Kabir Bhajans

I'm looking for living rooms.

For the last few years I've been producing devotional music with full arrangements — tabla, strings, layers of it. Beautiful, but somewhere in there I lost the thing that made me want to sing in the first place.

So I've stripped it back to Kabir. One voice, one guitar, nothing else.

Kabir was a weaver in Banaras six hundred years ago. He refused to belong to anybody's religion and annoyed all of them, and he sang about a divine with no name and no form — nirguna, "without attributes." Which is exactly why Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and people of no faith at all have kept singing him ever since.

I've put those songs to simple melody, along with verses from Nanak, Meera and Dadu. Sung in Hindi, with the meanings shared in English. An hour, no intermission.

Here is what I need to sing at your place: a room, a chair, and a few people who'd sit and listen. Twelve or two hundred, either is fine. No stage. No sound system, though I'll gladly use one if you have it.

And no fee. It's offered on a donation basis — a bowl by the door, or nothing at all. Kabir gave his songs away at the loom; nobody bought a ticket in fifteenth-century Banaras.

Homes, yoga studios, temples, libraries, community rooms. I'm in Piscataway and I'd love to start close to home.

Listen first, then decide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpssijQC2is

To invite me: nayar@indianmusic.us ·Call Me · WhatsApp Me