Dharma in Two Keys

Liz Hamill ’82 Shares Musical and Spiritual Inheritance

by Michelle Simmons

January 2, 2010

Last spring, Liz Hamill ’82 donated to Dickinson a longcherished collection of artifacts she had inherited from Allen Tanner, the renowned concert pianist. She spent three weeks in Archives & Special Collections digitizing his LPs and other recordings.

Liz Hamill ’82 is the embodiment of the sensitive artist. Dressed in black and speaking in soft, melodic tones, she opens up about her life as if turning a page in a photo album—or in her case, arranging and rearranging a jazz standard until it becomes her own.

Hamill grew up in Carlisle, a musical prodigy studying classical piano and playing guitar. As the stepdaughter of Howard Figler, former director of the Counseling Center, she spent countless hours absorbed in the Waidner-Spahr Library’s vast music collection. After high school, she enrolled in the piano performance program at the Boyer College for Music at Temple University.

“I didn’t realize what richness I had lost when I went to Philadelphia,” she recalls. “It was just eight hours in front of the piano—losing the library, losing all that other stimulus. It was too focused for me. I decided to leave piano performance and really study things in a much broader way.”

Hamill transferred to Dickinson, double majoring in classical studies and music. After graduating, she decided to give the piano another try and earned a master’s in music from the prestigious New England Conservatory, with an emphasis on jazz studies in its Third Stream program.

By 1997, she was eking out a living in Boston as a blues/folk singer. Her first album, Liz Hamill, Cambridge Post Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sandy Denny, had garnered positive reviews, and she had co-authored The Advancing Guitarist with the influential jazz guitarist Mick Goodrick. She had a solid underground following and a manager who also was working with singer-songwriters Chris Smither and Shawn Colvin. But she just couldn’t get that big break.

“It’s kind of like that almost-famous story,” she says. “I was almost playing at Newport Folk Festival. … I was getting good reviews, but my car is breaking down—that kind of thing.”

Then her maternal grandmother, Agnes Becherer, passed away. “She died in hospice,” Hamill says. “And assisting someone in the dying process deeply affected me. I had a lot of questions about what happens next to the person after they pass away.”

Hamill’s questioning led her to Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, one of the last Tibetan Buddhist lamas to be educated in Tibet before its annexation by China.

“I was able to qualify for a retreat, where he was teaching,” she says. “That was my first time when I sat with him in meditation. … He started to sing some of the chants, and his voice just pierced my heart.”

At the end of the retreat, Hamill thought, “I’ve got to do something about that—how can I help him? How can I help his legacy; are there any good recordings?”

Shortly afterward, she left for Brazil to study with Rinpoche at Chagdud Gonpa Khadro Ling, one of several Tibetan Buddhist communities he founded in the West. “If I wanted to record him, that’s where I had to go,” she explains. “I had encountered an authentic 1,000-year-old unbroken transmission from teacher to student lineage. That’s not something you’re going to find in a New Age crystals store.”

Hamill felt Rinpoche’s sacred teachings and liturgies should be preserved as soon as possible, as he was suffering from a heart condition. “I just said, ‘We don’t have so much time; I really would like to focus on what there is to learn from you.’ ”

The result is Dakini Music, the record label she founded to archive the music, chants and teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. All proceeds from sales go to support Chagdud Gonpa and Siddhartha’s Intent, an international Buddhist organization.

Hamill has donated her many Dakini Music recordings to Dickinson, including an 11-CD collection, The Way of the Bodhisattva, by Dzongar Khyentse Rinpoche, another influential Tibetan Buddhist lama teaching in Brazil. According to Kirk Doran, technical services librarian and a longtime Hamill friend who cataloged the recordings, “These are absolutely unique primary sources. They’re not something you get on iTunes.”

Hamill also arranged Rinpoche’s 2001 visit to Dickinson to speak on The Healing Power of Compassion. “It was one of the great highlights of my life,” she says. He died a year later.

She tells the story of their meeting not just as a remembrance of him but “to remember that we will all die, and we will all have to deal with the dying process of everyone close to us. When those times come, those moments won’t be separate from my memories of him and everything I’ve learned.”

Just last spring Hamill returned to Dickinson to work on yet another archival music project—but one quite different from the Buddhist recordings. (See "Gifting a GLBT Legacy.") After three weeks, she returned to Chagdud Gonpa Khadro Ling in Brazil to continue her work there.

Besides her ongoing projects at Dakini Music, she assists with the community’s daily maintenance—from cleaning the temple to receiving visitors and doing kitchen work. She’s also become adept at the gyaling, a traditional Tibetan reed instrument similar to the oboe, and maintains two blogs, one devoted to her continuing interest in jazz and blues and another for Dakini Music.

“In the past 10 to 12 years, there’s been unbelievable growth [at Chagdud Gonpa Khadro Ling in Brazil],” she says. “I have so much to do—we receive 2,000 visitors a month. It’s really like a Little Tibet or a Little Bhutan.”

Listen to some of Hamill's recordings and read her notes on the songs in "Audio Feature: Keeping Still Music."