Laaraji
Saturday 02 Jul 2022 from 8pm to 9:30pm
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Presented with Epoch and with the support of Ramdane Touhami
On the occasion of the launch of Epoch magazine, New York artist Laraaji transforms the Fondation into a space of meditation during a concert!
Since his beginnings in the 1970s, when he played transe improvisations in the street with an autoharp augmented with various electronic effects (a kind of trapezoidal instrument similar to the Hindustani santoor), Laraaji has made it his mission to transcend and heal through music.
If, as Steve Reich said, "All good music has a story", Laraaji's career is like a tale that begins with an Englishman on a trip to New York who falls in love with a street musician playing a trapezoidal instrument similar to the Hindustani santoor.
The Englishman is called Brian Eno. The street musician is not yet called Laraaji but Edward Larry Gordon. A former student of Howard University, enamoured of oriental philosophy, he has swapped his guitar for this instrument, which he has electrified himself. Eno produced the album Day of Radiance for his Ambient collection at the end of the 1970s, a seminal record in which one finds influences from New Age atmospheres as much as from the music of American minimalists or traditional Indian music. In the early 2000s labels such as Soul Jazz, Warp and more recently Leaving Records brought Laraaji back into the spotlight with elegant reissues. For nearly 40 years, Laraaji has deepened his knowledge of meditation and yoga, including the yoga of laughter and the yoga of sound with Sri Brahmananda Sarasvati, and was given the title, after his master's death, of Nadabrahmananda (master of sound).