Monastery Tibetan Choir to Be at CalArts and UCLA

It’s an intriguing picture:

The 21 Buddhist monks who make up the Dalai Lama’s personal choir riding in a van to between concerts of chants, swaying gently to the music of Otis Redding and the Supremes.

“I was playing Otis,” said Mickey Hart, drummer/percussionist for the Grateful Dead and self-styled ethnomusicologist. “And they liked it. I mean, they’re not screaming out the window when they hear Otis; they smile and they move back and forth. They’re very light, fun-loving people.”

It is not the image that one might conjure by the name Gyuto Tantric Monastery Tibetan Choir. Or by the group’s astonishing sonic contortion of Sanskrit texts meant to purify the soul and the environment.

Hart, under the auspices of the Grateful Dead, is sponsoring the monks’ tour, which includes stops tonight at CalArts in Valencia and Wednesday at UCLA’s Royce Hall. It is their second U.S. visit (an earlier incarnation of the choir made a few stops in the United States in 1985) and their first stop in Southern California.

“They’ve only been out (of Asia) a few times in 450 years,” said Hart, reached by phone in San Rafael. “There’s nothing quite like this.”

The monks’ unique religious discipline consists largely of chanting, which in some cases finds them performing ritual chants from 5:30 a.m. until nearly midnight at their monastery in northeastern India.

Most remarkably, each choir member is capable of singing chords; resonances of three separate notes can be clearly heard in each voice. And, while the average range of the human voice is about 2 1/2 octaves, the monks’ voices span six.

“It’s a feat, actually,” continued Hart, who first heard the choir on a tape given to him in 1968 by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. “This is a very athletic thing to do. . . . Each monk holds three notes simultaneously: a root, a third and a fifth. It’s quite amazing and quite beautiful.”

And on this tour it is all aimed at raising money to build a new monastery in Nepal, where the Dalai Lama and monks wish to relocate, and to support Tibet House, a nonprofit New York-based organization aimed at supporting Tibetan refugees.

So far, the monks have been pleasantly surprised.

“They were a little nervous the first day,” said Thupten Dadak, a former member of the choir now acting as interpreter. “But the people were so friendly that they were surprised and feel very comfortable now. Only three of them were here for the last tour. They are very amazed at the materialistic style of living, especially--but they are more amazed at how interested in them the American people are.”

The monks’ order was founded in 1474 in Tibet. They fled their homeland with thousands of Tibetans and their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, during the Chinese invasion of 1959. The Tantric College choir visited Europe twice in the early ‘70s, but very rarely chants outside the monastery. The performances given on this tour, Dadak explained, consist of a segment of their daily practice rituals.

“Each chant has different significance,” Dadak explained from the monks’ retreat at the Zen Center in Green Gulch, north of San Francisco. “But I can say that the basic chanting purpose is for peace and happiness for every life, not only human life.”

The chants are accompanied by various instruments: horns, bells, small trumpets--and even drums made from human skulls.

Explained Hart: “They look for seamless crania that have certain musically advantageous characteristics to put a drum head over. Or a thigh bone might have a certain configuration that would make it good for a trumpet. It’s not spooky or anything. It is meant to show the impermanence of life, and it really brings it on home.”