Three decades after our only previous encounter via phone interview, William Aura, the new age-smooth jazz composer/musician/producer and philanthropist/teacher/storyteller of 3rd Force and Playing for Change renown, and this writer finally met face-to-face on February 25, 2026.
For three hours, seated at a small table in the Rainbow Bridge market near his place in Ojai, an arts-centric enclave in the verdant coastal mountains near Ventura, California, we shared one of the most profound conversations I’ve had in recent years.
William told me it resonated deeply with him as well.
Our close encounter also coincided with “Onward and Upward,” the second radio single from the all-instrumental 3rd Force’s ninth album, “Lifeforce,” surging toward the top of Billboard’s Smooth Jazz chart, a milestone achieved two weeks later in mid-March.
Released on June 27, 2025, “Lifeforce” had already risen to No. 1 in Billboard in early October and on several other smooth jazz lists, including SmoothJazz.com, buoyed by “Show Me the Way,” the album’s first Billboard No. 1 radio single.
“Lifeforce” became the first 3rd Force album to spawn two tracks that achieved the pinnacle.
Yet 3rd Force’s remarkable return to recording and the charts – nearly a decade after their last album – was just one of myriad topics we talked about.
Otherwise, our Ojai visit was a very deep, wide, and personal exchange of thoughts and ideas between two septuagenarians who come from very different walks of life, but have many things in common.
When Aura and I first spoke by phone in April 1995, our conversation formed the basis of my liner notes for “Force of Nature,” the second 3rd Force album for the Malibu-based Higher Octave Music label and the follow-up to the band’s Top 10 eponymous debut. Mutual friend Geoff Gans, the package’s graphic designer (also a colleague of mine in our day jobs at Rhino Entertainment and a Grammy co-nominee a year earlier), made the connection.
Aura (who plays guitar, bass, keyboards, and more) had co-founded 3rd Force in 1994 with collaborators Craig Dobbin (an American classically trained pianist, music producer, and TV composer) and Alain Eskinasi (a Dutch composer, multi-instrumentalist, and world music percussionist).
“We like to run it cool and hot at the same time,” Aura told me in 1995. “It’s all about getting an intention on tape. On one level, it’s simple, because playing is such an exhilarating experience. But I also think there’s a higher purpose – to lift listeners to another level, to raise their energy, to share that exhilaration with them. That’s what we set out to do.”
Aura told me back then that to him and his bandmates, the “3rd Force” is the magic that happens when they play together, creating a transcendent sound neither could create alone.
“The stories and musical artistry of all these players add more to the whole than their individual parts – a recurring event on ‘Force of Nature’ and in the 3rd Force story,” read the closing line of my notes.
That’s all held true for more than 30 years.
After the first “3rd Force” album reached No. 9 at radio in 1994, both “Force of Nature” and “Vital Force” (1997) rose to No. 3. The band’s fourth album, “Force Field” (1999) peaked at No. 2.
The “Collective Force” best-of compilation (2000) preceded more new Aura/Dobbin material on “Gentle Force” (2002) and “Driving Force” (2005).
“Global Force,” the eighth 3rd Force album, released in 2016 after a 10-year hiatus, was their first No. 1 on the Billboard Smooth Jazz chart.
In 2025, after another break lasting nearly a decade, Aura and Dobbin reconvened and released “Lifeforce.” The duo produced and recorded it over an 18-month stretch, aided and abetted by their international cast of a dozen stellar musical collaborators.
Released by the Los Angeles-based Baja/TSR Records, the album’s 10 tracks show 3rd Force creating fresh cinematic soundscapes fusing new age, smooth jazz, acid jazz, rock, funk, soul, Latin, world, and indigenous music, as the group seeks and ultimately finds new paths to that transcendent zone.
Based on the album’s and singles’ reception, 3rd Force’s audience not only remembered them, but also celebrated their return.
Ahead: more on how Aura and Dobbin, a prolific, award-winning multimedia composer, produced “Lifeforce”; Aura’s work with the Playing for Change nonprofit non-governmental organization; and our remarkable Ojai encounter.
First, some Aura-l storytelling.
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Aura in Asia: Agent of Change
William Aura, who turned 75 on April 1, hails from the Detroit area. He moved west as an aspiring young musician and producer, and resided for many years in Ojai, where he also operated his recording studio, Auravision. He still has family and owns property in Southern California.
But for the last several years, Aura has called a bamboo hut in a tiny rice-farming village in northeast Thailand his home, and visits the States only occasionally.
By 1994, he’d recorded 15 albums under his own name for the Higher Octave Music label (where he was also a staff producer) and earned a reputation as a pioneer of the new age genre.
But in search of new musical adventures, Aura cross-faded to smooth jazz and world music and founded 3rd Force with Dobbin and Eskinasi, a pair of favorite collaborators.
Drawing from diverse personal backgrounds, interests, and musical influences over their nine-album career, the singer-less group (beyond using voices as instruments) has earned an international audience, with radio and online airplay boosted by the 3rd Force website and social media presence.
Yet they’ve never toured or performed live.
Along with 3rd Force albums and many other recording projects (among them working with Craig Chaquico on the former Jefferson Starship lead guitarist’s breakthrough new age albums, “Acoustic Highway” and “Acoustic Planet,” released by Higher Octave in 1993 and 1994), Aura over the decades also visited Asia often, particularly Tibet, Nepal, and Thailand.
He was variously seeking spiritual enlightenment, performing with local musicians in cultural exchanges, and aiding local efforts to improve educational opportunities and the quality of life for impoverished people in remote Himalayan villages.
In 2002, moved by his encounters and experiences with locals in Tibet, and the lack of funding and opportunities for children there, Aura founded the Aura Imports Sponsorship Project to raise funds and promote education for under-served kids in the region.
The enterprise created necklaces and other hand-crafted jewelry and sold the pieces online. Proceeds from customers worldwide funded educational and musical sponsorships that matched students with individual sponsors, and provided them opportunities and tools they could use to achieve their dreams.
Some of Aura’s video footage from this period is seen in Rick Ray’s award-winning 2006 film “10 Questions for the Dalai Lama.”
Connecting with Playing for Change
In 2007, Aura connected with the U.S.-based nonprofit Playing for Change Foundation, and served as PFC’s Regional Director of Asian Programs for the next 15 years. He helped produce videos celebrating peace, love, and unity while also promoting PFC’s mission of change through music and social action.
In this clip, Aura explained why Playing for Change was “the right thing to do.”
A memorable Playing for Change video from 2019 is a version of “The Weight” featuring The Band’s co-founder and the song’s composer Robbie Robertson and former Beatle turned All-Starr Band-leader Ringo Starr. The clip’s posted on the PFC YouTube channel and been viewed 47 million times as of spring 2026.
In early 2020, Aura was visiting the aforementioned remote rice-farming village of 400 residents in the Isan (or Isaan) region of Thailand for the first time when the COVID pandemic struck. He was stuck there unable to travel for almost two years.
In that time, as the village’s only non-Asian resident, yet welcomed by the locals, he gradually transitioned from a western to a more eastern lifestyle and world view.
As he framed it in our conversation in Ojai, the pandemic “broke” him of his western ways. He went from feeling stuck in the village to feeling right at home there.
Toward the end of 2021, I saw Aura playing bass in a Playing for Change video, joining guitarist Warren Haynes and an international lineup covering Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (see 01:46 and 03:38). William had recorded his part on a visit back in Ojai just post-pandemic, but would soon return to Thailand.
Seeing Aura prompted me to reach out to reconnect, after too many years. In a few clicks, I found his pages on the Playing for Change site and on Facebook, and started catching up with his remarkable life in the Far East as an American ex-pat. He was still actively making a positive difference in peoples’ lives there without looking for any personal financial gain.
His empathy and compassion for others inspired me to leave a greeting and a couple of comments. Our subsequent exchange reunited us, and reminded me of social media’s original, positive intent.
Here’s another example of social media for good: Playing for Change’s cover of The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” featuring the band’s drummer, John Densmore.
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‘Lifeforce’ – 3rd Force Wraps 9-Year Break
Along with being the sole Caucasian rice farmer in his Thai village, Aura was the only one whose bamboo hut also had a stash of musical instruments and a computer loaded with the latest recording and production software.
He had limited internet access but enough for digital file-sharing with bandmate-coproducer Dobbin at his L.A.-area production studio and their musical collaborators scattered around the globe.
Aura and Dobbin wrote, performed, and produced the 10 basic tracks for “Lifeforce,” then fleshed out the sound with contributions from their additional ace musicians.
Among them were Brian Hughes, Lawson Rollins, and Nils (guitars); Roberto Luti (slide guitar); Mitch Manker and Rodney Taylor (horns); former 3rd Force member Alain Eskinazi (keyboards, additional grooves); Keiko Komaki (Hammond organ); Mermans Mosengo (percussion, conga, harmonica); Shenkar (violin); Raman Maharajan (Himalayan flute); and Douglas Spotted Eagle (Native American flute).
The guitars, pianos, and horns often play simple melodies over grooving and soothing 4/4 backbeats and well-rounded bottom ends. The lead instruments solo some, but more often play to the song than go on extended solo flights. It’s cinematic, atmospheric, meditative music that could be soundtracks for road trips, cosmic travels, and…writing stories.
The production sounds seamless, as though the players were indeed all in the same room, feeding off each other’s grooves in real time, creating that 3rd-force vibe. To my ears, the music has more color and texture than the generic sonic wallpaper often heard in the new age-smooth jazz space.
And yes, you can dance to it. Or trance to it.
Apparently, my ears have company: Along with the album and leadoff single scoring No. 1, the aforementioned follow-up single “Onward and Upward” (featuring guitarist Rollins over a driving a LatinX groove) finally hit No. 1 in Billboard on March 12, 2026. It also topped four other smooth jazz singles lists the same week.
“We’ve been making music for three decades – and never had an album deliver two No. 1 singles. Until now,” Aura wrote in a thank-you post that day.
“It joins a project brought to life by an extraordinary family … To every artist who poured into this music, every station that believed, and every listener who stayed with us – this run is yours.”
Baja/TSR has slated a third “Lifeforce” single for release later in 2026, and asked Aura and Dobbin to follow up with what will be the tenth 3rd Force album, tentatively slated for 2028.
Find out more about 3rd Force here.
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A Force on Social Media
Beyond Aura’s musical and philanthropic pursuits, he is very active on Facebook, as I discovered. He shares thoughts, feelings, observations, and encouragement with other people who are likewise attempting to navigate life’s challenges without running aground.
In early February, he posted an especially thought-provoking reflection on the value of savoring the present. He articulated many of the thoughts bouncing around in my head these days, on the edge of 75.
Paraphrasing his more elegant prose, Aura observed that the past is history, the future is uncertain (and the end is always near, as Jim Morrison might add). Guilt about the past and fear of the future only poison the present. Our happiness right now is based in how much of that guilt and fear we can let go. Those are human constructs, after all.
Self-forgiveness is not only okay, it’s essential to happiness, he said. We just have to decide to do it. Our happiness is, therefore, in our own hands.
It sounds simple because it is. Sure, it’s been said before, many times, many ways. But finding and staying on a path to happiness is not always that simple. In our challenging times, his reminder to keep the headlights on – to stay in and revel in the present – resonated with me.
When Aura also mentioned in a post that he was back in California from Thailand for a short time, visiting family and taking care of some local business, I had to reach out to him. As my scholarly dad would say, “If not now, when?”
Fortunately for me, Aura was very receptive to my invitation to meet, and had an open Wednesday later in the month on Tuesday, February 25.
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Firsts and Lasts
In the interim, “Lifeforce” was my soundtrack as I road-tripped from Santa Clarita across the California desert to Las Vegas to attend a terrific reunion of boyhood pals from North Miami for a few days (an experience worthy of its own post).
On the five-hour drive home, I reflected on my 65 years of friendship with these guys, each one a character and fellow septuagenarian, on the things that have changed and things that never will, for better or worse. All told, we’ve beat the odds so far.
A few hundred million years ago, the desert floor was the bottom of a huge inland sea. But at this moment, as I cruised south on I-15 and then west on Pearblossom Highway to Highway 14, the surrounding desert was in full bloom, the floor greener than I’d ever seen it.
There was still snow on the mountains, thanks to a few monsoonal rainstorms in the fall and winter.
Every turn of my head provided a fresh visual treat, made tastier knowing it was so rare and fleeting: In just a few weeks, without further rain, the desert sun would scorch the desert floor back to its usual parched brown.
I felt a heightened sense of being here now, as Dr. Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass wrote in the 1960s, and Aura likewise expressed in 2026.
Still, my thoughts also flashed back to the beginning of the 1960s, when my pals and I were elementary school kids, when life was all about the firsts, when most things were still new and we were discovering what brought us happiness and what didn’t.
We all pursued different paths to happiness since then, and most of us got there.
Now, at our age, it’s about the lasts: Will this be the last time I do this, go here, or see that person?
Would that be the last time I saw the Nevada/California desert looking more like Ireland?
Would that be the last time I would see my seven brothers from other mothers? The only gang I ever remotely felt a part of?
Will anyone care in 100 years?
Unanswerable questions.
Just stop.
Be here now.
Like most others of a certain age, with mortality just over the horizon, these days I have greater appreciation for small, simple things that brought joy throughout my life, and perhaps I’ve taken for granted. Now, they give us reason to live, to be here now.
‘Collective Force’ En Route to Ojai
On a sunny, clear, cool day on March 25, I drove from my home in Santa Clarita, California, to meet William Aura for lunch in Ojai, 90 minutes away.
Cruising west on Highway 126 to Santa Paula, then north on Highway 150 to the Ojai Valley, through lush, fragrant orange, lemon, and avocado groves and some of Southern California’s most beautiful mountain-scapes, was another hour and a half of consciously being in the moment, savoring the natural beauty surrounding me.
My soundtrack was “Collective Force,” 3rd Force’s mid-career greatest-hits collection, which traced the band’s early development. It played through almost twice. By the time I met William, I felt reinvigorated.
He’d been sitting at a table with his friend Scott Weiss, a local musician and producer, and introduced us as Weiss made his exit. William and I sat down at high noon.
“I want to ask you right off, William, just how you can be so deep inside my head, that you’re writing what I’m thinking?” was my opening gambit.
He looked at me somewhat quizzically.
I assured him I wasn’t taking him to task, just facetiously expressing my amazement at the uncanny synchronicity.
Time seemed suspended as we shared thoughts about myriad things we have in common, from world views to music as a healing force to our imperfect personal and family lives.
We were so engrossed in our conversation, it was 2:30 p.m. before we realized we hadn’t ordered anything to eat or drink.
I brought up specific comments he had made about aging, turning 75 (on April 1, as I will on October 3), the task of letting go, the value of living in the moment, the importance of kindness and compassion in our relationships with people, the geopolitical insanity we’re all experiencing, and other issues that are also top of mind for me right now.
Aura was surprised to get such direct feedback on things he’d written and launched into the ether, not knowing if they would resonate with anyone else.
We talked about his life in the Thai village, and how anxious he was a return to that simple yet more spiritually fulfilling life he had found there. Being back in civilization, even in Ojai, was somewhat surreal, he said.
We both found the exchange enlightening and energizing. I didn’t even think to record it until an hour had passed, but opted not to, because we were sharing confidences best left between us.
And neither of us went or left empty-handed. William presented a necklace and medallion to me. He said he had made two like it, and was honoring me with one. I was speechless. It’s like we became blood brothers.
He also gifted me a Playing for Change t-shirt, black with the yellow logo on the front, like the one he’s wearing in his post earlier in this story.
For Aura, I brought six promo copies of “Force of Nature” I had recently retrieved from my project archives. I gave him two for him and Craig, and William signed the other four for me.
He invited me to join him and Dobbin on an upcoming edition of their “Behind the Force” podcast on the 3rd Force YouTube channel.
And Aura has asked me to write the liner notes for what he says will be the final 3rd Force album. It will be my honor to recap the band’s illustrious career and catalog for posterity.
“We have a title, also with ‘force’ in it,” Aura told me, preferring not to divulge it just yet, “but that’s about all right now.”
Nature will take its course with 3rd Force.
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Aura, on the other hand, as noted earlier, has lived a fascinating life and accomplished much as a musician, producer, recording artist, humanitarian, philanthropist, teacher, storyteller, and rice farmer whose expertise and kindness have had positive influence on the lives of countless people. He finds the most joy and fulfillment in helping others, which remains his never-ending pursuit.
Yet Aura would also be the first to admit he’s imperfect, just a regular guy. Even facing the three-quarter-century mark, he told me he still considers himself a work in progress.
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Helping School for Girls and Young Women in Thailand
Now back in Thailand, Aura has a new mission: to help raise awareness about and funds for the Dhammajarinee Witthaya School, the nation’s only boarding school for at-risk girls and young women. Almost every graduate goes on to attend colleges and universities in their own country and abroad.
In a Facebook post on March 19, Aura introduced the school and its Buddhist nun founder, Acharn Yai, to his network of friends and followers:
Aura posted this reflection on April 1, the day he turned 75:
And I’ll leave you with Aura’s recap of the birthday celebration his partner Mai and their entire village threw in his honor.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you found it worthy of your time.
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Coda: Thank You
William posted the following on 4/16/26 after reading this story:
I appreciate his note and his friends’ comments more than I’m able to express right now. So I’ll follow my dad’s lead, say thank you, and sign off.
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Stephen K. Peeples is a Grammy-nominated multi-media writer-producer and award-winning radio/record-industry veteran raised in Miami and Los Angeles by career newspaper journalists and music lovers. See the “About” page on his website. More original stories and exclusive interviews are posted there and on his YouTube channel.
Article: William Aura of 3rd Force, Playing for Change: An Ojai Encounter
Category: News and Reviews
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: stephenkpeeples.com
