As published for Long Island Press:

SPIRITUALIZED: KRISHNA DAS' JOURNEY FROM ROSLYN TO RAM DASS

By Kenny Herzog

Eastern spirituality has long been present in popular music, from the Beatles mingling with the Maharishi to the Beastie Boys taking it upon themselves to free Tibet.

By the same token, secularism has gripped much of the everyday American population over the last couple of generations, evidenced by the rise in mixed-faith and interracial marriages.

It should come as no surprise then that Krishna Das (born Jeffrey Kagel), after growing up Jewish in Roslyn Heights and attending Stony Brook University in the '60s, found an alternative path in Indian spirituality. Nor should it be entirely shocking that the likes of Sting and Rick Rubin have been drawn to Das' recordings of the Hindu chanting known as kirtan, an extension of Bhakti yoga, or the yoga of devotion, which he studied in India during the '70s under gurus Ram Dass and Mahara-ji Neem Karoli Baba. In fact, Rubin produced Das' latest album, Door of Faith, which melds Indian chants with a subtle soundtrack of Western music influences, resulting in a record ideal for relaxation, but resonant with a deeper sense of meaning and feeling.

"I think pop culture is a concentrated microcosm in the sense that people with money and power have the ability to get what they want, satisfy their desires," says Das of his association with celebrities. "So the curve between wanting something and satisfying their desire gets much smaller, and so they begin to [wonder], 'No matter how many times I satisfy those desires, why am I not happy?'"

Das himself was experiencing an existential crisis of sorts as a young man, going through what he describes as "general, horrible, nasty, vicious unhappiness." To him, the discovery of Buddhism saved his life. "I had no option," he says plaintively. "Either I was gonna find something to help myself with or I was gonna be dead... From the outside, my life didn't look very bad. But there was something in myself that I couldn't find."

From talking to Das, you get the sense that no matter where he was growing up, he would have wound up where he is today. "When I was growing up on Long Island, it was such a fantastic place to be for kids," he recalls warmly. "You could ride your bike anywhere. We had fields and swamps and forests to play in where we could be alone and hang out."

Coming of age adjacent to New York City also shaped his original interest in music. He would tune into Allan Freed's show on 1010 WINS and would feign illness so he could stay home and keep track of the singles charts by listening to Dan Ingram on WABC. But the sort of inner tranquility he was seeking wasn't there.

"What worked [in India] was that I met people who were embodying a different type of being," he explains. "People who obviously had a kind of peace and a love and a presence that I did not meet in my reformed Jewish temple [Temple Sinai]."

Apparently, producer Rubin, quirky as he may be, embodied the qualities Das relates to, and the strange partnership took off in the studio. "I can't say if I was on his wavelength," admits Das, laughing. "Because God knows what that is. But he certainly knew what had to happen. He knows what something should be when it's finished so that you're communicating what you intended."

After a 35-year spiritual journey from New York to India, Das looks back on whether he's communicated what he hoped to. "Absolutely not," he says firmly. But that's only because it is innate in his faith that such expectations are counterproductive, so there could be none to live up to or fall short of. "I get off on it, it's good for me," he says. "The fact that somebody else is enjoying it is always amazing and wonderfully satisfying, although that's not why I'm doing it. I'm free to enjoy it. I'm not trying to sell myself."