Yungchen Lhamo | Awakening
(Six Degrees Records)
Tibetan vocalist Yungchen Lhamo often refers to music’s healing power, and indeed, at a very basic level, her music—soft, sensuous, flowing like a clear river—does offer a tonic for our times. Lhamo’s rich soprano boasts a natural vibrato that powers her hypnotic melismas, and on Awakenings, her sixth album, the Kingston-based singer-songwriter is accompanied by a versatile, mostly Spanish ensemble that conjures a singular fusion of Buddhist chant, Indian percussion, Tibetan folk, and smooth jazz. Lhamo sings mostly in Tibetan with occasional forays into English and Mandarin, but her lyrics need no translation: This is the best-possible mood music, which works equally well as atmospheric background or as a point of mental and emotional focus.
Standout tracks include “Monkey Mind,” whose jazzy chord progression, peppered by Julio Garcia’s reggae/Afrobeat-style electric guitar, recalls the Police, and “Compassion for All Beings,” which boasts Lhamo’s haunting, multi-tracked vocals atop a bed of throat singing. The title track could well be the Tibetan answer to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” and “Auspicious Days” is a four-minute, raga-like melody featuring a time-suspending sopranino saxophone solo by Javier Paxarino. Lhamo is a refugee from Chinese-occupied Tibet who in 1989 escaped on foot across the Himalayas, bound for the Indian border and, eventually, Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. It was there that the Dalai Lama himself anointed Lhamo, whose name means “Goddess of Melody,” to go forth into the world to spread the gospel of Tibetan culture. He could not have wished for a better ambassador.
This article appears in August 2022.
