Tantric choir

What Mickey Hart has been up to lately.

"[It's] a vocal miracle," says Mickey Hart, one of the former drummers of the Grateful Dead. He caught wind of Smith's tape in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and it excited him immediately. He couldn't wait to share it with his bandmates.

"I mean, wait'll Garcia hears this, he's not gonna believe it!" Hart pips. "My ear was filled with monks for many years."

Yet the sounds that thrilled Smith and Hart's ears were not, technically, consummate. Smith's 1967 tape is limited by several factors, primarily by the technology of the day, but also with the number of voices. Smith only heard the remnants of the choir — the few monks that survived the perilous trek into India after the Chinese invaded in 1959 and killed or imprisoned most of them. In the original Gyuto monastery, there were over a hundred monks in the choir.

"No one's really heard a hundred monks outside of Lhasa for many years," Hart notes.

People have heard smaller groups. Seven monks from the only other monastery that practices the chants won a Grammy recently. So, to re-create the sound of a full choir for this CD, Mickey Hart recorded each monk multiple times to make 10 voices sound like a hundred.

"We overdubbed, and now there's over a hundred-voice choir here, which has never really been sounded in the West," says Hart.