2020 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Chinmaya’s first-ever album. A few extracts from his diary.
As background I should explain that, with my German girlfriend, I had flown into Munich from Pune in early spring 1990, shortly after Osho left his body in January, and after we had briefly tried – and rejected – Australia as a place to live.
Friday, 4th May 1990
Here in Germany, everything has to start from zero. Apart from passing through on the hippy trail back in ’75 I’ve never spent any time in Europe. My ignorance of German is so comprehensive that I have to be corrected as we pass the signs saying ‘Ausfahrt’ on the autobahn. I’ve been assuming they must be signposts to a vast city of that name that we are circling. Driving involves negotiating around rickety Trabants, full of excited East Germans enjoying their new-found freedom after the fall of the Wall.
For the first weeks I’m walking around with only a few coins in my pocket, carefully buying the cheapest food. I’m pointed to the only Indian restaurant in town interested in live music and soon face typical Indian delays in firming up a deal. How desperately I could use the sixty Deutsche Mark that I’m told they pay!
I may not have much in my pocket, but in my heart I’m carrying some of the juiciest music I’ve ever heard and played – live from Buddha Hall, Osho Commune, Pune.
But right now, as we have decided that Germany is to be our home, it’s how to get a job in the face of all this bureaucracy? I can’t get an Arbeitserlaubnis ‘til I have an Auftenhaltserlaubnis, which I can’t get until my tax is settled with the Finanzamt, which can’t be done until I have a Versicherung…
Once I sort out all the paperwork I start a new job for the first time in eight years, as an employee at a sannyasin-owned business, at Swadesha Tofurei, earning fifteen Marks an hour making tofu and cleaning. It’s a five am start after a bike ride across the city and hard grind, but at least I can get by with English there.
And it’s not all bad. Shortly after my arrival, Osho’s physician comes from Pune to give a talk at Munich’s packed Osho Tao Meditation Centre. Followed by a big music festival to which I am welcomed as if this was the Commune itself. Turns out that many of my fellow musicians from Pune are choosing Munich to live and Sunday morning live music meditations at Tao host vocalist Neera, kora player Ravi Freeman, multi-instrumentalists Prem Joshua and Amareesh, guitarist Vidroha Jamie, singer-songwriter Bindu and others. A bonus is the appearance of Bhikkhu and Waduda, in the process of setting up Tao Music (today New Earth Records) here in Munich.
Best news last: they have offered Joshua, Ravi and me a recording contract!
Monday, 29th May
Making tofu spreads, packaging Algen/Pilze smoked tofu, driving the okara (waste) to the local pig farm. Today as I arrived they split a dead pig in half in front of my queasy eyes.
So what am I carrying in my heart? The answer is ringing in my ears as I work: fragments of melodies created ‘on the hop’ before a performance; shimmering guitar chords picked out behind my sarod in a quiet jam with a friend in Nullah Park; world-eclectic grooves played by percussionists from every continent in Buddha Hall.
And out of this tapestry a few themes recur again and again: my first ever ‘gat’ (or composition) in a raga (it was ‘Shivranjani’) that mysteriously popped out of me five years ago, a mere year after I’d had my first lesson on sarod in London; highlights from a sequence of improvisations tossed out casually mid-raga by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan – each one a gem in itself, but for the master mere baubles decorating the majestic unfolding of the raga; a melody that appeared while playing for a live Sufi whirling event in Pune. All are elements that I plan to present to my fellows as ideas to work on.
Week from 10th till 17th June
We have been given a big room in a house outside the city to record in and I’ve taken a week off from the smell of boiling soybeans. The three of us are joined by Neera on vocals, Pramada on cello and Babu Alam, a Bengali tabla player. Pragito has flown over from London to do the sound engineering. Like me, the others too have brought a few musical ingredients to toss into a pot and we begin by presenting these and sorting out what we can collectively cook with.
By the second day we are each ensconced behind a pile of mattresses to stop our sound bleeding from one microphone into another and are preparing to record live. This will turn out to mean endless retakes, as a tiny mistake from any one of us means starting the recording again from the beginning. (Reel to reel tape recording – real history in today’s computer age!)
We begin with a track based on Joshua’s and my mutual love for the half major-half minor musical scale used in Raga ‘Charukeshi’. We’d worked together on this back in Pune, knee to knee, with me on sarod and Joshua swapping between sitar, sax and bamboo flute, exchanging lines, inspiring each other to find a complement. Now at the moment of recording we have Babu to keep us tight in time while the rest of the band simply add whatever they feel, or not. (In the end Charukeshi didn’t make it onto the Terra Incognita album but it can be heard in the video below.)
(I can’t believe what I just chanced upon on one of my external hard drives: another track, ‘Kirwani’, which didn’t make it onto our second Terra Incognita album, ‘Tribal Gathering’. I re-recorded it under the title ‘Fire’ in 1996 for my Feng Shui CD Part 1 on Nightingale Records. But here below the original from 1991 with Prem Joshua and Ravi – Osho News readers have an exclusive ‘first’!)
Our next day is dedicated to Ravi’s kora-based ‘Bap du Bap’. Deceptively simple, the theme that emerges from his fingers on those African gut stings calls for nothing more dominating than nuance in response. Less-is-more is often the best tip when faced with something difficult and unfamiliar (we are continents away from my comfort territory of Hindustani Classical here). So I sit back and let the others do most of the embellishments.
On the third day I suggest we try a seven beat. My basic idea recalls Amjad Ali Khan’s ‘Raga Zilla Kafi’, which I heard him perform in London years before. We’re all fired up by the fun of being seven (including Pragito), playing in seven and discovering at the end of our best take that it’s seven minutes long. (I will discard almost half of it during final mixdown later in the summer when it suddenly becomes clear when a statement is made and finished with.)
The fourth day is a long one, with endless retakes of ‘Shepherd’s Dream’, loosely based on some half-remembered lines from my favourite Indian classical record (‘Raga Mishra Mand’ on Ali Akbar Khan’s ‘Morning and Evening Ragas’ LP). My short improvisation midway through is a major challenge – I’m being overambitious. But the piece turns out to be perhaps the best balanced from the whole week’s recording, with lovely contributions from each of us.
The fifth day is hard work on Joshua’s moody ‘Darshan’, while the sixth is spent with Pramada, putting his ‘Oriental Expression’ ballad into overdrive. We are all tired by the rainy final day, Babu and I while away the morning playing fast gats in Raga ‘Bhairagi‘, which everyone enjoys but don’t record well because of my many mistakes. Josh and I sit uninspired, fooling around in the minor scale raga ‘Darbari‘: “I just can’t hear it anymore. Too depressing.”
“Yeah perhaps we should create something cheerful?” So, ‘Himalayan Celebration’ is born out of a composition from Villayat Khan I remembered from years ago. One take and done. Seven of us celebrate the end of the recording with clapping, cheers, bells and cymbals, all captured on tape. TERRA INCOGNITA, ‘the unknown land’ has been initiated.
Wednesday, 27th June
The Isar south of München, steep-sided, thickly-wooded on crumbling glacial boulder clay, the shallow river racing over coloured pebbles from deep in the Alps. I walk through pine forest to the ridge above it and plunge down vertically into the willows and bog at the bottom. Not a soul in any direction, I could be in wildest Canada. Suddenly a raft full of beer-swilling Bavarians careens downstream, an um-pa-pa band onboard playing ‘Oh When the Saints’.
Jamie and I have had a couple of sessions in the forest high above the riverbanks, weaving textures out of guitar and sarod. Two promising pieces emerge, one of them a melody he remembers me coming up with at a live music dancing meditation in Buddha Hall a year before. (I’m glad he was able to remind me of it for although we don’t record it this time, almost a decade later it will be released as ‘Chance Meeting’ – Paul McCartney’s favourite – on our CD, ‘Celtic Ragas’)
August
Bhikkhu and Waduda arrange for Terra Incognita to get our proper maiden gig as support act for bamboo flute maestro Hariprasad Chaurasia in Munich’s prestigious Gasteig Concert Hall. At dinner afterwards Hariprasad tells us how much he’s enjoyed listening to the live feed piped into his changing room, and then entertains us with stories about Osho, who he’d met when they were both young.
Monday, 3rd September
A new recording session. Over a few days I record ‘Sarox’ with Joshua (also ended up unreleased) and watch him and Ravi creating ‘Amazonas Juan’, ‘Blind Man in the Bazaar’ and ‘NYC Rainy Afternoon’. Jamie and I present the second result of our forest sessions, his touching composition ‘Hamsafar’, while a final session brings us all together to ramble carefree over a funny little melody ‘Paddy Goes to Poona’. It looks like we have an album!
I’m proud to have come up with the name for our band, with the title being an inspiration of Joshua’s taken from an Osho discourse. The cassette version was released in the autumn of 1990 with the rights to reproduce it shared between Tao Music and the Commune in Pune. The CD version followed a year later. It was a modest seller for Tao and deleted from the renamed New Earth Records by the late nineties, but continues to be sold in Pune and piped regularly into the Resort’s Welcome Centre.
Prem Joshua has gone on to become a world name in East-West fusion, while Ravi has brought his kora playing and multi-instrumentalist skills to numerous musical collaborations in the UK. Pramada, Neera, Pragito, Amareesh and Bindu have all passed on to the further shores. For myself I feel utterly blessed to have been in the right place at the right time to initiate my thirty years of CD creation with them.
‘No Goal But the Path’ by Terra Incognita is available from shop.osho.com – amazon.com
More about this album: chinmaya-dunster.com
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