Drummer, record producer and spiritualist Narada Michael Walden

Written by Rob Bhatt

Inside hisSan Rafael recording studio, Narada Michael Walden is recounting his experiences with his mentor, guitarist John McLaughlin, when the crackle of static from the speakers interrupts him. The topic quickly switches to the previous night's recording session, which featured a spirited rendition of the Jimi Hendrix song "Fire."

"We rocked hard hard," Walden says. "I wonder if that noise is an effect." He adjusts a few of the dials, but neither he nor one of his sound assistants can stop the sporadic popping sounds.

The discussion of McLaughlin resumes only after someone suggests that the static might be Jimi Hendrix's way of conveying his approval from the great beyond. No one disputes the suggestion, because it's really not much of a stretch to think the late guitarmaster himself would be impressed by Walden's rendition of "Fire."

With the trappings of more than thirty years of success as a drummer and record producer in hand, Walden is poised for a new beginning after a two-and-a-half year interlude in Los Angeles. He moved back to Marin County in April with a reinvigorated passion for the Bay Area. And while he is still actively recording his own music and developing new artists, he is also driven to transform his foundation's philanthropic programs into the focus of his already-great career's next phase.

"I want to do music for humanitarian good," he explains. "Not just to create hit records, but to be like Bob Hope. I aspire to be like Bob Hope. Bob Hope did those tours where he'd get all of his celebrity friends on a plane and they'd play for the cats in the Army, wherever they were. I love that stuff. Go out and play for people and bring 'em back up. I want to be like that. I want to do good. I have always felt that way."

In the spirit of these aspirations, he is reorganizing the Narada Michael Walden Foundation to increase its effectiveness. He initially launched the foundation to help underprivileged children, and for the past several years, he has helped bring together high profile Northern California musicians for holiday concerts to raise funds for the Performing Stars of Marin, a non-profit organization that offers performing-arts programs to children from impoverished backgrounds. In the foundation's new incarnation, he plans to increase contributions to groups serving children and develop new programs to help elderly musicians without the means to support themselves.

"I believe that the goal in life is to love and serve," Walden explains. "Based upon that principle, I love to make music that can help people in some fashion, either spiritually or physically or in whatever way it can. That's my calling. That's what I'm here for."

At age fifty-four, not even time has dampened his enthusiasm for life. His words flow in a rapid-fire rhythm reminiscent of a John McLaughlin riff when he speaks about the topics that excite him most - music, spirituality, and helping others.

His eyes light up and his voice climbs several decibels when he talks about performing at the Rainforest Foundation Fund benefit concert at Carnegie Hall this past May. For the sixth year in a row, Walden served as musical director of the concert produced by Trudie Styler (who is married to Sting), and at Styler's behest, he led the musicians offstage at the end of the concert in procession through the audience as the artists and the fans sung the words to John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."

Walden recreates the sound of the drum with his mouth. Sting, James Taylor, Sheryl Crow, the string and woodwind players, and the audience were singing together. "It was a miracle," says Walden. In fact, it was a powerful statement for peace, created by a man who draws power from being at peace.

Walden opened his recording studio, Tarpan Studios, in 1985, and a string of hits recorded there by artists including Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey prompted local TV station KRON to dub the studio the "Motown of Marin." The studio itself sits in an industrial park just a whisper from the shores of the bay in San Rafael. Walden regularly walks from his home to the studio, and on this afternoon, he's wearing running shoes, baggy gym shorts, and a yellow fleece vest that exposes arms thickened by five decades behind drum sets.

Despite a long list of accomplishments that include touring with McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s, winning three Grammy Awards, and being recognized by Billboard magazine as one of the top ten producers with the most number one hits, Walden is anything but a prima donna. Rather, he constantly offers words to raise the spirits of those around him. When members of his staff pop into the booth to check on him, he lavishes them with praise for their work during the previous night's recording session (the Hendrix song was recorded for the soundtrack of an upcoming independent film, "Guitar Man"). Later, when I comment about the primitiveness of my handheld tape recorder compared to the state-of-the- art equipment that surrounds us, he puts me at ease by mentioning that he uses a similar device to record initial versions of songs.

Everything about Walden's actions and words suggest that he is as committed as ever to living up to his spiritual name, Narada, after the divine Hindu sage, who was said to bring light, delight, and compassion to earth. Walden's spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy, bestowed this name upon him in 1976, and by then, Walden was already well along in his fruitful spiritual journey.

Growing up praying for drum sets (he now has a warehouse-full) while attending Catholic schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Walden was drawn to McLaughlin's musical style from the moment he heard "The Inner Mounting Flame," the 1971 release by the guitarist's Mahavishnu Orchestra. He was equally moved by a poem on the back album cover written by Sri Chinmoy, whom McLaughlin had already adopted as his own guru. "That just seemed to be a very powerful way to go, because my hero before that was Jimi Hendrix, who passed away in 1970, the year I graduated high school," Walden says. "With Hendrix being gone, there weren't that many heroes who could really play. Now I mean, who could really play, like John Coltrane could play, like Miles Davis could play. So when I heard Mahavishnu, I thought, here is a genius who can really play, and he's bringing a new consciousness of spirituality into his work. It's not drug-induced, it's spirit-induced, so I was really turned on to it, as a lot of my friends were."

Walden moved between Southern California, South Florida, and Connecticut between 1972 and 1974. He visited Sri Chinmoy meditation centers in Miami and Hartford, Connecticut during those years, and those visits led to meetings with both McLaughlin and Chinmoy. Walden first met McLaughlin after one his performances in Hartford, and, after another concert, he invited the guitarist to join him and his fellow bandmates for a jam session in their home in the woods. Their mutual interests in Chinmoy's teachings and the burgeoning jazz-rock fusion style that McLaughlin was elevating to unprecedented heights strengthened the relationship between Walden and his idol. In early 1974, McLaughlin formed a new incarnation of his Mahavishnu Orchestra, bringing Walden on board to replace Billy Cobham, the legendary drummer.

Interestingly enough, Michael Tilson Thomas, now the musical director of the San Francisco Symphony, conducted the orchestra that accompanied McLaughlin's renewed Mahavishnu Orchestra group in its first concert, which took place in Buffalo, New York. At the time, Tilson Thomas was the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Later in 1974, Thomas conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the recording sessions for "Apocalypse," the Mahavishnu Orchestra's fourth album, which was produced by Sir George Martin, the Beatles' producer. Just twenty-two years old at the time, Walden was recording under the venerable Martin's direction, and with a band led by a man who defined his genre.

Bewteen 1974 and 1978, when he wasn't on tour with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Walden spent much of his time at Sri Chinmoy's meditation center, the Sri Chinmoy Centre, in New York. The guru called upon devotees to engage in a rigorous set of activities, including all-night meditation sessions and lengthy hikes. On some occasions, the guru would direct a group of devotees to write a song or a comedy sketch and perform it for the others. Or he would ask devotees to learn and perform songs written in his native tongue, Bengali. Walden credits these experiences for helping prepare him for the demands that he would face later in life. "This is what helped me hone my skill to be a record producer," he says. "With Guru, you had to be Johnny-on-the-spot. Know a good song? Write a good song. Because that's what we were expected to do."

Meanwhile, the experiences with McLaughlin brought his musicianship to new heights. Though Walden had, for a long time, performed music in the nontraditional time signatures that were popular among jazz-rock fusionists, McLaughlin taught Walden how to visualize shapes when he played, enabling him to maintain precise rhythms when the odd meters found the beat hard to find.

"He was my teacher, and without him, I wouldn't be here," Walden says of McLaughlin. "I'm so grateful that he saw something in me, because there were a hell of a lot better drummers than me. But he wanted a combination of someone who could play and who would live the spiritual life, and the fact that I was willing to do [both] gave me the opportunity [to work with him]."

In 1976, ready to define his own sound, Walden released his debut solo album, "Garden of Love Light," and also wrote for and appeared on Jeff Beck's "Wired" album. By 1978, he left New York for California and gravitated toward the production side of the business even as he remained active as a concert and session drummer.

The most popular hits to come out of Tarpan Studios - Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love," Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know," and Maria Carey's "Vision of Love," among several others, lack the structural complexities of the works that Walden recorded in the '70s as a drummer. "We were way ahead of our time, playing in those odd meters, jazz-rock fusion with Indian mixtures," Walden says. "But it paved a road so people can say, 'If you did that, what are you going to say now?' And that's where I feel that it's given me a new platform from which to jump."

"Some people may not respect my hits. They may only respect the jazz-fusion side. And others, they don't know anything about that. All they know is what I've done with Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. So I believe that God has me set up here to talk through different platforms, where if I talk about God and talk about good things, people take it to heart. That's what I like."