Suzanne Sterling's 2009 kirtan video is a short, unadorned document of a live devotional chanting session performed with four band members at the Rudramandir Center for Spirituality and Healing in Berkeley, California. Running just under five minutes, the clip offers little beyond its setting and its personnel, so this piece uses it as a doorway into the practice itself: what kirtan is, how its call-and-response structure works, why the room a chant is sung in matters, and what a viewer can actually listen for when a recording is this brief.
The video runs 4 minutes and 57 seconds and was published on August 20, 2009. Its description identifies the performers as Suzanne Sterling, with band members Amy Carr, Chris Krotkly, Jason Parmar and Todd Boston. It places the performance at the Rudramandir Center for Spirituality and Healing in Berkeley. The video has been viewed 12,583 times, a modest figure that suggests a niche audience of people looking for devotional music specifically.
It is worth being precise about what the material does and does not tell us. The description gives the performance venue, the lineup, and credits for media production by Celestine Star and Golden Star Productions. It does not say which instrument each musician played, what songs were sung, or what Sterling said to the room. Nor does it give the exact date the performance was recorded, only the date the video went online. A responsible reading of the clip therefore stays with what can be seen and heard, and with the general nature of the tradition it belongs to, rather than inventing a backstory for the individual performance.
That restraint is useful in itself. A five-minute live clip is not a biography or a teaching. It is a snapshot of a practice in motion, and the best way to get value from it is to know what the practice is doing.
Kirtan is a form of devotional singing rooted in the Indian bhakti traditions, in which sacred names and praises are sung aloud, usually in repetition. Its defining feature is that it is communal. A leader typically sings a phrase, and the group answers it, so the music moves back and forth between one voice and many. The leader may begin a line, the room may take it up, and the phrase is repeated until the chant gathers its own momentum. Many kirtan sessions build gradually, with tempo and volume rising and falling over the course of an evening, though the specifics vary widely between teachers and traditions.
For a listener new to the form, the call-and-response pattern is the most important thing to notice. It is what makes kirtan different from a concert in which the audience simply listens. Each repetition invites participation, and the sound is designed to be completed by the people in the room. In a short clip, you can often hear this exchange most clearly in the first moments, before the texture thickens. Listen for where a single voice steps forward and where the group answers, and notice how quickly the call becomes a shared line.
Musically, kirtan tends to rely on repetitive melodic cycles rather than the verse-and-chorus form of Western pop. This is part of why a short recording can be so absorbing. The repetition is not a lack of development; it is the point. A phrase sung for the fifth time sounds different from the first, because the singers have settled into it and the listeners have begun to breathe with it. If you watch the video once for the melody and again for the rhythm of the exchange between leader and group, you will hear two different things.
The description places this performance at the Rudramandir Center for Spirituality and Healing in Berkeley. The name itself signals the setting's purpose: a space framed around spirituality and healing, not around entertainment. For a practice like kirtan, the physical room is part of the instrument. A space with good acoustics and a receptive audience changes how a chant sounds and how long a group stays with it.
The video does not allow us to say much about the room's appearance or its sound, and it would be inaccurate to describe either in detail. What can be said is that Berkeley has long been a city with a strong presence of spiritual and alternative practice communities, and that a center with this name sits within that world. The performance was, in other words, not staged in a concert hall. It was given to a community that had come to a space designed for practice.
When you watch a kirtan recording, try to imagine yourself in the room. Who might be there? How would the group answer a call? Where does the energy seem to rise? These are questions the video can prompt even though it cannot answer them fully.
The lineup credited in the description is a four-person band joining Suzanne Sterling: Amy Carr, Chris Krotkly, Jason Parmar and Todd Boston. A small band of this size is typical of contemporary kirtan groups, where a lead vocalist is supported by a few musicians who can sustain a drone, keep time, and answer the call. The description does not assign roles, so it would be speculation to say who played which instrument or who did what in the performance. What the credit does tell us is that this was a group performance rather than a solo recital, and that the music depended on several people holding the sound together.
The description also credits the production with assistance from Jerry Tomlinson, identified as the producer of the Great San Francisco Crystal Fair, and includes a 2009 copyright notice for Suzanne Sterling and Golden Star Productions. Those credits place the video in the Bay Area's late-2000s ecosystem of spiritual events and independent media, when artists were often recording and posting their own live material to the web. The clip is a product of that moment, and watching it today means seeing a record of how devotional music was documented and shared at the time.
Because the clip is short, it rewards focused attention more than casual scrolling. A few practical approaches can help you get more out of it:
- Listen first without watching. Kirtan is an audio practice before it is a visual one, and the voices and the spaces between them carry most of the meaning.
- Count the call-and-response cycles. Note how many times the group answers the leader before the phrase changes, and whether that number shifts over the clip.
- Pay attention to the drone and the rhythm underneath the voices. Those steady layers hold the room together while the melody moves.
- Notice your own body. Kirtan is designed to be sung along with, so many listeners find themselves tapping, swaying, or humming before they realize it.
- Then look up the tradition. Reading about bhakti devotion and the history of sacred name chanting will give you a framework for what you are hearing.
None of these approaches requires knowing the language of the chants or the specific songs performed. Kirtan is widely practiced by people who do not speak the original languages, and its emotional logic, the move from call to answer and back again, is accessible to any listener willing to join in.
A video of this length is easy to dismiss. It has no narrative, no interview, no explanation of the songs. But its value lies in what it preserves: a live moment of a devotional community singing together in a Berkeley center, documented by independent producers at a time when online video was still finding its shape. The clip reminds us that kirtan has always been, at heart, a practice of shared breath and shared voice, and that recordings are most useful when they point us back toward the room and the people in it.
If you have been looking for a place to start with kirtan, this is a modest but honest entry point. Watch it once for the sound, once for the structure, and once for the feeling of being invited to answer.
Start by listening to a few other kirtan recordings to hear how different groups handle the call-and-response form, from small bands to larger community singing. Then read about the bhakti traditions that gave rise to sacred name chanting, which will deepen your sense of why the repetition matters. If you are curious about the Bay Area spiritual community that produced this video, the Rudramandir Center's own materials and the Great San Francisco Crystal Fair's public record are good places to learn more about the setting. Above all, if a kirtan session is happening near you, go and sing. The recording is a sketch of something that is meant to be lived.
