– 26 February 2024
Antar Richard Garneau
by his son, Pascal Garneau
Antar (Richard) Garneau died of natural causes at his home in Berkeley, California in February of 2024. He was 74 years old.
Music was my father’s life. This is what should be said above all else. His devotion to music was absolute, from the time he was a teenager until the day he died – his guitar was beside his bed. Growing up in the Bay Area and coming of age in the 1960s, he played and sang rhythm & blues in several groups, obsessed with and influenced by BB King, Clapton, Peter Green, and Muddy Waters.
When he discovered Indian classical music in the 1970s, it forever altered his path. In 1971 he studied sitar in Berkeley with Nikhil Banerjee and in the late-70s traveled to Kolkata, India to study music with the great sarod master Ali Akbar Khan. As fortune would have it, Khan relocated to the USA and opened a college of music in Marin County which allowed Antar to devote his time to the practice and study of Indian Classical music.
He and my mom were young parents, she becoming pregnant with my sister Sylvanne while they were still in high school. I came along seven years later and our folks managed to keep it together for at least another four years, so I was very young and my memories of that time period are only quick flashes. In our house in Fairfax, CA my sister and I shared a room so dad could have a room devoted to his practice. You can infer what you want from that arrangement! 😉
After my folks split up, my dad moved around a bit from Marin County to Hawaii to pursue music and surfing, then to Los Angeles to pursue acting and music. He studied ethno-musicology at University of Hawaii and later UCLA, where he got his PhD and taught music there for four years.
I believe it was the mid-1980s when he became interested in Osho and meditation. His mother Meera (Marie-Thérèse Engel), my grandma, was a sannyasin and, from what I’ve been told, lived for a time at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. I remember them in their orange robes and beads when they would come to visit.
It seemed to me then that because Osho was his mother’s thing my dad was a little skeptical of it. He’s not much of a follower by nature and bristles at any type of authority or power. But he very much enjoyed the lifestyle and the vibe of the culture. I believe it was the late-80s when he went to Pune and took sannyas. He lived there, off and on, as a musician and sannyasin. He had many stories from that time and he told me those were some of the best years of his life.
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Many years passed with little contact and after an attempted “family reunion” in the mid-90s, which resulted in a major falling out, he and I didn’t speak for about fifteen years. Thankfully we eventually rekindled and had fourteen years of friendship before he died.
We worked through our difficulties, my own resentments, and settled into a loving, though somewhat complicated, relationship. He moved to Marin County, where I live with my family, to be closer to me and then eventually to Berkeley where he remained. We chatted a lot online, talked about music, about life. We would occasionally get together and eat Indian food and reminisce.
Still… until the very end… it was music. I’ve never known someone more devoted to music than my dad. He spent nearly all of his life studying music and practicing guitar and sitar, day and night, no matter what, even at the expense of family, close friends, and earning a stable income. As a musician myself, I recognize his total devotion and dedication to his art, though being his son it is bittersweet, missing out on having him as a “dad” in the normal sense. Don’t worry, I turned out fine.
He was active on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and various online music-related groups. He was prolific on YouTube, having uploaded hundreds of performance videos of himself playing jazz guitar, classical Indian music on sitar, and more recently some spoken word stories about his life. You can search Antar Blue on YouTube if you want to find his channel (youtube.com).
He was a true original, highly intelligent, very funny – sometimes his stubbornness and sharp tongue got him in trouble. Big belly laughs, a great sense of humor and an engaging storyteller. He would often command the room and hold court, a trait he inherited from his mother, a charismatic matriarch who ran an ashram in the Bay Area before the Osho days.
There was no memorial service, but I have been listening to a lot of Miles Davis, Joe Pass, and Chet Baker and thinking kind thoughts about him. In some ways it has now become easier to love him unconditionally.
Here is one of the last jazz videos he made and one of my favorite Miles Davis tunes Blue in Green:
Here’s a bonus video, Antar tells the story of when he saw The Beatles:
Alert thanks to Rama Meir Suissa
More Tributes
Oh my, he was great presence in Venice and our meditation Center in Laguna…
Thank you for your tribute.
Viramo enjoyed his gifts too.
Fly high, Antar.
Love,
Ma Deva Liberty
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