At 73, my guest today, Denise Kaufman, is kind of the ultimate Renaissance woman, an active member of the Sixties Bay Area psychedelic rock scene who's seen and done it all and continues to do it all.
The longtime singer and bassist is a member of Ace of Cups, which is this pioneering, all female psychedelic rock band that opened for Jimi Hendrix, the band Janis Joplin and so many others, and that she shared the stage people like the grateful debt, Jefferson Airplane.
She continues to play and record new music with the recently reunited group, which has been praised by Rolling Stone, Billboard, CB's this Morning, NPR, All Things Considered, the Guardian, and has recorded new songs with Bob Weir, Jackson Brown, David Freiberg and more.
A deeply spiritual person who's been exploring energy flowing community connectedness for over half a century, Denise also is a trained yoga teacher who's taught everyone from Madonna to Quincy Jones and so many others.
She splits her time between Venice beach, where she practices and records with the ace of cups, and teaches Yin yoga and Kauai, Hawaii, where she founded the island school in 1977 and lives on an organic farm and surfs in her free time.
She's just an awesome human being.
And I am so excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
Your mom, Golda, was actually a London Jew who was on her way to the US when the London bombing broke out.
My mother was a widow, and so my brother was a little boy with her.
And she was coming to the World's fair in New York, and they were en route on the Atlantic when Britain entered the war and London started to get bombed.
They were coming as a vacation, essentially.
She married quite young.
She married like in 20 or 21, and her husband had gotten cancer, brain cancer.
And so she nursed him for some years.
And after he passed, the family said, you know, you should take Julian and have a little time off.
And they had some cousins in New York.
And so she came to go to the world's fair and then basically never left.
Yeah.
So the US became the home.