While working with a seemingly small arsenal of instruments, few people have put so much into evolving a music form as Krishna Das. Over the past decade his name has become synonymous with kirtan — try to find a yoga [0] studio that doesn’t sell his albums or play his music, or a yogi who is not aware of what he does. His adventurousness, nurtured in the early ‘70s as a rock singer, has only grown with age: kirtan with electronica; remixes; weaving poetry and sarangi into nuevo-chants; kirtan lessons on CD; live albums; and, this past Tuesday night at Jivamukti Yoga in New York City, keeping in tune and time with hip-hop beats alongside MC Yogi.

While it was uncertain where he would end up after Triloka/Karuna Records — a label he helped found nearly twenty years ago to provide an outlet for aging jazz players — folded, his phoenix career has arisen again with his newest effort, Heart Full of Soul, emerging on NuTone Records this week. A live recording with the addition of things like guitar and a drum kit to coincide with the cymbals, harmonium, and tablas indigenous to the style, the community feeling he craves and provides for so many continues on its unbroken thread.

While the double-album does not have the crispness and sheer beauty of the two albums he created alongside producer Rick Rubin — Door of Faith and Breath of the Heart — there is always something refreshing about his journeys. And travels they are: you need to invest yourself in the 22-minute “Shri Ram Jai Ram Jai Ram” and 23-minute “All One (Hare Krishna).” In this tradition, songs are not sound bytes filling up space between paid advertisements. They are life lessons; they are emotional, breathing creatures; they hit us in the heart more the ears, like a lifeline that plunges deeper and deeper with every listen.

As he told me during one interview for my first book, Global Beat Fusion, that depth is what the various yoga practices aim for. As the innumerable kirtan posse members joining KD on his latest can attest to, his words are a powerful force bringing a devotional art form rooted a half world away to light in America:

“A practice like chanting has a number of different ways that it allows the mind to settle, rather than grabbing it and holding it down. Purification is a really powerful word, and it shouldn’t be thought of as meaning pure and impure, good and bad. All this attachment we have for stuff and for who we think we are, what we want and don’t want, there’s a certain amount of energy that’s frustrated within us because we don’t know how to get what we want. So you’re never going to be able to calm your mind with that energy because all that energy wants to do is get off.”