With an Om and a Chuckle, Krishna Das Rocks Vancouver

By Linda Solomon for The Vancouver Observer

“Five years ago I was stuck in a room with a guy I didn’t like.  Me," Krishna Das joked to an audience of some 1000 people at Saint Andrews Wesley United Church on Burrard Friday night. The event was sponsored by Banyen Books and Sound, Vancouver’s venerable New Age and spiritual book store.  The joke was funny, particularly because of Krishna Das’s deadpan delivery.  His timing was impeccable, the punch line coming after a perfectly drawn out beat. The joke came mid-concert and belonged to a repertoire of self-effacing comments that built, as the concert went on, creating the impression of a humble, spiritual seeker, who, with the passage of years, had only grown more aware of his human foibles, or, in his own words, of  “my miserable life.”

As the beloved singer, who was born Jeffrey Kagel in 1947 in Long Island, New York, scanned the packed church, he delivered the first in a series of sardonic, well-placed punch lines.  There were hundreds squeezed into the pews, people standing in the spaces behind the pews, and filling the balcony.  Looking out at the crowd, he shook his head and with the seen-it-all, done-it-all shrug of the New Yorker said,  “There must not be much happening in Vancouver tonight .”

In fact, there was plenty going on and the packed hall was a measure of how beloved Krishna Das’s has become in his years as an Indian kirtan-style musician.  It also spoke to the number of people who resonate with his Hindu based chants, and the devotional path to meditation the singer acquired from discipleship with the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, who was made famous by the writings of Ram Dass, and who died in 1973.  "It was either this or pump gas," he quipped.

Krishna Das then ushered the audience through an ecstatic musical journey that meandered through 15 devotional chants over three hours, including a surprise upbeat foray into a rendition of “Jesus Is on That Mainline, Tell Him What You Want” past Hare Krishna Hare Raam and onwards to the climatic Om Namaha Shivaaya, accompanied throughout by harmonium, tabla, violin and bass guitar.  After the traditional American song, Krishna Das explained that he had grown up not knowing much about Jesus, because “I was Jewish on my parents’ side.”

Turns out, the guy Krishna Das was stuck with in the room five years ago, was a guy who had just returned to the ashram of the guru who had changed his life as a young man.  Krishna Das had lived in India for almost three years in the early 1970s. His heart was especially drawn to the practice of Bhakti yoga—the yoga of devotion and he said that Neem Karoli Baba led him deeper and deeper into the practice of kirtan—chanting the names of God.  

"We would come against our fears and our stuff and then he'd just kill it with love.  He would just look at you and giggle and you would forget your stuff,” Krishna Das has said of his teacher.

Off tempo kirtan practitioners, accomplished musicians, yoga teachers, massage therapists, patchouli-scented  septuagenarians, and business people, mixed with magazine publishers, politicians.  "All the key movers and shakers in Vancouver's White Light Mafia are here tonight," a man told the woman at his side.  Women in flowing silk dresses danced at the edges of the stage, babies gurgled during the prolonged silences that followed each chant, and all around the church, people raised their voices and sang, forming a beautiful harmonic wave that filled the hall.


Krishna Das played the harmonium accompanied by Genevieve Walker on the violin, Alan Arjun Bruggeman on the tabla and Patrick Hammond on bass guitar.   

photo of Krishna Das by Rameshwar Das (c)2007
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