Arty's Aarti

Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. How is it you love me So much for so little? The bed of the valley Is less stone than I. No matter how far off My life's stream meanders, Your sea of compassion Keeps drawing me hot. Though gloomy impressions Like mists would deny you, Your sun's affirmation Keeps making me sing. Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. Your beauty is blazing Like mountain moons on me, The snows of your silence Wash all my dirt clean. This forest so lonesome I'm hacking to reach you, Is full of birds singing 'He's closer than you!' Ah why should I wonder You give all for nothing? Your glance is so lovely, A steel heart would melt. Chorus My art is the craft of A thundering river Which acts to a pure sea Of stillness, your name. My heart I have mined for Good words and intentions, To burn off like incense All faults in your flame. Chorus. I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. Despite some every eligible candidates (Pete Townshend and Ronnie Laine for example) there is not an English or British aarti. I was for almost two weeks a lone Englishman and because of my regular ghazal readings at the morning and evening songs and prayers was nicknamed 'Arty' by one of the fifty Americans who outnumbered the Indian devotees and staff residing or on pilgrimage there. I played up to my role as the lone stage Englishman and so did everyone else. Sometime in the second week, one of the old Parsi followers comically 'exposed ' me as 'a Welshman in disguise' which all added to my reputation as 'quite the clown... and composer' (as Baba's niece, Meheru, the woman I am pictured with under Baba's picture in the final frame put it.) All of these elements combine in my attempt at an Aarti uttered from the British stiff upper lip. I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, adding a higher vocal, drums and harmonium.

Around Creation in 80 Minutes - The Baba Lovers "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love"

Sedgeford poet Gaz Calway has teamed up with the North Carolina singer-songwriter Gabriella Tal on an album of unusual lovesongs. The album - called "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love" - begins on an Indian hilltop with a devotional chant before taking the listener through a hell at the centre of earth and out the other side to Eden and in a thrilling ascent of seven heavens, each more enchanting and ego-free than the last.

"Hell isn’t other people; it's ourselves, our self-fulfilling

Cock up conspiracy clouds, our I-land's alien nation."

In the process, the performers experience a growing self-knowledge and meet ideas and characters drawn from all over the world and from all arts, cultures and Faiths.  There are references to Dante's hell, purgatory and heaven; the Arthurian quest for the grail; the Sufi 'Conference of the Birds;' the soul-realising love stories of Leila and Majnun and Lancelot and Guinevere;  Celtic maidens, Homeric and Hindu gods, Judaic angels,  Shiva's snake;  Jacob's ladder; and an immortal Light glimmering beyond the dark forest of the material world.

Listeners voyage through (inner) space like grail knights, preparing to overcome the terrifying challenge of the fourth heaven where ego and love struggle for final supremacy and to avoid a great fall back to the start. 

Dante was guided on a similar path by Virgil and Beatrice. Gaz and Gabriella are guided all the way to the Seventh Heaven by the written works of the twentieth century Indian Spiritual Master Meher Baba, at whose Tomb-shrine the musical game begins.

The attractively packaged album with 24 page lyric booklet is released on 31 January and available via www.thebabalovers.bandcamp.com where an online version is also available for download.  The duo's online single "Heavenly Moon" featuring two tracks from the album is available there now. The album releases here on 31 January 2019 - https://thebabalovers.bandcamp.com/album/6-degrees-of-separation-7-degrees-of-love