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Baker's Dozen

Delving Into Consciousness: Hamid Drake's Favourite Music
Sean Kitching , September 4th, 2019 09:47

Percussionist Hamid Drake guides Sean Kitching through 13 favourite albums of cosmic enlightenment courtesy of Alice and John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix and much more. Photo by Ludmilla Faccenda

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Alice Coltrane - Journey In Satchidananda
Years before I’d become familiar with the music of John Coltrane - his earlier stuff and then later stuff that he did with his wife Alice. When he passed on, she started doing her own music and that touched me very much. I was a young teenager, starting to get involved in spirituality and her music rocked my world. When she released Journey In Satchidananda, which means ‘existence, knowledge, bliss’ in Sanskrit, it was a term that I was familiar with. The resonance of the music became something that I would sit and listen and try and meditate to. I didn’t really know much about proper forms of meditation but I would just sit and be in that space with the music.