Tina Turner ★ Beyond: Spiritual Massage By Tina Turner ★ [2009] ★ "Beyond" ★

Swissinfo.ch Jul 10, 2009 - 15:39

When Regula Curti rang her Zurich neighbour Tina Turner's telephone number, she wasn't expecting the Queen of Rock and Roll herself to pick up the receiver.  Curti wanted to ask if Turner would lend her voice to an album of Christian and Buddhist songs she planned to record with her Swiss-Tibetan friend Dechen Shak-Dagsay. To her surprise, the singer, a Buddhist herself, agreed.

The result is Beyond – Buddhist and Christian Prayers, which has so far been released in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The title track, also called Beyond, is a spiritual message written and spoken by Turner.

"I called her and it was really pure luck that she took the phone herself and she felt my emotion because it came from a vision I had in which I heard her talking into a soundtrack, not singing," Curti told swissinfo.ch over a cup of ginger tea at her Seeschau yoga and music therapy centre at Erlenbach on Lake Zurich.

"We met three hours later and I told her what I felt and she looked at me and said that she had waited a long time to spread her spiritual life to the world and to her fans," Curti said.

"In Beyond she is speaking a full message. It's like her own prayer to the world. It's based on holy scripts and [Persian poet] Rumi poetry and she made the text herself, it really comes from her deepest heart," said Curti.

In the background, Shak-Dagsay, a Tibetan mantra specialist, sings the tara mantra chant and Curti, a trained singer, a text from German medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen.