Dhani Harrison can’t help but sound like his father, and not just in his singing voice or his lyricist aesthetic: He’s a veritable echo of his father when he speaks passionately about spiritual healing, connecting with nature, and collaborating with virtuoso musicians from ancient, non-Western cultures.
But Harrison’s father George Harrison believes his heritage is valid: Growing up making music with his father and on a record label that popularized meditation practices, Indian classical music, and “world music” on this side of the world, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, a tree with diverse roots that grew deep and branches that reached far from home.
Harrison’s latest project is Dreamers in the Field, a collaboration with Tuvan throat singing ensemble Hun Fool Tu. The album was just released on Dark Horse Records, the label founded by George Harrison in 1974 and revived by Dani in 2020. In a poetic tribute, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the label, the album Shankar Family & Friends, and Harrison’s father’s Dark Horse tour with Ravi Shankar and an Indian orchestra.
“My dad obviously made a huge contribution to world music,” Dani Harrison, 45, said over Zoom from her home in the U.K. Though Harrison has released several albums as a solo artist and with various bands, this is her first with Dark Horse, and “it felt right that this world music should take root on Dark Horse.”
Harrison is obsessed with music. The algorithm would only serve up Hun Huur Tu if you already listen to a lot of throat singing music. But it happened to him shortly after he finished touring in 2019, when he stumbled upon a performance by the group, who play on traditional Tuvan instruments. Instantly captivated, he looked up their performances online and found several videos of them playing live.
“I would literally watch them sing every night,” he says. “I was hooked. I found the music therapeutic and it was exactly what my body needed. I found it really beneficial just to listen to these masters sing, and it inspired me to try and learn their particular throat singing style.”
He emailed producer Carmen Rizzo, who’s worked with everyone from Michael Jackson and Seal to Ryuichi Sakamoto and has done several albums with Hun Fool Tu. Harrison expressed a desire to collaborate on a future project, to which Rizzo replied, “Actually, I have almost all the songs that we recorded with them for the last album that we didn’t end up using. They’re just sitting on a hard drive.”
Lizzo flew in from Prague and played the recordings for Harrison. Some of the songs were traditional and others were new to him, such as “Mazarik” with its majestic string arrangement. Harrison added piano, synths, drums, guitar parts and backing vocals, and decided to create some new material. Lizzo took the material to Hun Fool Tu in Slovakia, where he recorded his vocals to Harrison’s songs in his hotel room after the concert.
It was all done remotely, with Harrison only communicating with the group via FaceTime, but still, “it’s a traveling record,” he says. “That’s the essence of their music. It’s the caravan riders, the Uratai River. It’s all traveling music. So it’s no surprise that it took this long to finish.”
Hun Fool To
(From Dani Harrison)
The final record is like a soundtrack to an unseen film – Harrison has actually done music for several of those films – and its modern pulse and groove ebbs and flows with Tuvan vocals that sound simultaneously essentially human and primal, and from another world.
“This style of singing comes from a time before language existed,” says Harrison, “and it recreates the sounds of birds, horses, streams, and mountain winds, so there’s a powerful natural feel to it all.”
Harrison learned many new things about the human body, including that we have resonating vocal cords, that there is hidden capacity in both our head and chest cavities, and that constructive frequencies “amplify these whistling sounds, and suddenly you can sing three notes at once in one body.”
When he plays this music for friends, “they love it,” he says, “but then they feel so overwhelmed, they cry, they laugh. It’s something that needs to get out. It feels like it shakes you inside, it gets in every corner, it picks up all the dust that’s accumulated and sweeps it out the door.”
A lot has piled up for Harrison, who recently returned to the UK after almost two decades in Los Angeles – a process he jokingly calls “rewilding” into the English countryside.
He was on his way to Japan shortly after that first phone call with Rizzo in early 2020 and planned to spend 10 days in Australia when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. Soon, those 10 days turned into four months.
“It was like paradise,” he says. “We were locked down in the best place. We were in the country, not somewhere like Melbourne, so we were very lucky.”
It was during this time that he began writing original instrumental compositions, which became his latest solo album, Innerstanding, which was quietly released in October last year. He finally returned to the UK in the summer, but “after that it was just lockdown after lockdown”.
Harrison channeled his frustrations about being “detained” into what he considered a “tough record.” “It’s a tough record, and we’re definitely sticking up for what we believe in.”
He didn’t elaborate, but the somewhat cryptic lyrics he added at the end suggest resentment against a government that is forcing a “new religion” on people, dividing society into tribes and stoking conflict.
Following in the footsteps of Harrison’s breakout solo album (2017’s In///Parallel), the new record surges with electronic beats and grungy electric guitars (much of it played by Graham Coxon of the band Blur), but the cinematic arrangements and influence of Indian musical grammar lend it a kind of spellbinding magic beneath Harrison’s youthful tenor and lilting falsetto.
It’s an album of aggressive unity, “written at the end of an era, before and after the whole world changed,” he says, “and things have changed a lot since then,” but its message is simple, he adds: “My light, my love in all things.”
A few weeks ago, Harrison appeared at the end of Eric Clapton’s performance at the Royal Albert Hall, his first time on stage since November 2002, when he took part in the all-star “Concert for George” concert in memory of his father, who had died a year earlier. He sang the George Harrison classic “Give Me Love” with Clapton and said it was “incredibly emotional to be back on stage.”
He’s already planning a world music soundscape album with Lizzo, this time with the Sofia Women’s Choir in Bulgaria. He wants to perform “Innerstanding” on stage and is currently finishing up the mix for a live concert film in Dolby Atmos. Dani Harrison’s workshops tend to blend high tech and ancient cultures, and are both soothing and aggressive.
But he says, sounding very much like his father: “We have to be proactive in loving one another. We have to be proactive in trying to come together.”
