Liv Khalsa was raised in Osseo, Minnesota, and his first music teacher was his grandfather who conducted marching bands that played for troops during battles in World War I. Liv started on trumpet at 13 and moved to Phoenix. He got a tape recorder and when he was 15 he recorded a new age album for friends and family featuring a home-built synthesizer, backwards tape loops and nature sounds.
Although he played trumpet in his high school marching band, after hearing The Byrds in the mid-Sixties, Liv also began playing guitar in a rock band. As a sophomore, he started a studio production company to record local bands, tape interviews and put together a one-hour weekly radio show for KDKB, a freeform underground station.
After playing in a King Crimson-styled progressive rock band, Liv attended a graphic arts school for two years to study graphics and printing. He also began meditating in 1972, the same year that he started his own record company after producing an album of folk songs by Bi Bi Bhani. Over the next two decades, the company evolved into the Invincible label, one of the oldest and most successful new age recording companies which has branched out into other types of music.
Liv has been involved as either producer, arranger, recording engineer, songwriter or musician on 130 albums that have sold a total of more than a million units. These albums include the worldbeat Music of the Spheres (two volumes) and the meditational Crimson series (seven volumes) featuring Celtic harpist Kim Robertson and new age vocalist Singh Kaur (with Singh and the jazz ensemble Mosaic on Vol. 7). Liv also has been involved with recordings by sitarist Rahul Sariputra, Robertson and Kaur as solo artists, and acoustic guitarist Mila Gilbert.
Livtar Khalsa's life journey began in Macon, Georgia, but he grew up in Orlando, Florida, where he began accordian lessons at age seven, studied piano from nine until he was eleven, started playing banjo at 12 in Kingston Trio type folk groups with his brothers, and then switched to guitar when he was 14. In high school Livtar was playing guitar in rock bands, but also played trumpet in the school orchestra. His early musical influences ranged from The Beach Boys and The Ventures to The Doors and The Who.
In late 1969, Livtar began studying yoga and meditation in California before being sent to Atlanta to start an ashram where he has been the director ever since. Music has always been a major part of his meditations, and he plays regularly, not only at the morning and night meditations in Atlanta, but at the two big annual national gatherings during the summer and winter solstices.
In 1972 he formed the Khalsa String Band with musicians from ashrams all over the country, recorded four albums with them, and went on a national tour in 1974. Livtar released two solo albums -- The Khalsa Way (1980) and Our Time (1984). During the past eight years the summer solstice gathering in New Mexico has featured a concert with national acts on Peace Prayer Day when Livtar has performed on-stage with Ray Manzarek, Donovan and Arlo Guthrie. Livtar also played guitar on an album by Singh Kaur and several other projects being produced by Liv Khalsa.
"What I learned by meditating is how rhythm and repetition affects the consciousness," explains Liv. "I am continuously studying the relationship between mantra and music. One of my main goals is to take music beyond entertainment and make it an experience on the soul level as well."
According to Livtar, "We're trying to steer both us and the listener toward consciousness, fun and ecstasy at the same time. Our lives are not geared towards the earth, but towards our higher consciousness. Of course there's no reason consciousness can't sneak up on you while you're listening to music and feeling good.
"It's interesting to note," says Liv, "that most baroque music was notated by the composers so that it would be interpreted by the orchestra playing it. It's designed for musicians to do with it whatever they want. So we did.
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