LARAAJI

Laraaji is a musician, mult-instrumentalist, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City. He attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington D.C. on a scholarship to study composition and piano. Laraaji’s experiments and exploratons with the open-tuned electric autoharp/zither began with a gentle nudge from his divine guidance. In 1976, in Queens, NY, he had gone into a pawn shop to trade his guitar for much-needed cash, but was guided to instead acquire the autoharp/zither in the store window. Heeding this mystical and startling guidance, he left the shop with a Kentucky Blue Grass instrument he had never touched before. But within a few weeks Laraaji had discovered a new sound vocabulary with this 36-stringed American folk instrument.  

After much open-minded experimentation with altered tunings, Laraaji arrived at a deeply engaging and exotic new age music performance sound, which he sometimes refers to as “Celestial Vibration”, recalling an earlier paranormal sound hearing experience. Laraaji began studying Eastern mysticism and improvising trance-inducing jams on his modified autoharp, processed through various electronic effects.

In 1979, Brian Eno saw LARAAJI playing in Washington Square Park, NYC and invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, released 1980. Since then LARAAJI has recorded over 50 solo and collab albums, the latest of which are three solo piano improvisation LPs, SUN PIANO,  MOON PIANO & THROUGH LUMINOUS EYES, VISION SONGS Vol 1 (Numero Group).  He also conducts healing laughter playshops around the world. See htp://laraaji.blogspot.com/ and follow @edwardlgordon

His latest collaboration with Endel entitled “You are Relaxed” was released August 22, 2022 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-transcendence-of-laraaji