I know that's not the dictionary definition, but that's what it means to me personally, which is sort of like more free-thinking Hinduism, with its very open spiritual outlook."

As Uttal's recordings have increasingly assumed an "orchestral" quality, his band's live performances have become much more than mere concerts. "When we're playing the music, I really try to create a space that's something of a different world that also has a spiritual sense to it. I know people think, 'Okay, this is Indian-based, so it's sort of spiritual.' But that's not exactly what I mean. I'm really into Indian musical and devotional expression. I enjoy the fact that we're able to do an Indian kind of music and that people are actually hearing it and liking it in some heartfelt way. But the real thing is that we are playing music from the heart. Whether it's Indian or not, that, to me, is spiritual expression."