Heart Song - Ecstatic Music & Dance by Parvathy Baul with George Brooks

– BREAKING NEWS – Parvathy Baul has been denied entry to the US by US customs at San Francisco Airport. This event is cancelled. All tickets will be refunded.

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Join us for a celebration of divine love expressed through song, story, music and dance.

In this very special program, Parvathy Baul, the leading Sadhaka (practitioner) voice in the Baul tradition is joined by virtuoso saxophonist/composer George Brooks, renowned for his improvisational mastery and his deep understanding of Indian classical music. Together they will present a meditation in movement and sound, prayer and devotion, embodying a universality that transcends religious boundaries.

A mystic yogic tradition dating back centuries, Baul draws from traditions like Buddhism, Vaishnavism, Sufism, and Tantra. This eclectic mix of influences centers on universal human conditions in the face of divine unity. Listen through the veil of twilight language as they weave, in story and song, the poetry of life, love and nature sung in colloquial Bengali. In the Baul tradition every melody is a doorway for spiritual passage, every movement a step toward another state of being.

Parvathy Baul is a practitioner, performer and teacher of the Baul tradition from Bengal, India. She is also a multi-instrumentalist, dancer, storyteller and painter.

She has performed in over forty countries, including such prestigious concert halls and music festivals as the Noh Theater in Kyoto, the World Music Center in New York City, Melbourne Arts Center and the Festival of World Sacred Music in Fez, Morocco.

Hailed as the “leading voice in Indian Jazz fusion” George Brooks has been a regular collaborator with well-known masters of Hindustani and Carnatic traditions such as Zakir Hussain, Sultan Khan, Shankar Mahadevan and L. Subramaniam, as well such distinctive artists as John McLaughlin, Terry Riley, and Larry Coryell.

Venue

The candle-lit venue for this momentous event is strikingly apropos for its own mystic roots and deep abiding welcome of spiritual inquiry and expression in the arts. The Swedenborgian Church is named for the author of its multi-volume foundational texts by the prolific 18th Century scientific polymath turned mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who was termed by Buddhist proponent D.T Suzuki as "the Buddha of the North." In the west, his theological writings heavily influenced numerous members of the Transcendentalists, artists and poets such as Goethe, William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as psychologists such as Carl Jung and William James. This 1895 edifice in particular was designed in the emerging Arts & Crafts tradition with humble, raw natural materials and elements of simple design to embody symbolically spiritual “lessons” about the relation of humans and all of nature to the Divinity. Here everyone's loving reverence for the Divine and its creation is at home.