Asha (aka Asha Elijah, Asha Quinn, Asher Quinn & Denis Quinn), is an English singer-songwriter and composer of an individual genre, the spiritually-themed love-song. As a musician he was first known as Denis Quinn on the New World Music label. He was born in Dulwich, South London, England.
Proceeding primarily as an instrumentalist initially, his first album of songs Open Secret was not released until he was 34. After several more early instrumental works, including improvised solo piano vignettes, he has turned increasingly to music as a vehicle of expression for spiritual devotion, through self-penned love ballads and anthems.
Inspired in part by the Sufi poets Rumi & Hafiz, his songs speaks of love, lover and beloved as one, though often presented lyrically as romantic odes. His compositions can double as both conventional love-songs, but also higher hymns and songs of praise to God.
Asha's path is as a Christian mystic, though he was born to a Jewish mother, and initiated aged 35 into mystical Islam, through a Sufi master, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. His faith is in Christ as an inner, living being of love, uniting humanity in one over-arching virtue, love itself. He takes as his doctrine Christ's last commandment to the disciples: Love one another.
He regards music as the art with the greatest capacity for transmitting higher love, Agape in the ancient Greek tradition. He seeks to express his devotion through song, but also as a means to actually transmit a message of higher love. When asked what kind of musician he felt he was, and what genre he felt he belonged to, he described himself as more of a postman than a musician.
Garnering lyrical inspiration also from the music of the two "great Jewish prophets of song in our time", Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen, Asha also locates himself musically as a minstrel in the tradition of the folk-song, lament, anthem & lullaby. His musical synthesis owes more to the lineage of the troubador on the Grail quest than to the contemporary scene.