Imagine if you will ...watching in rapt attention as an artist completes a live painting in front of you, serenaded by diverse singers and instrumentalists and inspired by quotations like this: Can you paint upon the page of the world the ideal pictures of the Celestial Concourse? The pictures which are in the ideal world are eternal. I wish you to become such an artist. Man can paint those ideal ...
The next few weeks promise to be pretty eventful. A cross-section of the Nashville Bahá'í community is engaged in a project called the Music City Initiative, which builds on a vision which the Badasht Project piloted 7 years ago in Victoria, BC. The idea is to bring music and the arts into the forefront of the community's activities, thereby bringing a more intense spirit into everything we do. Close Encounters (...
JB here again, with #2 in my series of Badasht Track Notes, this time taking a look at the Unity Prayer. Being that the oneness of humanity is the central concept of the Bahá'í Faith, the inspiring words of the Unity Prayer have served as a focal point for countless devotional gatherings and firesides - often musically. There seems to be no end to the melodic possibilities of this naturally ...
Last night at a concert, a lady in the audience admitted to wondering if it was OK to set the Bahá'í Writings to music in a way that made her want to move and dance and get happy. This was after hearing us play a twanged-up Moanin' Sons version of Whither Can a Lover Go - which, while certainly one of our more intense pieces using the Writings as ...
My first experience reading anything resembling recovery literature was The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It came about as a necessity: I was in LA trying to break into the songwriting world, and through a series of events I won't get into here, my well had dried up. I wasn't writing, or doing much else, yet I felt like there was creative potential all around me. Around that time, I ...
Hi, JB here. I thought it might be fun to get into the background of some of the original Badasht songs, who and what was involved, a few anecdotes and so on. Maybe it will bring out the inner music geek in you! We'll start with the Healing Suite, from Badasht Vol. 1. The creation of Healing Suite was one of the coolest musical experiences of my life. First of all, ...