RAGAS LIVE FESTIVAL RETURNS

Ragas Live Festival, New York City’s most ambitious music drop, returns in it’s 12th year as a 24-hour live event at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works.

Presented by Pioneer Works in collaboration with Brooklyn Raga Massive and the Society for Arts and Culture of South Asia, Ragas Live Festival will present 24 continuous hours of transcendent, spiritual music at the Pioneer Works main stage.

Performances include masters of the raga tradition such as Ramakrishnan Murthy and the Akkarai Sisters alongside legendary figures in ambient music, minimalism and new music including Vicky Chow, David Cossin and Mark Stewart of the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Mind Maintenance from the influential duo of Joshua Abrahms and Chad Taylor.

Presenting music as diverse as a Georgian Polyphonic choir Supruli amongst traditional classical raga sets on the sarod from Sougata Roy Chowdhury and sitar legend Gaurav Mazumdar, the event is a refreshing and enlightening iteration of the traditional Indian classical overnight concert. Genre expanding artistes include Quadrature and a new group, Amirtha Kidambi, Qasim Naqvi and Rafiq Bhatia Trio.

Notably, Rafiq Bhatia’s Son Lux was nominated this year for the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Reflecting ragas influence on jazz, Celebrating John McLaughlin and Mahavishnu will feature Premik Russell Tubbs on woodwinds, an original member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. 

Breaking ground within the tradition will be a jugalbandi, or duet, of Kunal Gunjal and Suhail Yusuf Khan on santoor and sarangi, two traditional classical raga instruments that have never been performed together in the United States. To sarangi maestro Suhail Yusuf Khan’s knowledge, the last time these instruments performed together was in India featuring his legendary grandfather Ustad Sabri Khan.

As Raga has influenced the genre of minimalism, the Ragas Live Festival has had a fruitful relationship with composer Terry Riley, an artistic advisor, who performed virtually for the festival in 2020 and 2021.

This year, Riley has given his blessing to composer Amir ElSaffar to create and premiere a new work inspired by Riley’s seminal work In C.

The new composition, In E half-flat will be the finale of the 24 hours of music and will be performed by an ensemble of 12 musicians steeped in the microtonal Maqam tradition of North Africa and the Middle East.

Other trailblazers in new music and ambient music, Vicky Chow, David Cossin and Mark Stewart of the Bang on a Can All-Stars will be performing for the first time as a trio and interpreting works by Nik Bartch, Brian Eno, Cassie Wieland and others.

The Ravi Shankar Foundation is supporting this year’s festival and will be sharing rare and unreleased performance and interview recordings during the breaks and live broadcast.  

The festival’s 24-hour format is inspired by ragas’ unique time cycle in which specific modes are only played at specific times of the day.

Raga, the classical music of South Asia, is unique in that specific modes harmonize not only sonically, but with the energy of particular times of day, such as sunrise, sunset, or the deep of night.

Inspired by this sonic time cycle, Ragas Live Festival was born as a live, in-studio radio broadcast at Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR, in 2012 when a community of 50 musicians volunteered to perform 24 sets of raga over 24 hours. 

Quickly attracting a global listening audience, the annual broadcast and its expansive presentation of music became central to a musical movement that the New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, and others have called “The Raga Renaissance”.

Ragas Live Festival first outgrew the radio studio and became a live, in-person broadcast in 2016 at Pioneer Works, where it has performed for capacity crowds.

In 2020, the festival’s virtual presentation reached over 100,000 people with performances in 15 cities in seven countries. In the following years, the video livestream on the Pioneer Works Broadcast has become an integral element – making these 24 hours a truly global event.

All 24 hours of last year’s festival have just been released on Pioneer Works’ YouTube playlist.

When and where: October 14, 8 pm to October 15, 8 pm at Pioneer Works main stage, Brooklyn, New York. Tickets: $45 at pioneerworks.org/programs/ragas-live-festival-2023. Call 718-596-3001. More info at www.ragaslive.com.