By Dimitri Ehrlich
Her life has been a story of unexpected transformations. As a child, Sasha Lazard was typically open-minded in her relationship to music, consuming with casual acceptance whatever the adults around her happened to be playing.
Growing up—first in New York City and then in Paris— Lazard was exposed to the jazz music her father loved. (A professional TV news journalist, he played trumpet in a jazz band as a hobby.) After her parents divorced, Lazard’s mother, an art photographer, met a boyfriend who introduced Lazard to opera. Although at first she had to be dragged unwillingly to multihour performances of Mozart and Wagner, soon she felt an extraordinary revelation: She had found her home and it was classical music.
Over the next several years, Lazard was unwavering in her commitment to honing her ethereal mezzo-soprano, tuning out more or less all the various pop music of the moment that her peers were dancing or headbanging to. Blossoming into a professional performing artist, it seemed her life and destiny were set.
After graduating from Bennington, Lazard headed west and was accepted at the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Soon after, she met a young DJ producer named Mark Raskin in a nightclub back in New York. Over the next several years, Lazard found success merging her operatic vocals over cool, trippy beats, releasing a series of Billboard-charting singles. Over the course of five albums (including the score and soundtrack for the movie Blind, starring Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore, on which Lazard sang a duet with Robert Redford), she continued to explore ways of blending classical singing with various forms of pop music.
In 2022, after three bouts with Lyme disease, Lazard attended a sound bath performance on Shelter Island (a retreat organized by Purist) and once again the compass of her life journey took an unexpected turn. “During the sound bath, I felt a shift,” Lazard says.
Although she had been meditating on and off for many years, the sound bath became a catalyst for her to view music as a tool on the spiritual path. “The sound waves quieted, and then reawakened my brain, and nothing had ever been so successful in putting me into a truly meditative experience before. It really opened me up to the idea of the healing power of music and tone and vibration.” sashalazard.com