5 years after the Laya Project journey began, urban music embraces diverse traditions and cultures in Laya Project’s musical celebration of life.
Laya Project documents regional folk music traditions in remote villages that lay in the 2004 Asian tsunami’s path.
Laya Project’s musicians are the people of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar and India. Performances of unknown local musicians were filmed and recorded on-location, arranged and mixed to create a composition that embarks on a musical journey crossing borders, while still preserving the music of the people.
Five years later, bridging the distance, urban music embraces diverse traditions and cultures in Laya Project’s musical celebration of life… A New Day.
MC Yogi is my true home boy from out in the cuts of West Marin where we grew up. For the past decade or so he’s been serving as a yoga teacher (with his amazing wife Amanda), all the while cultivating the persona of MC Yogi, Bhakti lyricist and new-school kirtanwalla. One day he came at me with this strong energy and focus to bust out an album, so we got together and envisioned the sound: beyond hip-hop, beyond kirtan, beyond yoga music – a new incarnation of world-centric devotional music for the modern-day seekers out there. Ganesh is Fresh, Rock On Hanuman, the title track Elephant Power, and Om Namah Shivaya sprouted out of a pile of dusty breakbeats and tablas, and then we met up with the extremely talented Sean Dinsmore (“Don”) of the Dum Dum Project and created Elephant Power.
Everyone blessed this album. The generous people of our home town contributed money at a dinner held at Yoga Toes. Jai Uttal, Krishna Das, Bhagavan Das, Sukhawat Ali Khan, Rita Sahai, Manose, Geoffrey Gordon, Sharon Gannon, Niraj Chag, Parmita and Joel at White Swan, and many others brought their magic, and the results are something so unique and beautiful and accessible that almost anyone will love this album. And this is just the first one!
Get it at iTunes and watch us get from #9 to #1 on the Top Albums in the world category!
I’m proud of this one. I created this track from some samples from an awesome act I’d recently recorded, The Ebb & Flow Possibility Show, with Evan McGown on the upright bass and Andrew Reissiger on the nylon (Bronkar Lee beatboxes on the original).
This track was birthed in a few hours and Yogi had some very inspiring words that he finessed into some powerful verses. We then poured through Obama speeches on YouTube and found the most inspiring one to be his speech at the DNC in ’04. At the same time, White Swan was preparing to print 10,000 of them for the DNC in Denver. I ended up scratching excerpts from Obama’s speech (which eerily fit into 16 bar phrases and at times sounds like he’s rapping too).
This is my girl Soukeyna, an amazing vocalist from Oakland who writes and sings in Portuguese, French, Wolof, and English. Her songs are so unique and beautiful, and I’ve been so honored to know and work with such a fresh, world-class artist. We brought Jason Bodlovich in for his beautiful bossa nova guitar arrangements, funky electric on Waxhale, and drum kit and percussion (including his cuica alter-ego). Uriah Duffy came through on the bass for Waxhale, and Taylor Cutcomb stroked the upright on Quando Voce Chega. It wouldn’t be the same without Alex Cathayud’s pandeiro and tambourin. Such a great project – and there’s so much more where that came from!
In addition to producing, mixing, arranging, instruments, and everything else that went into this EP, I also designed the art! Limited Edition CDs in digipacks available soon.
