Lea Longo's live "Peace Chants" set, recorded in June 2012 at the Conservatoire de musique de Québec for the first annual Montreal Yoga Festival, is a five-minute document of a kirtan artist working at the point where devotional call-and-response singing meets a songwriter's instinct for a hook. Longo sings mantras such as Om Namo Bhagavate, Om Nama Shivaya and Adi Shakti, with musicians Rad Crasto, Shawn Mativesky, and Yasushi & Niranjan, and the material draws mostly from her album Peace Chants. The clip is short, and the available record of it is thin: a recording, a title, and a channel description. That is enough to hear what the set is attempting, and it is worth taking seriously on those terms.
The set was captured in June 2012 at the Conservatoire de musique de Québec, in Quebec City, though it was staged for the first annual Montreal Yoga Festival. The video itself was published on YouTube in January 2013, roughly seven months after the performance. Its listed view count is 10,540, which tells you it has found a modest, steady audience rather than a viral one. For a live recording from a yoga festival, that is an honest footprint: the people who went looking for this kind of music found it.
Kirtan is a devotional practice of singing sacred names and mantras, usually in a group, with the leader calling a phrase and the room answering it back. Its power is repetition. A short line sung over and over, with a harmonium or drum keeping time, slowly shifts the attention of everyone present from thinking to listening. Traditional kirtan is built to be sung by a room, not performed at it.
That is what makes Longo's approach interesting. Her own description of the set says she "fuses mantra chants with her hooky original melodies." The tension in that sentence is the whole subject. A pop-trained ear wants a melody that lodges in the head and returns the next morning. A devotional tradition wants the mantra to do its work through repetition and not through novelty. Writing original melodies around sacred text risks making the chant a vehicle for the tune. The set's own framing suggests Longo is trying to keep both: the hook invites a newcomer in, and the mantra keeps the listener there.
The channel description names three chants, each with its own character:
- Om Namo Bhagavate — a mantra of reverence addressed to the divine as Bhagavat, a name with deep roots in Vaishnava devotional tradition.
- Om Nama Shivaya — one of the most widely sung mantras in modern practice, honoring Shiva. It is often the first chant many Western listeners learn, which makes it a natural entry point for a live audience.
- Adi Shakti — invoking the primordial feminine creative power in the Shakta tradition, a name that sits in a different devotional lineage from the first two.
The description adds that "many more" chants are in her repertoire, so this set should be heard as a sample rather than a complete catalogue.
The channel credits four collaborators: Rad Crasto, Shawn Mativesky, and the duo Yasushi & Niranjan. The description does not specify who played which instrument, so any claim about individual roles would be guesswork. What it does establish is a small ensemble around a single vocalist, the classic shape of a kirtan band, where the voice leads and the rhythm and harmonic bed hold the room.
The description lists four records, each pointing to a different corner of her work:
- Songs of a Siren — described as jazz mantra.
- Peace Chants — Indian chants, the album this live set draws from most heavily.
- Zen Voyage — meditative mantra meditations.
- Longo Lounge — lounge chants and downtempo chill.
Read together, the list shows a musician moving the same material through several moods. The jazz and lounge records push the mantra toward the rooms of ordinary nightlife; the meditation record slows it down toward practice. The live set sits in the middle, where a festival audience is most likely to meet it.
This is where honesty is the only useful posture. The material available describes a recorded performance, a catalogue, and a set of practice offerings: group meditation sessions, wellness retreats, and private mindfulness and meditation classes. It does not describe how Longo came to kirtan, which teachers shaped her, or how the album was made. Anyone wanting that origin story will need to go to her own writing or interviews, which are outside the material used here.
What the material does show is a practitioner who has kept the work active across several records and who brings it to festival stages and to the small rooms of retreat and classroom practice. The 2012 recording is a waypoint, not a summary.
- Watch the full live clip, listening specifically for the moment a chant turns into a melody and back again.
- Start with Peace Chants if you want the material as it was performed; move to Zen Voyage for slower, meditative listening.
- Find the albums on iTunes or Apple Music, or visit the official site at lealongo.com for more of her music.
- If you practice, try singing an unfamiliar mantra along with a recording before deciding whether a hook helps or distracts the chant for you.
