Laurie Anderson is worried. The revered multidisciplinary artist has recently returned from her first, “sort of spur-of-the-moment” trip to India, and it’s not the alarming (if anticipated) poverty in that country that has her so dismayed, it’s the state of our United States.
“I’m just so distracted these days,” she tells me over the phone from her New York City residence. “I’m really very worried about what’s going on. So any chance to make something that brings people together is so important to me. I didn’t expect to be this worried,” she adds, with an admittedly worried-sounding chuckle. “I’m not paralyzed, but it’s up there.”
Anderson, 77, is hardly alone in feeling stress over the current erosion of progress and civil rights and the amping up of inanity that’s trickling down from the Oval Office. But since 1987, an educational and cultural institution in New York City has endeavored to offer up a modicum of wisdom and peace to those inclined to seek it out. And beginning in 1989, that institution, Tibet House US, has enjoyed the support of the biggest musical names — including David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith — for its annual fundraiser, endeavoring, via one concert a year, to raise money and vibrations. The benefit, long spearheaded by artistic directors Philip Glass and Anderson, has become a landmark annual event in the city — this year’s iteration takes place on March 3. Yet too few seem to know that Tibet House is an actual place. Or what its mission is. That holds true even for some of the show’s performers over the decades.
Ganden Thurman, elder brother of actress Uma (who is an honorary chair of the event) and son of Tibet House co-founder Robert A.F. Thurman, is the organization’s executive director. “I feel that all of [the benefit performers] understand that the central thrust of our interest in Tibet, our purview vis-à-vis Tibet, is about self-determination, freedom of expression, freedom of association,” he explains during a Zoom conversation. “All the things that musicians and other artists stand for.” As the organization’s website notes, “Tibet House US is dedicated to preserving Tibet’s unique culture at a time when it is confronted with extinction on its own soil.” Indeed, China’s Communist Party has ruled Tibet since the 1950s, and the U.S. State Department’s website notes specifics of China’s iron-fisted rule, including “extrajudicial killings by the government; disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment by the government,” and much, much more.
Returning Benefit performer Eugene Hütz, of Gogol Bordello, recalls, “I first heard about Tibet’s struggle via Beastie Boys activism, not BBC or CNN. Right there was a great example for me how much punk rock and hip-hop musicians have a reach into youth culture that mainstream media doesn’t.” Speaking via email, he continues, “Similarly we speak about struggles we consider righteous, Ukraine certainly being one of them, through our music.”
Ukrainian-born singer/composer Hütz arrived in the States with his mother in 1992 as a political refugee; he formed Gogol Bordello on NYC’s Lower East Side in 1999. After participating in what he figures is six years of Tibet House benefits, he refers to the “Tibet House family” and the “incredible NY tradition that brings legendary and new artists together in a unique way for an undeniable cause. Much love to Philip Glass and Bob Thurman for establishing this yearly monumental playground for talent.”
Rarely has a playground been as grand as the Carnegie Hall stage. Despite the exalted setting, the annual affairs are noted for the almost “behind-the-scenes” collaborative feel of friends hanging out and doing their favorite songs together, which appeals to many performers. And most certainly to the audience, which is always up for a never-duplicated evening.
Tibet House’s first benefit featured four participants: Philip Glass, author Heinrich Harrer, Robert A.F. Thurman, and the Gyuto Monks. The ensuing years upped the ante considerably. David Bowie appeared in 2003, and although that performance has not been released — nor any other from the Tibet House benefits, either in audio or video — much documentation exists online, as (usually lousy) guerilla videos. Bowie, in collaboration with the Kinks’ Ray Davies (sporting a bow tie), is casual perfection, crooning his “Loving the Alien” and the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.” The finale found the pair — along with Ziggy Marley, Lou Reed, and Tibetan monks in traditional burgundy-red robes — jamming on the pointed Bob Marley gem “Get Up, Stand Up.” As one YouTube commenter noted, “My favorite 3 artists — Lou, Bowie, Ray, singing on the same stage together! Probably the only time ever.”
Anderson doesn’t really remember her first Tibet House benefit, saying, “My memory is very fried for stuff like that.” But in 2017, she honored her late husband, Lou Reed, during a benefit that occurred during Trump’s first term. Anderson performed her then new piece “Don’t Go Back to Sea,” with lyrics including “you don’t look like a president to me,” along with other intensely personal, Reed-directed lines. That same year, Smith covered Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” along with her prescient 1979 song “Citizen Ship,” singing, “Cast adrift from the citizen ship / Lady Liberty, lend a hand to me.” In 2014, Iggy Pop, joined by New Order, was joyously spot-on for Joy Division classics “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” while other years have featured boygenius, Margo Price, Cyndi Lauper, and Keanu Reeves, all singing for Tibet.
Located at 22 West 15th Street, Tibet House US rises quietly near Union Square, the Guitar Center, and Rent the Runway’s NYC showroom. Inside a red-brick building with double glass doors is a multi-level layout with a Buddhist shrine, exhibition space, and a library dedicated to Tibetan culture. The raison d’etre for Tibet House US’s 1987 founding, as Glass elucidates in a video on the official website, is “The whole country [of Tibet] was abducted. And the world didn’t notice.” In 1959, the current Dalai Lama and approximately 200,000 Tibetans fled to India to save their own lives and their culture, “leaving behind the destruction and genocide in their native land of occupied Tibet.”
Glass and Robert Thurman are co-founders of Tibet House US, along with actor and activist Richard Gere. The latter is likely the biggest boldface-name supporter of the Tibetan diaspora, visiting with the Dalai Lama in His Holiness’s home in Dharamshala, India, which is also the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Occasionally, something like 1997’s Seven Years in Tibet, which starred Brad Pitt, will restart a conversation, but Tibet’s plight is rarely front-page news. That movie was based on Heinrich Harrer’s 1952 memoir; he was an Austrian mountaineer and former SS sergeant who was cleared of Nazi crimes after the war. Harrer spent many years in Tibet, and tutored the Dalai Lama in English. One of his most traveled quotes sums up Tibet’s plight: “My heartfelt wish is that my story may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.”
Ganden Thurman echoes that sentiment when he observes, “the Tibet issue in itself is very difficult for people to understand. And then the Tibetan response to their problem, as a further twist of the knife of obscurity, is that the Tibetans’ response is nonviolent resistance, and this is not well understood by people. People think that it is surrender.”
If you haven’t heard of Tibet House US, or been to an annual benefit gig or gala, you’re not alone. Despite the dazzling symphony of talent that appears every year, the one-night-only event might feel lost in the glare of Broadway’s blinding lights. “So, people don’t know about it because we don’t spend money on advertising,” says Ganden Thurman. “We have to be very thrifty around here. It’s word of mouth. We use the communities that are based around those artists, and around us, and anyone collaborating with us.”
A few weeks prior to the Carnegie Hall event, Anderson is not yet sure what her precise participation for 2025 will look like. “I’m probably gonna do something with [NYC jazz band] Sexmob. I might do something with Michael Stipe. What’s really cool is that the rehearsal is very loose. People kind of go, ‘I need a bass player. Can you play?’ Last year, Maggie Rogers was on, and she and Joan Baez just kind of said, ‘Hey, let’s sing something together.’ Last minute, they just went off into a room and tried something. I love that feeling of improv.”
The 2025 benefit will see returning artists Smith, Anderson, Glass, R.E.M.’s Stipe, African music icon Angélique Kidjo, and Gogol Bordello, plus queer country up-and-comer Orville Peck, Tune-Yards, alt-jazz artist Arooj Aftab, Canadian singer/songwriter Allison Russell, actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear, The Fantastic Four), and longtime hit-making musical activist Jackson Brown. For starters. As Rolling Stone has observed, THUS’s annual hoedown is “one of the longest-running benefits in America that never fails to put together an incredible lineup.”
But do the iconic nights and thrilling pairings bring in big bucks for Tibet House US? In 2025, a ticket to the concert and gala (an event where one might mix and mingle with the evening’s performers) is $500; tickets to the performance begin at $49. While recent giant-venue benefits for victims of the Los Angeles fires have seen millions of dollars raised, the monies earned are more modest for the Carnegie Hall annual.
“In general, our point is that we’re all enriched by each other and by strengthening our bonds and by.…” Ganden Thurman pauses. “The religious words would be ‘purifying our bonds.’ But I think ‘enlivening our links with each other’ is a perfectly acceptable term. That’s what the concert is about, on a purely practical level.”
He continues, “And monetarily? It generates around $500,000 … $400,000 to $500,000, I’m not exactly sure. We don’t have underwriting, so all we see from that is around $100,000 to $150,000.” Which is, any way you cut it, scant for such an iconic event to benefit a big-city organization.
But Tibet is a sensitive issue in terms of politics and business, because of China’s economic power and its relationship with America. Which is why, Thurman explains, “It’s very difficult to get corporate and governmental support.” The executive director adds cheekily, “Although our government had, prior to the current crime spree, supported the Tibetan government in exile. And has, since the very, very beginning, even and including the creation of the original Tibet House, in collaboration with the Tibetan government-in-exile, which at that time was very Dalai Lama–centered. He hadn’t yet divested himself of his traditional political power that the Dalai Lama’s office held since the Mongols, some long time ago.”
Monies raised help support Tibet House’s operating costs, as well as online and in-person events for the public, some at no charge. Upcoming offerings include weekend yoga workshops at Tibet House US’s upstate New York Menla Retreat Center, Buddhist teachings, meditative sound baths, photography discussions, and a talk on “the vibrant intersection of neuroscience and the Tibetan Mind Sciences.”
But if the Tibet House benefits are the height of coolness and prestige, they are clearly not providing a huge hunk of the operating budget. Still, notes Thurman, “the people who have supported Tibet House are individuals of means over the years, and individuals without means, many of them. And also artists, because artists understand intuitively and existentially these issues of self-determination, self-expression, community-building, and strengthening the bonds of community.”
Thurman then ramps up, offering an apt take on the audience-artist relationship: “What they do up on that stage, they do for all of us. And in a way, our identifying with them and having fellow-feeling with them is allowing us to feel what they’re doing as if we were doing it ourselves. And we know this, and this is a tremendously powerful thing.”
He also values the ephemeral nature of the musical combos at the benefit concerts, “the fact that this concert wasn’t legally recorded, because there always are somehow bootlegs out there. These unique combinations, [Allen] Ginsberg and Smashing Pumpkins [Billy Corgan] [in 1997]. My colleague says I’m insane, but I swear to God I remember hearing Bowie and Blondie playing ‘Heroes,’ which would have been a truly brilliant highlight.”
Calling Carnegie “kind of the Church of high art, a cathedral, in a sense,” Thurman explains one of the most thrilling aspects of each year for him: “To me as a Tibet House person, seeing Tibetans on the same stage with these people, seamlessly integrated into a show, I think is incredible.”
Logistics and expenses prevent Tibet House from having too many Tibetan performers flown in to perform at Carnegie. But Anderson is once again excited to see Tenzin Choegyal, the son of Tibetan nomads, who has performed musically worldwide and opened many of the Dalai Lama’s public talks. On Anderson’s recent sojourn to India, she went to and took inspiration from the Maha Kumbh Mela, a six-week Hindu festival in India attended by nearly a half a billion people this year.
“There were so many different kinds of music there. People doing so many different types of practices,” says Anderson, a student of Buddhism and meditation since the late ’70s. At the end of her trip, she found herself among Tibetans in India. “That kind of chanting is one of the most haunting sounds in the world, and that’s how Tenzin starts [the Tibet House benefits]. It really seems to really come from another part of the body, it’s so resonant. That’s pretty much our Tibet House tradition, starting with that chanting. It’s such a beautiful way to begin.”
And it’s a moment that is much needed. “I think given what’s going on in the country, there’s a lot of interest in a musical community, in a spiritual community, and kind of wanting to be part of something. I think that’s one of the reasons people are really showing up for this one,” Anderson observes. As for any preconceived onstage message? The avant-garde artist is slightly taken aback. “Gosh, I don’t know. I think it’s so implicit that anything for me would be redundant, so I’m trying to just find positive ways to look at life.”
If what’s past is prologue, Anderson will find a united, if not predetermined, front among this year’s performers — as in 2017, when Andy Greene, of Rolling Stone, reported, “The evening was devoted to raising money for the people of Tibet … but throw a bunch of progressives into a room two months after Donald Trump’s inauguration and it’s inevitable domestic politics will come up more than a few times.”
Hütz will let his band’s barbed music do the talking. And he’s excited to “yet one more time, collaborate with the awesome [violist] Martha Mooke and Scorchio Quartet, which allows for Gogol Bordello’s sympho-punk side to reach maximum potential. We choose songs that have class struggle, anti-oppression, and anti-fascist topics, but also were written with grandiose arrangement intention,” he explains. “Some are ‘When Universes Collide,’ which deals with extremes of class struggle in Brazil, and ‘Forces of Victory,’ written in collaboration with great Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan.”
Although Gogol Bordello is a beyond-busy touring entity, even an abbreviated Tibet House set is something not to be missed. “I only wish we could ever play these songs with such powerful string arrangements at Punk Rock Bowling or Warped Tour,” laments Hütz. “But this is what makes Tibet House once again so special. It is only there that this level of grandiose cross-pollination and juxtaposition happens.” ❖
Katherine Turman has written for Entertainment Weekly, Spin, Variety, and other publications, and is the author of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. She lives in Brooklyn.
