Laraaji
The musician, mystic, and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising trance-inducing jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects.
Brian Eno saw him playing one night in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series (Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance, released 1980). Laraaji went on to release a series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances.
In recent years, his career has been celebrated extensively, with reissues of his extensive and wide-ranging back catalogue on labels including Numero Group, Glitterbeat, and Leaving Records. Latest album Sun Piano, released on All Saints in summer 2020, sees Laraaji fulfilling a lifelong ambition to return to his first instrument for a suite of spiritual keyboard improvisations recorded in a Brooklyn Church by Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Mary Lattimore) – a new chapter to the story of a much-loved cult icon.