Carnival of Soul

If you’ve been to a Bend Roots Revival in the last two years, you may have heard frenetic rhythms pulsing across the Deschutes Brewery warehouse lawn, accompanied by droning strings and chanting.

The sound came from the community stage (this year known as the Bend-in-Spoon Stage, for the restaurant group behind Chow, Local Slice and others), nestled next to the Kids Zone on the long stretch of grass separating the BIGS and Black Butte Porter stages from the 4 Peaks and Redbird stages. While Roots is known for its eclectic lineup of rock, punk, metal, jazz, folk, blues and much more each year, the Chant Bend Kirtan group — a style of traditional Indian group singing or chanting — still stands out as ethereal, even cosmic, with unfamiliar (to Western ears) melodies and rarely seen instrumentation in the pop music realm.

“Our regulars bring their pillows and their cymbals and their things that they bring,” said violinist Julie Southwell, a regular performer with the Bend kirtan group. “I just get a kick out of it because I’ve been involved with many, many Roots festivals since they began in other bands, and just to have the mix and bring the worlds together and have my friends walk by and say, ‘What is this?’ It’s funny.”

The group, led by musician Kat Rose Kniest, will return to the Bend-in-Spoon Stage on Saturday (fittingly, the kirtan follows yoga with Nicole Baumann on the same stage). Southwell will also host yoga and perform on the stage Sunday with classical Indian music group Musical India, a trio featuring sarod (an Indian stringed instrument similar to sitar) player Ross Kent and tabla player Josh Williams. Southwell and Kniest will also play with Celtic and Indian group Purple Lotus on the El Sancho Stage on Saturday.

This year’s Bend Roots Revival — the 12th in 13 years and sixth to be hosted at the Deschutes Brewery warehouse — runs Friday through Sunday.

Bend’s kirtan group grew out of the Sol Alchemy Temple, which was located on Studio Road for five years before closing last year. Kniest now leads Wednesday night kirtan at Bend Community Healing, and Sol Alchemy hosts concerts there and at Tula Movement Arts throughout the year.

Kirtan was originally part of bhakti yoga practices, according to Kniest. It involves singing the various Sanskrit names for God in a call-and-response fashion, with the vibrations from the singing and music helping to elevate consciousness. Kniest likened the practice to a kind of meditation.

As the Sol Alchemy website explains, “It is yoga for the heart, which aims to connect us with our divine, inner nature and the one spirit that unites us all.”

“It’s a way of banishing the ordinary mental consciousness and … being uplifted up into higher states of feeling, whether it be peace or joy or bliss or just impartiality, compassion,” Kniest said. “… It’s a higher frequency than our — if you were to describe something that was divine or godlike, it would be compassionate; it would be joyful; it would be peaceful. It would be these sorts of things.”

While the local kirtan group uses Hindu and Buddhist chants, it has no affiliation with a specific religion, Kniest and Southwell said. People do not need to understand the words they are singing to participate or the deeper spiritual connotations, and in fact many don’t, Southwell said.

“We’re just singing, and they’re singing back, which is what families have done in every culture of the whole entire world to connect with each other,” she said. “It’s what people do to connect with each other; it’s what people do to heal themselves. There’s many vibrational things that happen when we sing and listen to music.”

Sol Alchemy — and the offerings on the community stage in general — brings international flavor to the Roots festival every year, and falls in line with the event’s overarching mission of music and arts education. Roots is the main fundraiser for Rise Up International, which helps provide music and arts education in Bend-La Pine schools. (Rise Up opened a school in India around 2005 or 2006 when the organization formed, Director Jesse Roberts said.)

Roughly 80% of the organization’s education budget comes from Roots, Roberts said.

“It’s more than just a festival,” he said. “There’s a lot of musicians who play in the festival who throughout the year are also teachers, music teachers, art teachers in the programs that we’re working with. (It’s) this full-circle idea.”

Rise Up has programs in 10 local schools, including before- and after-school music education, ukulele groups and art classes. Schools will often match funds for these programs, Roots co-founder, musician and music educator Mark Ransom said.

“I think people are figuring out … programs have been cut in the schools, and yet the distribution of wealth is wacky,” Ransom said. “And so a lot of the people that have the money recognize that as well and want to put it someplace where it’s going to work and do what they want it to do, which is serve the community.”

Community-building is important to Sol Alchemy and the kirtan group. Southwell has traveled to India 10 times since 2004 to study yoga and classical Indian music with classical violinists and brothers Mysore Nagaraj and Mysore Manjunath (she has brought the brothers to perform in Bend for many years as well). Kirtan and Indian music traditions have helped her grow as a musician and person, she said.

“I’m very inspired by the Indian approach to music in terms of their spiritual aspects, like The Beatles were,” Southwell said. “And so for me, I still want to be who I am; I want to be an authentic violinist to Julie Southwell, but it adds to the quilt of sounds and textures that I can share with people — that I can give to people. I feel like … in kirtan, we do the same. We’re our unique, individual selves sharing what it means to us, but we don’t have to have some sort of strict (structure). We absorb what they do in India and kirtans and singing devotionally, but we’re from America, so we’re honoring that.”

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