Laraaji’s music helps fans achieve a sense of balance
New Age performer Laraaji got there first — now the world is trying to get on his level
Laraaji is in a place of peace. The 77-year-old New Age musician has spent the past several months the same way most people have — at home. For him that’s a Harlem apartment. He has a piano, electronic instruments and a zither — an instrument with an array of strings that overhang a resonating body that produces a twangy, ethereal sound — the zither being the one that became his main creative outlet.
Talking to Laraaji, it is clear he has spent years cultivating an internal life that revolves around stillness but is teeming with activity, much like the music he has been producing since the late 1970s.
In the same period as the New Age boom, Laraaji has become canonized. As the world seems to become increasingly ravaged by tumult, more people are turning to Laraaji’s music to achieve a sense of balance. With the external world thrust into the contradictory duality of chaos and stagnation, he is drawing on his practice of looking inward at an existence he sees as eternal, imbued with joy and playfulness. One he feels can also be transformational.
Laraaji’s own transformation was gradual. It was the piano he played as a boy in a Brooklyn church that became his primary focus.
“My teachers didn’t really dictate the direction of the music I would eventually learn to play,” he says, “but they were a great help in getting me to assume the attitude of the serious piano student. That set up my understanding of how to take any new practice seriously in your life: to devote five hours a day if you want to consider yourself moving toward being a committed artist.”
After graduating from Howard, Laraaji moved to New York to become an actor and comedian while immersing himself in Eastern religion and New Age thought. He began to understand different levels of spiritual awakening as “vibratory planes,” and as he established a dedicated meditation practice, it reawakened his desire to re-engage with music-making. After what he describes as a “sound vision,” a moment during meditation in which he was able to hear and experience those vast, universal reverberations, he bought his first zither.
He soon customized it, modifying the instrument with electronics to replicate the sounds he had received during his revelatory moment. In 1980, he was playing this instrument in a corner of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village when Brian Eno, the U.K. musician and producer who had recently worked with the likes of Devo and Talking Heads, overheard him playing. Eno invited him into the studio to record what would become Laraaji’s best-known record, Day of Radiance, the third instalment in Eno’s historic Ambient series.
Day of Radiance is a masterwork of timbral unity. Laraaji relies entirely on the augmented zither, each stroke of the hammer on the strings evoking brilliant, overlapping points of light, like a setting sun hitting tiny waves on a gently rolling ocean. The album is made up of three Dances, pieces of crystalline clarity that leap and twist around a central chord, and two Meditations, ruminative expanses that drift in and out of different moods and tonalities. It is in the context of a late-career revitalization buoyed by accelerating external discord that Laraaji released his newest album, Sun Piano, a return to his origins.
It was recorded with the musician sitting at a piano in a Brooklyn church, by himself except for producer Jeff Zeigler, improvising themes that are inspired nearly as much by the R&B and soul music of his youth as they are New Age. Returning to the instrument he first learned to play allowed him to access those formative moments and filter them through an entire lifetime’s worth of experiences with contemplative practice.
Sun Piano draws on a metaphor he has used as a guiding principle for other recent albums: that of the sun as a source of spiritual guidance and renewal. It isn’t coincidental that his first experiences playing the piano were also some of his earliest encounters with religion. They seem to have become fused in his mind.
“The piano is an instrument that gives voice to how I hold space for light,” Laraaji says. “If you were sitting in the church, you’d look and see that there’s a man at the piano, someone playing a physical instrument.
“However, were you to close your eyes and let the piano coax, guide and escort the emotional imagination, there is a good chance that you would feel a lightness. A luminosity ... I don’t feel that I have to bring true light or peace to anyone.
“This ocean is everywhere already,” Laraaji says. “Music and sound are just ways to unlock our dormant memory that right where we are is a whole ocean of peace, perfection, oneness, eternity.”