Laraaji

Comedy and meditation

Laraaji was born Edward Larry Gordon in Philadelphia on 3 May 1943 and grew up in New Jersey, where he learned violin, piano, trombone and voice. He studied composition and piano at Howard University in Washington, then moved to New York to try his luck as a comedian and actor. He did stand-up in Greenwich Village, with Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory as his models, and had a small part in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 film Putney Swope. He also played Fender Rhodes in a jazz-rock band, Winds of Change.

Around 1970 or 1971 a poetry reading in a Harlem church sent him looking into meditation, and through the early 1970s he studied Eastern mysticism.

The zither in the park

At a pawn shop he swapped his Yamaha guitar for an Oscar Schmidt autoharp. He wired it for amplification and played it with hammers, brushes and bows, borrowing from Dorothy Carter's way with the hammered dulcimer, and he calls it his zither. Through the late 1970s he busked with it in Washington Square Park and on other New York parks and sidewalks, playing with his eyes closed so that he could feel the energy around him rather than watch the crowd. His first LP, Celestial Vibration, came out on Swan in 1978 in a tiny pressing, under his birth name.

Brian Eno heard him in Washington Square Park and left a note in his zither case. Laraaji phoned the next day. The result was Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, produced by Eno for Editions EG in 1980, the third record in Eno's Ambient series and the first to carry the name Laraaji.

Cassettes and laughter

Through the 1980s he made his music at home and put it out himself on cassette, much of it on his own Celestial Vibration imprint, selling tapes while he busked and supplying long meditative pieces to meditation groups. He studied with Swami Satchidananda and with Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati of the Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. He also began teaching laughter as a meditation, and has run Laughter Meditation Workshops around the world since the 1980s.

Vision Songs Vol. 1 followed in 1984. In 1992 All Saints released Flow Goes the Universe, produced by Michael Brook. He recorded Islands with Roger Eno (1995), Divination/Sacrifice with Bill Laswell (1998) and FRKWYS Vol. 8 with Blues Control (2011), and in 2013 All Saints gathered work from 1978 to 2011 on the double retrospective Celestial Music.

Bring On the Sun

In August 2016 he spent three days in a New York studio with the producer Carlos Niño, and the session filled two records: the gong drones of Sun Gong and Bring On the Sun, both issued by All Saints in September 2017. The longer album opens with Introspection. He played End of the Road and Café OTO that year, played an NPR Tiny Desk set with Arji OceAnanda in 2019, and in 2020 released Sun Piano, Moon Piano and Through Luminous Eyes.

Rediscovered

In 2023 Numero Group issued Segue to Infinity, which paired Celestial Vibration with six side-long sessions from the same years, cut from acetates that had turned up in a storage locker. Pitchfork made it Best New Reissue and argued that he deserved better than the story of a busker found by Eno. The Creative Independent called him "both a pioneer and an icon in the world of New Age music." Nick Hakim and Eddie Chacon are among the younger artists who cite him.

He played on the Medicine Singers' album in 2022, and in 2025 he sang and played zither on Big Thief's Double Infinity, including the single Grandmother, and played on Daniel Lopatin's soundtrack for Marty Supreme. In 2026 he joined Big Thief on tour as a special guest, from Dublin to Red Rocks. He lives in Harlem.