Released on March 10, 2023, "As Things Unfold" is a single, one track long, and it arrives at a distinctive point in Jim Gelcer's career. By then he had moved well past the debut kirtan album Bhagavan (2010) and the groove-forward Bhakti Groove Machine (2013). He had also released Cape Town to Kolkata (2019), and he was working increasingly in the single-release format, with titles like "Reconcile" (2020), "Do Androids Dream of Savasana" (2021), and "Mariupol" (2022) preceding this one.
Read against that run, "As Things Unfold" belongs to a thread of reflective, theme-driven pieces. It sits before the 2024 and 2025 singles on healing, hope, compassion and letting go, and before the full-length Quiet Expanse. The title alone, with its note of acceptance and patience, anticipates the territory he would explore more fully in later work.
Gelcer is a Canadian drummer, singer, composer and producer who trained in jazz at the Eastman School of Music and York University, and that background shapes how he approaches devotional music. His voice is warm and precise, an alto that sits comfortably in the mid-register. The emphasis falls on sincerity and clarity rather than display.
His work typically centers on harmonium, with jazz-influenced chord voicings and room for improvisation on drums or keyboards. The pacing in his recent work tends to be deliberate and slow, content to let a phrase sit and repeat. The overall feel is closer to chamber music than to a festival singalong: intimate, conversational, restrained. I can't speak to the specific instrumentation or arrangement details of this single beyond those general hallmarks, so treat the above as the context in which to hear it.
There is only one track here, and it is the point. "As Things Unfold" is a compact statement, and a single is a different listening proposition from an album. There is no sequence to follow and no arc across sides. Instead you get one idea, held at length.
What makes it land is the premise embedded in the title: practice as something that reveals itself over time rather than something to be mastered. Among Gelcer's singles of this period, it belongs with pieces that turn toward acceptance and the unfinished nature of inner work. Because he is known for holding a single phrase without over-decorating it, the single format suits him. A short release gives the listener one thing to sit with rather than many things to sort through.
Gelcer's work sits within the Sivananda Yoga lineage. He studied Sivananda Yoga and completed teacher training at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat in the Bahamas in March 2006. Kirtan came to him when he was invited to chant in the temple at the Sivananda Ashram in the Laurentian Mountains. That path matters: his music is bhakti, devotion expressed through song, framed by a classical, nonsectarian approach that pairs devotion with meditation and self-inquiry.
At the same time, he openly blends kirtan with jazz, R&B and rock. He doesn't present this as a pure tradition discovered and preserved; the synthesis is out in the open. "As Things Unfold" is best understood as part of that hybrid, devotional in orientation and shaped by a working musician's ear for harmony and space. It is not ecstatic, call-and-response kirtan built to whip up a room, and it is not purely ambient background either.
This single is for listeners in a reflective or transitional stretch: someone in the middle of something unresolved, whose practice is more about patience than breakthrough. It suits people who already like the understated side of devotional music and who are comfortable with the voice being present, rather than treating the music as wallpaper.
It is less suited to anyone wanting propulsive rhythm, dense production or high-energy group chanting. And if you want entirely secular wellness music with no reference to mantra practice or devotion, Gelcer's work as a whole may not be the right fit.
Give it undivided attention at least once. Headphones in a quiet room, in the evening or at the end of a practice session, will let the voice and the space around it come forward. Because it is a single piece, you can easily play it twice in a row: the first time to take in the whole, the second to follow the phrasing and notice where the music leaves room.
If you use music in a daily routine, it can also serve as a short companion to meditation or a closing note after asana. Either way, resist the urge to do something else while it plays. The piece is built around unhurried unfolding, and it asks for roughly the same in return.
