Ben Leinbach

Ben Leinbach is an award-winning producer, composer, recording engineer and multi-instrumentalist. Various periodicals have called his music "masterful" and "remarkable," and have said that everything he touches turns to gold. He aspires to create transcendent music that holds a broad spectrum of the human experience: the beauty and the darkness, the love and the longing, the joy and the melancholy. He hopes that exploring this terrain helps listeners feel more deeply and live more fully.

He grew up listening to popular music and playing rock and roll, and after college he pursued a career as a rock and jazz drummer. He then took an internship at Spark Productions, a recording studio in Oakland, California, where he learned recording, mixing and mastering. The studio worked mostly in hip hop, R&B and gospel, along with jazz, Latin jazz and world music. He went on to produce singer-songwriters and to create backing tracks for rap and R&B artists. As a drummer he has performed with Kurt Elling, Chico Freeman and Michael Manring. One of his former rock bands shared bills with Green Day, Primus and The Ohio Players.

A turning point came when Jai Uttal arrived at Spark Productions to record "Beggars and Saints." Ben has recorded every Jai Uttal album since, including the Grammy-nominated "Mondo Rama," and the two have co-written and released four albums of world music. Through Jai he met percussionist Geoffrey Gordon, and through Geoffrey, Shiva Rea. These relationships steered him toward yoga music and kirtan, the call-and-response form of ecstatic singing and prayer. In that world he has recorded and produced projects with Deva Premal and Miten, Snatam Kaur, Donna De Lory, Jaya Lakshmi, David Newman, Mike Cohen, Brenda McMorrow, Johanna Beekman, Katie Wise, and Rob and Melissa, among others. As a recording engineer he has also worked with Joan Baez, Ledisi and E-40.

Ben works from his home studio in San Anselmo, California, just north of San Francisco. He produces, records and mixes for artists across many genres, and he is also called on to master projects and add instrumentation to recordings in progress. He often describes his domain as "world music," layering instruments from different parts of the world over lush textures, with a little psychedelia, to make a sound that can reach listeners everywhere.