ANCIENT sanskrit and guitar are Doug Jerebine’s passions.
You may remember Jerebine as Jesse Harper, who played in bands Human Instinct, The Embers, and The Brew.
Nowadays, he’s a monk who combines the classical Indian language with performance, and says the two complement each other well.
“The roots of music and sanskrit are the same; it’s the language and the music of the gods. It’s exceptionally beautiful and the primordial aspect moves you to hear the music as a language.”
Jerebine says most contemporary scholars agree sanskrit is the mother of all languages. He spent from 38 years in India as a travelling monk translating several books of sanskrit scripture, and says pacific people admired and respected his decision to move there.
“I do feel that we as the pacific (which means peaceful place) are a great gift in a world of war and aggression.”
Peoples’ perceptions of India as poverty stricken are skewed by their concept of materialism, he says.
“India is no more [in poverty] than other parts [of the world]; in the West we have a spiritual poverty. For [Indians] money is less important, and what we see as poverty is more like a normal life.”
In the 1960s, during his first stage of infatuation with the guitar, Jerebine’s music could be described as Hendrix ’98 meets Sonic Youth.  He was a guitar virtuoso who bent the neck of his guitar to adjust string tension because it didn’t have a whammy bar.
Thinking outside the square led him to India during the Hare Krishna movement. Now, forty years later, he performs with a guitar of his own design called a Raag Taar.
“It’s the most pleasurable instrument to play. It’s essentially a guitar and bass combined with movable frets that allow for microtone movements,” he says.
The design is similar to a traditional Indian sitar, and Jerebine plays it because he became annoyed with the inaccuracy of the notes on normal guitars.
When Jerebine visits New Zealand from his home in England, he stays with the same music teacher who introduced him to Indian music, and after all his travels, he says music in New Zealand is world beating.
“It is of a calibre hard to find in the world and too few people realise that we have top musicians here.”
Doug Jerebine with the Mantarays, 9pm, Happy, May 8.