Paramahansa Yogananda - Chants and Prayers

Self-Realization Fellowshop - LP
US, 1961
Instrumental / Chants & Prayers / Yoga

Quite mesmerizing dry lo-fi ballads labelled as Chants & Prayers by Los Angeles Yoga superstar, who famously influenced the likes of George Harrison and Steve Jobs. Hard to label, but it reminds of early exotica-era Sun Ra especially the Rimsky-Korsakov harmonium cover Song of India...

It's hard to write about this record as if it was not a soft power product made by a world-famous guru and yoga master - who's greatly responsible for the huge development of Western Yoga culture in the late 20th Century - but I'll try to focus on the music. Paramahansa Yogananda's story is famous (he sold millions of copies of his autobiography) but it sure casts a light on how the music he recorded on this 1961 record came to be such a weird blend of Indian and US music: the use of delays (then only used in groundbreaking US pop songs, Les Paul & Mary Ford's How High The Moon, and Elvis' Blue Moon Of Kentucky), the percussions and the harmonium played by the yogi himself (who chants in English). It's hard not to see something programmatic in these arrangement choices, the metaphorical meeting of East and West that culminates on the only instrumental track on the LP, an arrangement of Russian classical composer Rimsky-Korsakov's Song of India...

The rest of the album is lead by Yogananda's voice, that has almost childish qualities; maybe partly due to the repetitiveness and simplicity of the lyrics ("O God Beautiful, O God Beautiful"). The result is quite psychedelic, but almost unintendedly, precisely because of the music's rusticity and naive jollyness. (VG+/VG)

Tracklist

1. Prayer At Dawn
2. O God Beautiful!
3. Hey Hari Sundara!
4. What Lightning Flash!
5. God, Christ, Gurus.
6. In The Temple Of Silence
7. Song Of India
8. Shanti Mundiray
9. Prayer Of Eventide