Dhani Harrison can't help but sound just like his father. It's not just his singing voice, or his aesthetic voice as a composer. When he enthuses about spiritual healing, unity with nature, and collaboration with master musicians from ancient non-Western cultures, he is the very echo of his father.
But in the case of Harrison, whose father was Jorge Harrison, who receives his inheritance honestly. All those years making music with his father, growing up around the practice of meditation and Indian classical music, and a record label that promoted “world music” on this side of the world culminated in an apple that hasn't fallen far from the tree: a tree. whose eclectic roots grew deep and whose branches reached far from home.
Harrison's latest project is “Dreamers in the Field,” a collaboration with the Tuvan throat singing ensemble Huun-Huur-Tu. The album has just been released on Dark Horse Records, the label that George Harrison created in 1974 and that Dhani revived in 2020. In a poetic echo, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the label, the album “Shankar Family & Friends” and from the Dark Horse Tour accompaniment that the elder Harrison performed with Ravi Shankar and an Indian orchestra.
“My father obviously did a lot with world music,” says Dhani Harrison, 45, via Zoom from his home in England. The younger Harrison has released several albums as a solo artist and with various bands, but this was his first time at Dark Horse and “it seemed good to me that this world music would come to his home there.”
Harrison has an omnivorous musical diet; only someone who has already listened to a lot of throat singing music would receive Huun-Huur-Tu through an algorithm. But that's what happened shortly after Harrison finished a tour in 2019 when he stumbled upon a performance by the group, which also plays on traditional Tuvan instruments. Instantly fascinated, he looked them up online and found several videos of live performances.
“I literally watched them every night,” he says, “and I became obsessed with it. The music was so healing and seemed like exactly what my body needed. “It was really beneficial to hear these teachers sing, and then it started to inspire me to try to learn how to do certain types of throat singing.”
He emailed Carmen Rizzo, a producer who has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson and Seal to Ryuichi Sakamoto, and who made several albums with Huun-Huur-Tu. Harrison said that he would love to help on any of his future projects, and Rizzo said, “Well, actually, I have almost a whole album of material that I recorded with them for the last album, but we never used it.” . “It’s just on a hard drive.”
Rizzo flew from Prague to play the recordings for Harrison: some were traditional songs he was already familiar with and others were new to him, including one (“Mazhalyk”) with a majestic string arrangement. Harrison was inspired to add piano, synthesizer, drum and guitar parts, as well as backing vocals, and to create some new songs. Rizzo took that material to Huun-Huur-Tu in Slovakia, where they recorded vocals for Harrison's tracks in a hotel room after a concert.
Everything was done remotely and Harrison only communicated with the group via FaceTime, but of course, “it's a traveling record,” he says. “That's the nature of their music: it's the caravan riders and it's the Ulatay River. It's all traveling music. So it's only natural that I got this far before finishing it.”
Huun-Huur-Tu
(From Dhani Harrison)
The final album is like the soundtrack of an invisible film (Harrison has, in fact, composed music for several films), with modern pulses and rhythms that ebb and flow with these Tuvan voices that sound intrinsically human and primitive and, at the same time , from another world.
“This style of singing comes from a time before language,” says Harrison. “They are recreating the sound of a bird, or the sound of a horse, or the sound of a stream, or the sound of the wind in the mountains. So it has the vibrations of the force of nature at all times.”
Harrison learned a lot of new things about the human body, like the fact that we have sympathetic vocal cords, and about the hidden capabilities of the head and chest cavities, and how constructive frequency “amplifies these whistles and suddenly you can be singing.” three notes at the same time within one body.”
When he plays this music for his friends, “they love it,” he says, “but then they feel immensely overwhelmed and cry or laugh; It is something that has to come to light. He feels like he's shaking you inside, and he's going around every corner and picking up all the dust that's been gathering and sweeping it toward the door.”
A lot has been building up for Harrison, who recently returned to England after nearly 20 years in Los Angeles. He jokingly referred to it as a process of “rebuilding” in the English countryside.
He was on his way to Japan in early 2020, shortly after his initial call with Rizzo, and was planning to spend 10 days in Australia when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. Soon, 10 days turned into four months.
“It was paradise,” he says. “They locked me in the most beautiful place. And it wasn't Melbourne, it was in the countryside. So I was very lucky.”
That's when he began writing a series of original instrumental songs that became his new solo album, “Innerstanding,” which quietly came out last October. She finally returned to England that summer, “and then it was lockdown after lockdown after lockdown.”
Harrison channeled his frustrations over being “detained” into what he considers “a difficult record.” He is a tough drive and definitely stands his ground in terms of what he believes.”
He did not give more details, but the somewhat enigmatic lyrics he added at the end suggest an aggravation toward governments that impose a “new religion,” dividing society into tribes and inflaming conflict.
In keeping with Harrison's successful solo album (“In///Parallel” from 2017), this new record vibrates with electronic rhythms and grunge electric guitar, much of which was performed by Graham Coxon of the band Blur, but with arrangements and cinematographic influences. of Indian musical grammar that provides a kind of mantric spell beneath Harrison's still young tenor and melodious falsetto.
It's an aggressive drive album, “written from the end of before to after, when the whole world changed,” he says, “and it's been very different since then.” But the message, she adds, is simple: “My light, my love in everything.”
A few weeks ago, Harrison appeared at the end of Eric Clapton's performance at the Royal Albert Hall; the first time he took that stage since November 2002 to participate in the “Concert for George,” the star concert in memory of his father. , who had died a year earlier. He joined Clapton on George Harrison's classic song “Give Me Love” and it was “really touching,” he says, “to be up there again.”
She's already planning another world music album with Rizzo, this time with the Sofia Bulgarian Women's Choir. She wants to go out and perform “Innerstanding” on stage and is currently finishing mixing a live concert film in Dolby Atmos. High technology and ancient culture tend to mix in Dhani Harrison's workshop: healing and aggression.
But, he says, sounding a lot like his father, “we have to aggressively love each other. We have to make an effort to actively try to unite.”
