Nam Gyal Phurbu is a multi-talented Minneapolis musician who works as a composer, singer, and recording engineer. He performs at events in Canada and the U.S., usually for events organized by Tibetan communities, and his recordings are all over the world, including India, Tibet, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S. His web site lists his released recordings and offers the chance to listen to and purchase them, as well as offering other information about his performances and studio. The web site's name comes from Potala, the 5th century palace of the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala, India.

Personal history
Nam was born in the south Indian city of Mysore on July 26, 1977. He moved to the Twin Cities in June 1996 after graduating from high school in India, joining his parents, who came to Minnesota in 1992 in the Tibetan Resettlement Project. Nam speaks Hindi, Tibetan, English, and understands Nepali. His classes in the Tibetan school at Mysore were in English and Hindi. Nam's school had school prayers, but no mandatory religious training. Tibetan Buddhism was taught to him not as an explicit doctrine, but rather as a daily life behavior of compassion and mercy.

Nam now works as a technician for IBM and lives in Northeast Minneapolis with his family.

Musical influences
Nam learned Tibetan songs from buying tapes of Tibetan music in India. One of his favorite Tibetan music groups is Chak-Sam-Pa (“Iron Bridge” in Tibetan). He also enjoys classic rock such as the Eagles, the Beatles, and Los Lobos, and would like to explore more Western instruments.

One of Nam's early musical influences was a song written by a Tibetan musician in exile in Switzerland. Nam first heard this song when he was seven or eight years old; it was very popular in India. This was one of the songs that inspired him to be a musician. He loves it because it is a slower-paced traditional song. Nam loves its rhythm; when he was little, he didn’t understand the words, but he felt the pace was really warm, and he loved the way the singer sang it. Nam found out the real lyrics only about a year ago, from an older friend who was in his twenties when the song was first released.

It’s about a man leaving Tibet. In the first verse, the narrator of the song climbs to the top of a mountain, looks back and sees his country. In the second verse, he asks a house to give him a place to sleep for the night and he stays one night there. Finally, the narrator promises his friend he’ll be back tomorrow when the sun rises.

The style is called thu-shay (in Tibetan this means north, but the region of this style of song is actually in the south of Tibet).

Listen to Nam's rendition of this thu-shay:

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Approach to music making
Nam doesn't read Western musical notation, and doesn't think of music in terms of notes at all. He uses an intuitive way of choosing which instruments, such as keyboards, to use for composing his songs. Nam gets the instrument, without a specific idea of what he wants it to do, then he explores what the instrument can do. His approach to music is laid back; he usually has no specific goal, other than educating Tibetans and reminding them of their country, language, culture, and identity. He also just likes composing and performing fun things like love songs.

When he writes a song, he often starts with a rhythm on his keyboard, makes up a melody (lead) on the keyboard, sometimes hits a chord, then changes it, and so on, until a song emerges. He doesn't use the keyboard rhythms for writing traditional-style songs, however; if he wants to write a new song, he writes a new one and doesn’t mess with the traditional styles. He also writes traditional songs without mixing new styles into them. For Nam, it's important to keep old and new separate, because he thinks his Tibetan audience places a high value on preserving the old music traditions and they wouldn't like songs that mix old and new. If he has lyrics already written, he looks at the lyrics first to decide the style of song. For example, a reggae beat would suggest a love song to him. For a Tibetan freedom song about people dying in the struggle, it would be a very hard repeated drum beat before the words to create tension at the beginning of the song.

“Jack of all trades, master of none": Nam describes himself as a musician without the time or interest in getting his music technically perfect. Nonetheless, he is a self-taught recording engineer who records, produces, and distributes his own CDs. He learned what he needed to know to set up a home recording studio from the Internet and the manuals that came with his equipment. Nam would like to work with different artists, but so far he's mostly a soloist.

Nam's songs
Nam's songs, on his albums, are about 80% love songs, and 10-20% patriotic songs about Tibet. For Nam, the lyrics are the most important part of composing songs. His friends write lyrics for his songs sometimes. In Tibetan culture, many words are very “high,” i.e.; formal and difficult. Even though this more formal language can be more lyrical, many Tibetans have a hard time understanding it. Nam writes very direct lyrics because to him, preserving the vernacular Tibetan language is more important than trying to teach more difficult levels of it.

Even though he's never been there, Nam feels he can communicate love of Tibet because he was taught about it in school. He knows Tibet from seeing videos about it, and he studied its geography and history. He also keeps his songs' lyrics somewhat general; he's not specific about details, but uses general themes of the refugee experience and losing Tibetan freedom.

An international musician
Having grown up in India but then moving to the U.S. as a young adult, Nam sees certain differences between being a musician in each of the two countries. In India, musicians have chances to sing, perform, and compose songs, but in the U.S., you can record and release your own albums. In India, it's really tough to do that because of the economy; it's even tough to get a job that pays well. Some of Nam's songs are about Tibetans' way of life in India, compared to Tibetans in Tibet, but so far they are not really songs about, or addressed to, India.

Nam talks about how different cultures produce different kinds of lyrics for certain genres of songs. For example, he says the U.S. is more free compared to India when it comes to romance relationships. In India there are very strict rules. Even if they’re in English, the love song themes of India wouldn’t appeal to Americans because they are often about keeping romance secret because it's forbidden.

There is no market for Tibetan music in Tibet, because the Chinese government does not allow Tibetan recordings to be sold there. Elsewhere, in the Tibetan diaspora, the market is small. There are approximately nine hundred to a thousand Tibetans in Minnesota today, and there were only about 500 when Nam arrived here in 1996. Some of the venues for Nam to perform his music include Tibetan community gatherings in Toronto, the Twin Cities, and the West Coast, and the usual dates for such engagements are Losar (the Tibetan New Year, which can fall between Jan. 21 and Feb. 19), Uprising Day on March 10, and the Dalai Lama’s birthday on July 6.

Nam's instruments
Nam plays keyboards and flute, and his friend taught him to play the danyen. The danyen is a Tibetan guitar with three double-strings. Danyen means “melodious voice” in Tibetan; “da” means voice, “nyen” means beautiful. Nam brought his danyen from India when he came to the U.S. Its strings are the kind used in badminton rackets.

Listen to Nam playing the danyen:
This is a very old, traditional Tibetan song, Nam can tell this from its rhythm and pace. It was composed for the 14th Dalai Lama, wishing him a long life. Nam says normally it would be performed with two other guitars, a flute, and a violin. Nam says this song will “take you along the mountain.” He doesn’t know who wrote it, he loved the pace of it and learned it from a tape by himself, then found the lyrics for it. Nam says that with Tibetan songs, it’s often hard to find the chords, so you just listen and write it down for yourself.

Dalai Lama song:

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This type of song is the most common way of playing Tibetan guitar in central Tibet, around the capital city of Lhasa. Every province of Tibet has its own style of music, but the central style is the most common. This tune is usually followed by a fast-paced dancing song.

Lhasa dance prelude song:

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After the prelude song comes a circle dance, called gor-shay ("gor" means circle and "shay" means song or dance). Each part of Tibet has a different way of doing gorshay, but some form of this simple dance happens at every Tibetan wedding or any other community gathering:

Gorshay:

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