Join us for an amazing evening of Indian classical music!

Gautam Tejas Ganeshan's New Directions group, which was commissioned in 2009 by the San Francisco Foundation, explores the ecstatic edge of contemporary Indian classical music. With an all-acoustic focus, the group performs new music from within an old tradition. Gautam frees Carnatic vocal virtuosity to access its angular outer reaches, and Anantha R. Krishnan contributes an unflinching, intelligent intensity on the mridangam (south Indian barrel-drum) with a sophisticated technique and powerful repertoire. The group was featured in the 2009 SF International Arts Festival at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason (SF). Gautam is the founder and director of the Sangati Community Center for South Asian Music.

Grammy nominee and Indy award winning singer and multi-instrumentalist Jody Stecher is familiar to Freightgoers for his explorations of American roots music. Tonight, Jody reveals a different facet, as he performs traditional Indian ragas on the sursringar, a rare stringed instrument now in the early stages of revival in India. In the mid 1960s Jody became interested in raag sangeet, the modal classical music of India, and had the good fortune to study intensively with the sons of Ustad Ziauddin Khan Dagar, the chief musician of the royal court of Udaipur. Jody learned sursringar from Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar during the decade spanning the mid 1970s-80s and later received significant input and guidance from Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar. (One of the ancestors of the modern sarode, the sursringar is a superb solo instrument for classical North Indian music, able to bring out the subtle microtonal shadings, long sweeping slides, and curvilinear melodic contours of the ancient style of music known as Dagar Bani Dhrupad.)

Visit the Sangati Center's for information on New Directions

Visit Dawgnet for information on Jody